Kubernetes pod wget -qO- fails for some service, but not all - networking

Question

As I was going over my recent experiments, I went over my notes to recreate a relatively simple setup using Kubernetes for a back-end and front-end service setup. In my scenario both of these services need to be exposed, and for now I'm doing that using NodePort.
This all worked quite nicely a week or so ago, but I think I managed to mess things up and this has me going nuts. The result is that I cannot seem to get access to my back-end pods via the service. I've followed along the Debug Service document (https://kubernetes.io/docs/tasks/debug-application-cluster/debug-service) and things are going haywire pretty quickly.
So this is my current yaml file:
apiVersion: v1
kind: Service
metadata:
name: test
spec:
type: NodePort
ports:
- name: default
protocol: TCP
port: 80
targetPort: 8080
selector:
app: test
---
apiVersion: apps/v1
kind: Deployment
metadata:
name: test
spec:
selector:
matchLabels:
app: test
replicas: 1
template:
metadata:
labels:
app: test
spec:
containers:
- name: test
image: jan/test:v1.0.0
ports:
- containerPort: 8080
protocol: TCP
The application starts fine - it reports in the log it is ready for requests. (It is a Java/Grizzly application). Now here is a list of what I tried.
check kubectl services: it is there (for this example it is 172.17.0.4)
exec into the pod (alpine)
ifconfig - 172.17.0.4, 127.0.0.1
nslookup test 10.96.0.10 - works
(note without nameservice this will return
can't resolve '(null)' : Name does not resolve
ping 127.0.0.1 - works
wget http://127.0.0.1:8080 - responds fine
ping 172.17.0.4 - works
wget http://172.17.0.4:8080 - fails immediately, connection refused
wget -qO- test - fails after a while, operation times out
exec into another (busybox) pod
ifconfig - 172.17.0.8, 127.0.0.1
nslookup test - works
ping to pod 172.17.0.4 - works
wget http://172.17.0.8:8080 - fails immediately, connection refused
wget -qO- test - fails immediately, connection refused
Most importantly - I think that the wget -qO- {service} need to start reporting its pod, which currently it does not. Again - I went through the scenario of the Debug Service document and that completes without issues.
So what (else) could be wrong for that wget -qO- to fail?

Answer 1

So, let's see...You are in a busybox pod.
ifconfig - 172.17.0.8, 127.0.0.1
wget http://172.17.0.8:8080 - fails immediately, connection refused
What are you doing here? This is like to do localhost:8080. Of course you are getting connection refused. There is nothing serving on port 8080 of busybox.
wget -qO- test - fails immediately, connection refused
Same here. Now you are doing the request on port 80 of busybox, that again has nothing serving.
There is absolutely no way this configuration has ever worked. All you are doing is to do requests to yourself from within a busybox.
You need to do the request to a service that points to your app or directly to the pod that contains your app.

Answer 2

I removed an important property that was fed into the application. So actually the problem was not at all at the level of K8S. Essentially I was rendering my deployed application 'invisible'.