jschoubben
e1febe8e0f
The consolidation left a sparse sequence -- 1, 4, 6, 7, 9, 10, 12, 15, 16, 18, 19, 25, 34, 35, 36, 37, 40, 42, 44, 45, 48, 49, 58 -- where the gaps were only the archaeology of what used to be there. Renumbered contiguously. Renames run in ascending order, so every target number is already free and no two files ever collide. The reference rewrite is one simultaneous pass rather than a sequence of replacements. Numbers moved into slots other numbers were vacating -- the node host went 37 to 16 while the lab went 16 to 9 -- so replacing one at a time would have cascaded and silently pointed things at the wrong record. Seven plain-text references survived the merges as prose rather than links, naming records that no longer existed: the enrolment token, the link boundary, what a declaration is, reachability, the repository structure. Each mapped to the consolidated record that now holds it. Verified rather than assumed: every [ADR NNNN](path) link now has matching text and target, checked across the whole repository, and the checker passes. Frontmatter `consolidates:` lists dropped -- they named records that are gone, and each consolidated record already says in prose what it absorbed.
3.3 KiB
status, initiated, touches, became
| status | initiated | touches | became | |||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| graduated | 2026-08-22 |
|
|
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
Closed 2026-08-25. The lab is stood up. The topology this effort described raises, and the substitution it turned on — a simulated public segment addressed from documentation space rather than RFC1918 — is enforced by the declaration validator before anything is raised rather than left as a thing to remember.
The certificate conclusion above is carried by
01-end-to-end-testing.md, which
specifies the lab's own ACME issuer on the public segment. It is designed and not built —
implementation state is a third axis, and the effort graduates on its conclusions, not on
their delivery.
One item leaves this effort without a home and is recorded here so it is not lost: the reverse
proxy does not set caServer, so it defaults to the public authority's production endpoint.
That is a fact about what runs today, not about the lab.