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hq/03-DESIGN
jschoubben 4e80820e2f Design connectivity in full: overlay, resolution, exposure, filtering, certificates
Written as one document because the five are one design. They share inputs,
they must agree, and every one of them today is computed in a different place
by a different module from a different copy of the same facts.

The through-line is that none of the five can be answered by a machine alone,
so all five are decided centrally and delivered as `file` resources. That costs
no new host vocabulary and removes both remaining direct database connections
from nodes -- wireguard and traefik are the only two, and both are connectivity.

Three decisions fall out, all proposed:

0050 -- reachability is declared, not inferred from an address. The RFC1918
regex is wrong for carrier-grade NAT (100.64/10 tests as public, so an endpoint
is written to an address nothing can reach), wrong for IPv6, and wrong for a
routable address behind a closed firewall. The lab needing TEST-NET-3 to
satisfy the regex is the same bug from the other side. Also kills hub election
by address prefix, which fails silently and makes renumbering an outage.

0051 -- the enrolment token carries where the mesh is and how to recognise it.
Closes two circles with one mechanism: verifying the mesh needed the CA, and
obtaining the CA meant trusting whoever handed it over; and a node had to reach
the mesh before it could resolve any mesh name. An address plus a fingerprint,
carried out of band, resolves both -- and closes the CA question 0049 deferred.

0052 -- a filter rule names its source. `scope:` is declared in five manifests,
is part of no rule type, and is referenced by no code, so those manifests
appear to restrict ports and restrict nothing. Removed rather than implemented;
the general fix is refusing unknown keys, which the host already does and
manifests do not.

Also corrects two claims in 0049 asserting wireguard was already handled.
Research 006 says both modules still reach upward; neither is.
2026-08-27 00:36:49 +02:00
..
2026-08-25 01:55:52 +02:00

03-DESIGN

The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.

Two layers

Folder What it is
00-as-is/ The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again.
01-to-be/ The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/.

They are never mixed. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention.

When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated, the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs, the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is the expensive half.

Frontmatter

Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:

---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: []                 # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD      # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: []            # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---

For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.

Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.

Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never written to disk.

What belongs here

Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/ and the research that produced it is closed.

Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.