jschoubben
702efca6bb
HQ held only the to-be. Every reader had to already know the system the decisions were about, and an as-is claim had nowhere to live except inside an intention. Adds 02-DESIGN/00-as-is — eleven documents written from the implementation and the operational record, not from intent, including the parts nobody would choose again. The two existing designs move under 01-to-be. Layers are declared in frontmatter and never mix: a design that ships does not move, its as-is counterpart is written, and both stand. Back-fills adr/0001-0014 for decisions taken in implementation and never recorded — the broker, the module abstraction, the mesh database, managed files, provisioning, migrations, the workspace removal, failing loudly, the constitution, application placement, linking, the employee model, the artifact, the three silos. Each marked reconstructed, dated from the history, and citing the evidence it was recovered from. The two existing records renumber to 0015 and 0016 so the ledger runs oldest first; 0017 extends 0015 to modules outside the core, principle only — the domain list is deliberately not invented here. how-we-build.md becomes the source of the mesh constitution, with a sync playbook, so the enforced copy stops being the only one that is true. Process becomes explicit: five playbooks, eight thin skills that defer to them, a repository map, and AGENTS.md with CLAUDE.md as its include. The five Observations become 04-ISSUES 001-005 where they can be owned and closed. 006 is new and uncomfortable: HQ is not indexed into the knowledge base. That claim is what decision 27 rests on, it was never checked, and the README now says so instead of repeating it. Also corrects the ADR index into something generated, the "02-DESIGN is empty" claim, the VISION.md pointer that did not survive the repo split, and a note asserting the symlink rule was contradicted — it was a misreading; the rule forbids hand-made links, the installer links by design.
51 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
51 lines
2.4 KiB
Markdown
---
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status: ongoing
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initiated: 2026-08-22
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touches: [02-DESIGN/00-as-is/01-mesh-and-transport.md, 02-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md]
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became: [adr/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.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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- Not yet stood up. `incus` is declared in `modules/hal/developer/module.yml` and merged
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(PR #944); the lab itself is unbuilt.
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