jschoubben
cf9357e8e9
What the mesh is, what it is becoming, and why. Implementation lives in the code repositories; the reasoning lives here. 00-GENESIS mission, engineering context, effect, and the rules that hold 01-RESEARCH investigations, before they harden into design 02-DESIGN the authoritative specification adr numbered decisions — what was chosen, and what was rejected DECISIONS.md the ledger: every decision, in the order it was taken Written for a reader who is not its author and has no access to the mesh it describes. Addresses use the documentation ranges of RFC 5737 and RFC 1918; nodes are named by role. Single initial commit by intent. The prior history came from a private repository and carried operational detail — a routable address identified as a VPN hub, real domain names, a hosting provider — which sanitising a tip commit would not have removed from the log.
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004 — Reproducing the mesh network in a lab
- Status: ONGOING — topology established and mapped; not yet stood up
- 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.
incusis declared inmodules/hal/developer/module.ymland merged (PR #944); the lab itself is unbuilt.