Files
hq/03-DESIGN
jschoubben e65e5809dc The scenario declaration gets a real network model
forwarded: [443] was the tell. It implied a destination-NAT rule while
never saying from which address, and the address is the whole point: a
household's public address is what a peer records as the endpoint when a
machine there dials out, and what a public name for a published machine
there resolves to. It was decoration in the old shape and is load-bearing
in this one.

The model now names three positions a machine can be in, because they are
genuinely different and the mesh has to cope with all three. Directly
attached, with its own routable address. Behind a gateway you control,
reachable only through a forwarded port at the gateway's address. Behind a
gateway you do not control, reachable not at all, with an apparent address
belonging to someone else's router that changes when the machine moves.
The third is the hard one and the one that breaks reachability
assumptions first.

A gateway now carries three facts instead of a boolean: the parent
segment, the address the world sees the network as, and whether addresses
are translated — so a routed range is expressible as well as ordinary
household NAT. published names the gateway it forwards through, which is
how a machine on a LAN that itself has a public address is stated, and
publishing on a foreign gateway is a declaration error because that is
exactly the constraint being reproduced.

Moving a machine between positions becomes a lifecycle operation rather
than a declaration: the same identity at home, then on a foreign network,
then asleep, in one run. Whether the overlay survives that and notices the
endpoint changed is observed, never arranged.

All three RFC 5737 ranges are now allocated a job — the internet segment,
a foreign network, and a spare — with private segments kept byte-identical
to production because those addresses mean the same everywhere.

New open question worth having: a real gateway forgets NAT mappings after
a timeout, and whether a scenario can say so decides whether keepalive
behaviour is testable or merely hoped for.
2026-08-23 22:42:27 +02:00
..

03-DESIGN

The authoritative specification. Implementation is built against what is written here.

Two layers

Folder What it is
00-as-is/ The mesh that exists today. Shipped behaviour, described as it is — including behaviour nobody would choose again.
01-to-be/ The mesh being built toward. Every statement traceable to a record in 02-DECISIONS/.

They are never mixed. A statement about the future does not belong in an as-is document, and an as-is document is never edited to describe an intention.

When a to-be design ships, it does not move. Its as-is counterpart is written or updated, the to-be document's status becomes implemented, and both stand — one describing what runs, the other recording what was intended. Deleting the intention loses the reasoning, which is the expensive half.

Frontmatter

Every design document (not the READMEs) carries:

---
layer: as-is | to-be
status: designed | in-progress | implemented | abandoned
code: []                 # owning code repo(s), from 00-META/repos.md
updated: YYYY-MM-DD      # date of the last status change, not of text edits
decisions: []            # 02-DECISIONS/ records this document rests on
---

For an as-is document, status: implemented is the normal state — it describes something that runs — and code: names where that implementation lives.

Status changes when implementation state changes, never because design text was edited. An implemented claim must be defensible from the owning repository's main branch, not from intent. If it cannot be checked, it is in-progress.

Cross-cutting views are generated from this frontmatter by the hq-status skill and never written to disk.

What belongs here

Functional analysis, architectural description, and specification — prose and diagrams only, no code. A manifest field may be named; a manifest may not be pasted. A document enters the to-be layer only after the decision behind it is recorded in 02-DECISIONS/ and the research that produced it is closed.

Subfolders are encouraged where a layer grows enough to need them.