jschoubben
4bf7a35568
Playbook 02 and 04 were followed for the substance — decisions before design, design before build — and skipped for the bookkeeping. This closes that. 004 graduates. Its one open item was "not yet stood up"; the lab is stood up, and the substitution the effort turned on is now enforced by the validator before anything is raised rather than left as a thing to remember. Its certificate conclusion has a home in 01-end-to-end-testing and is designed but not built — implementation is a third axis, and an effort graduates on its conclusions. One item leaves 004 without a home and is recorded rather than lost: the reverse proxy does not set caServer, so it defaults to the production endpoint. The two lab designs read `designed` while running in production of a sort, so they become `in-progress`. And the lab gets an as-is document, which it did not have. It records what runs including the parts nobody would choose again: that `place:` is refused and the lab therefore raises EMPTY MACHINES, that the drawing shipped with no design document behind it, that a router is tagged as a machine for a reason found by a bug, and that the integration suite raises two of five scenarios while both faults found so far lived in the three it does not. 006 stays active, deliberately. Two of its open questions ARE the tier 0 design — whether absorbing six concerns makes the host too large, and whether an unprivileged node earns a place in the inventory. Playbook 04 is explicit that an open question is a reason to research, not to build around.
68 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
68 lines
3.3 KiB
Markdown
---
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status: graduated
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initiated: 2026-08-22
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touches: [03-DESIGN/00-as-is/01-mesh-and-transport.md, 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md]
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became:
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- 02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md
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- 02-DECISIONS/0031-the-lab-provides-the-underlay.md
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- 02-DECISIONS/0033-a-router-is-scenery-not-a-node.md
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- 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/02-scenario-declaration.md
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- 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md
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---
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# 004 — Reproducing the mesh network in a lab
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- **Initiated by:** jochen, 2026-08-22 — *"the most difficult part of our VM setup will be
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the networking part"*
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- **Areas touched:** `modules/wireguard`, `modules/dnsmasq-app`, `modules/traefik`,
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`modules/mesh-ca`, `node_accessors`, `nodes.site` / `nodes.underlay_addr`.
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## Summary
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The network is **entirely generated from mesh-DB rows by module hooks**. `install.d` performs
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no network configuration whatsoever — no WireGuard, no DNS, no firewall. That makes a faithful
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lab primarily a *data* problem rather than a networking problem, and means the lab exercises
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the real code path instead of a reimplementation of it.
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One constraint decides whether the lab works at all: the WireGuard endpoint rule tests the
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underlay address against an RFC1918 regex to decide reachability. **A simulated public segment
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addressed from RFC1918 space silently prevents the mesh from forming** — no endpoint is written
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for the hub, so nothing can ever initiate. The simulated public segment must therefore use
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TEST-NET-3 (`203.0.113.0/24`).
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With that one substitution the lab reproduces the production topology exactly, including the
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case that is hardest to get right: a node that is publicly *named* but sits behind NAT, whose
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endpoint the hub can only learn from a handshake.
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Detail in [`analysis.md`](analysis.md).
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## Settled
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**The lab issues its own certificates.** Public names are certified by an ACME server on the
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lab's wan segment; `.internal` names keep the mesh CA. The lab preserves production's two-CA
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split rather than collapsing it, because a single-CA lab would hide any bug living in that
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split. It also makes the router's port forward load-bearing — HTTP-01 must reach the
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published-but-NATed node on port 80, so a broken forward becomes a reproducible certificate
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failure instead of a mystery.
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Requires one change: `caServer` is not set on the reverse proxy today, so it defaults to the
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public authority's **production** endpoint. It must become configurable, defaulting to
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production so real nodes are unaffected.
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## Open
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*Closed 2026-08-25.* The lab is stood up. The topology this effort described raises, and the
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substitution it turned on — a simulated public segment addressed from documentation space
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rather than RFC1918 — is enforced by the declaration validator before anything is raised
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rather than left as a thing to remember.
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The certificate conclusion above is carried by
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[`01-end-to-end-testing.md`](../../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md), which
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specifies the lab's own ACME issuer on the public segment. It is **designed and not built** —
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implementation state is a third axis, and the effort graduates on its conclusions, not on
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their delivery.
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One item leaves this effort without a home and is recorded here so it is not lost: the reverse
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proxy does not set `caServer`, so it defaults to the public authority's production endpoint.
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That is a fact about what runs today, not about the lab.
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