Files
hq/01-RESEARCH/004-lab-network/00-overview.md
T
jschoubben c0b35652d0 The numbering is the flow: decisions are 02, design is 03
papa-hq reads 01 research -> 03 decision -> 02 design. The order is a
scar, not a choice: 02-DESIGN existed from its initial commit, and when
adr/ was finally promoted on 2026-07-13 it took the next free number
rather than its place in the sequence. By then design was too settled to
renumber.

hal-hq was three commits old, so it is not. adr/ becomes 02-DECISIONS and
02-DESIGN becomes 03-DESIGN, and following the folder numbers now walks
the process in the order it happens: research produces a decision, the
decision authorises a design.

00-GENESIS becomes 00-META, matching papa's rename from the same
restructure.

Every path reference rewritten across documents, frontmatter, playbooks
and skills. All links resolve; all 58 frontmatter blocks parse and their
path fields still point at files that exist.
2026-08-23 18:05:11 +02:00

2.4 KiB

status, initiated, touches, became
status initiated touches became
active 2026-08-22
03-DESIGN/00-as-is/01-mesh-and-transport.md
03-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md
02-DECISIONS/0016-a-lab-node-is-a-virtual-machine.md

004 — Reproducing the mesh network in a lab

  • Initiated by: jochen, 2026-08-22 — "the most difficult part of our VM setup will be the networking part"
  • Areas touched: modules/wireguard, modules/dnsmasq-app, modules/traefik, modules/mesh-ca, node_accessors, nodes.site / nodes.underlay_addr.

Summary

The network is entirely generated from mesh-DB rows by module hooks. install.d performs no network configuration whatsoever — no WireGuard, no DNS, no firewall. That makes a faithful lab primarily a data problem rather than a networking problem, and means the lab exercises the real code path instead of a reimplementation of it.

One constraint decides whether the lab works at all: the WireGuard endpoint rule tests the underlay address against an RFC1918 regex to decide reachability. A simulated public segment addressed from RFC1918 space silently prevents the mesh from forming — no endpoint is written for the hub, so nothing can ever initiate. The simulated public segment must therefore use TEST-NET-3 (203.0.113.0/24).

With that one substitution the lab reproduces the production topology exactly, including the case that is hardest to get right: a node that is publicly named but sits behind NAT, whose endpoint the hub can only learn from a handshake.

Detail in analysis.md.

Settled

The lab issues its own certificates. Public names are certified by an ACME server on the lab's wan segment; .internal names keep the mesh CA. The lab preserves production's two-CA split rather than collapsing it, because a single-CA lab would hide any bug living in that split. It also makes the router's port forward load-bearing — HTTP-01 must reach the published-but-NATed node on port 80, so a broken forward becomes a reproducible certificate failure instead of a mystery.

Requires one change: caServer is not set on the reverse proxy today, so it defaults to the public authority's production endpoint. It must become configurable, defaulting to production so real nodes are unaffected.

Open

  • Not yet stood up. incus is declared in modules/hal/developer/module.yml and merged (PR #944); the lab itself is unbuilt.