Files
hq/01-RESEARCH/004-lab-network/00-overview.md
T
jschoubben f05e4a0dce Follow papa-hq's research convention; the mesh links nothing
Research efforts move from status.md to 00-overview.md with active /
graduated / abandoned, matching papa-hq so the two repositories read the
same way. Playbooks, skills, README and the ledger follow.

Reverses yesterday's withdrawal of the symlink note in GENESIS. The note
was right and the withdrawal was wrong: the intent is that the mesh
creates no symlinks at all, so a founding document listing "symlinks, not
copies" as a design principle does point the opposite way from where this
is going, and that is a contradiction rather than a stale detail.

ADR 0018 records the position, proposed. ADR 0011 stays as it is — it is
the historical decision and the incident behind it is why anyone believes
either record — and is superseded in intent, not edited. Its one
editorial line, which called the wider reading false, is corrected to
state what is actually true: centralising who may link narrowed the
incident class without closing it, because a link the installer makes
resolves exactly like one made by hand.

The argument that kept linking was staleness. ADR 0004 removed it: every
managed file is already derived and reconciled, so a copy is the natural
form and a pointer into source is the shape the mesh's own model forbids
everywhere else. What is not settled, and is marked open, is how
staleness gets detected — which is the decision that makes or breaks it.
2026-08-23 09:29:09 +02:00

2.4 KiB

status, initiated, touches, became
status initiated touches became
active 2026-08-22
02-DESIGN/00-as-is/01-mesh-and-transport.md
02-DESIGN/01-to-be/01-end-to-end-testing.md
adr/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.