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hq/03-DESIGN/01-to-be
jschoubben b1874f1d0f Segment policy, shared gateways, and what the model leaves out
Asked whether a real setup is coverable — router, modem, access points —
the answer splits, and one part was a genuine gap.

Most equipment is invisible and the omission is deliberate. The test: does
the device change what an IP packet can do? A switch moves frames within a
segment. An access point bridges wireless clients onto one — a machine on
wifi and a machine on cable are the same machine to IP. A controller
configures equipment and has no packets of its own. Modelling any of them
adds a fixture with no fault to catch.

Two entries in that list do matter. A modem in bridge mode is a media
converter and invisible; in router mode it is a second gateway, which is
double NAT — expressible as nested segments, but publishing through two
gateways still is not, and that is now named as the one real absence.

And VLANs are segments, which exposed the gap: inter-segment policy was
inexpressible. inbound: is a HOST firewall, per machine. A segmented
router enforcing rules between networks is a different thing and blocks
traffic regardless of what the destination thinks — a node behind such a
rule cannot be reached even by a peer that knows exactly where it is.

policy: states it as a fact about a pair rather than a property of either,
defaulting to allowed and asymmetric by design, because the useful
configuration is almost always one-directional.

Segments may also share a gateway: identical gateway declarations mean one
gateway machine, not two, because that is what a VLAN-capable router is —
and two routers sharing an address would not work anyway.
2026-08-23 23:32:30 +02:00
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03-DESIGN / 01-to-be

The mesh being built toward. Every statement here traces to a record in 02-DECISIONS/; nothing arrives by drafting.

A document here describes an intention. What currently runs is in 00-as-is/, and the two are never merged — when something ships, the as-is document is written and this one's status becomes implemented.

Document Covers Rests on
00-work-breakdown.md How the decomposition gets built, in what order, and where a human must look ADR 0015
01-end-to-end-testing.md The lab: a real mesh a change can be run against before it reaches nodes ADR 0016, 0029
02-scenario-declaration.md What a scenario declares — the underlay, and what to place on it ADR 0031

Not yet written

  • The eight bounded contexts. ADR 0015 decides the decomposition; the per-context specifications do not exist yet. The work breakdown says in what order they are needed.
  • Domain grouping outside the core. ADR 0017 settles the principle and explicitly does not settle the domain list. That is a research effort, not a design document, until it concludes.