Proxy configuration beside insecure, not a fifth policy — ADR 0108 closed that set at four, and both
of these tune how a request is carried rather than deciding what a name admits. A registry is the
case that needs it: image layers arrive as single requests of gigabytes and a proxy's own default
refuses them long before the workload is reached.
Absent is no limit, which is what every route already got. A limit that is not a whole positive
number of bytes takes the route with it, named in the log like a port that is not one — serving it
without the limit would carry exactly what the module said not to carry. Enforced on the declared
length where there is one, and while reading for a chunked body, which declares none: without the
second, a limit is advice.
autocert checks the host policy before the token and answers 403 — the
internal authority does this for every public name, so mail.novox.be's
challenge died on the internal manager's probe one commit after it
stopped dying on the public one's 404. Both shapes of refusal now fall
through to routing; a fifth test pins the 403 case with a refusing
policy.
autocert's HTTPHandler answers 404 itself for a token it does not hold
and never consults its fallback on the challenge path — the
predecessor's exact fault, rediscovered live when Mailu's renewal died
behind this proxy on cutover day. tokenOrRoute probes each authority
against a buffered writer and hands a token none of them holds to plain
routing, so a consumer's own ACME client answers its own challenge
through an ordinary path-scoped route. Four tests pin it, including the
cache-key shape a restart-surviving token actually has.
Internal aliases were served over plain HTTP only — correctly refused a
public certificate (no public CA can validate a private name), and then
left with nothing. The mesh has two authorities for its two name spaces
(08-connectivity §2), so the proxy now takes an optional internal ACME
directory and dispatches at the handshake by the same question HostPolicy
already answers: which authority may certify this name at all.
A route may also say its target speaks https, with insecure for a backend
whose own certificate nothing would trust — the shape Mailu's webmail
front needs, and the exception: everything else the mesh hands this proxy
stays plain http on the private network.
A route now consumed with two hosts when the mesh composed both — the
same host under internal-name reaches the same rule as its public name,
restoring the convenience a predecessor proxy gave for reaching a service
over the VPN without a public TLS round trip (the field composeName now
writes, feat/route-carries-internal-alias — this branch depends on that
one landing for internal-name to ever be populated; builds and tests
clean without it, just serves nothing extra).
Never certified: onlyWhatTheMeshSaid used routed(), which answered yes
for any host in the table regardless of how it got there. A new
eligibleForACME() checks a parallel 'public' set instead — every host
reached through a route's own name, never one reached only through its
internal-name — so an internal alias is proxied but never given its own
failing ACME order. routed() is unchanged and still used for the 404
message, which legitimately wants 'is this host served at all.'
Found reviewing my own change before merging it, and it was load-bearing rather than cosmetic.
Priority was read with asPort, which caps at 65535. A rule declared above that silently became
priority 0 and stopped shadowing the route it exists to shadow. The one real rule this has to
reproduce is declared at 100000 — so path scoping and refusal would both have shipped looking
complete, passing their tests, and doing nothing on the only case that motivated them.
A priority is an ordering and has no range. asWhole takes any whole number the mesh wrote and
rejects a non-integral one, which was not meant as a priority.
Also: a host may now be routed on some paths and not others, which made the 404 dishonest — it
said "no route for this name" while listing that very name as served, a contradiction an
operator has to disbelieve the proxy to get past. An uncovered path now says so, and a name
that is genuinely not served still lists what is.
Two regression tests, both through the proxy rather than against the parser, because the parser
was where the bug looked fine.
Implements novox/hq ADR 0108, closing issue 116. The proxy's request path was a host lookup
and a forward, so it applied nothing — while the ingress it replaces relies on four things it
had none of.
Path scoping came first because it is a prerequisite, not a sibling. The table mapped a host
to one target, so a host could not be routed two ways, and the refusal this issue turns on
matches a path on a host already routed to a workload. No amount of authentication or source
filtering would have made it expressible. The table is now host to an ordered list of rules,
matched on path prefix.
The order is total, not just by priority. Sorting on priority alone leaves rules that share
one in whatever order the map produced, so the same declaration would serve differently
between restarts — a fault that works, and works differently each time, which is the hardest
kind to believe when reported. Within a priority the longer path wins, which is also the
intuitive reading.
auth names a secret and never holds one. A declaration carrying a credential is refused
whole rather than served unprotected, so the option ADR 0108 rejected cannot return by
accident. A secret that cannot be read makes the route refuse and say so, rather than serve
the workload unprotected — a gate that cannot check is not a gate that opens, and the
alternative turns a missing file into a silently public admin surface.
Authentication costs one bcrypt comparison on every path including an unknown user, so an
unknown user is not measurably faster than a known one with a wrong password. That difference
is a way to enumerate a route's users from outside it.
Redirects keep the request's own path and query, or canonicalising one name onto another
would land every deep link on the front page and raise no error doing it.
Eleven tests, four of them for the capabilities and two for the failure modes that rot
quietly: the credential-in-a-declaration refusal, and the unreadable secret failing closed.
Nothing else breaks if those stop working, so nothing else would report it.
No new dependency: bcrypt comes from the x/crypto module already required.
0056 is 'the authority is the control plane, not a database'. A citation
pointing at the wrong decision is worse than none: it reads as corroboration.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
autocert keeps its account key at one fixed name, `acme_account+key`, in whatever
directory it is given, and reuses it for ever. That is right while the authority
stays the same and silently wrong the moment it does not. Re-initialising the
internal CA makes a new authority with a new root: it has never heard of the
account in the cache, rejects every use of it, and autocert has no path back from
that. Nothing is re-registered, no order ever reaches the CA, and issuance stops
with nothing saying why — until somebody guesses that deleting the cache directory
by hand is the answer.
Name the directory after the authority instead of sharing one between all of them:
a digest of the ACME directory URL and the root this proxy was told to verify it
with. A re-initialised CA has a new root, the mesh delivers it as a changed bundle,
the proxy restarts on that file and lands in a directory with no account in it, so
autocert registers afresh and orders again. The healing is that "is this account
still valid" never has to be asked — an account is only ever found where it is
still valid, which needs no error codes, no probe at startup and no network call
that can itself fail.
It closes a latent one of the same shape: pointing ACME_DIRECTORY at production
after testing against staging reused the staging account, because the cache had no
idea the two were different.
Trailing whitespace around the delivered root is not a new authority — the mesh
writes that file, and a newline coming or going must not throw away an account.
Old directories are left on disk, unused: they hold the only copy of certificates
that may still be valid, and this program is not the thing that should decide a
certificate is finished with.
A proxy already holding certificates orders them once more on the first start after
this, because its account moves. Free against the lab's own CA and against staging;
one issuance per name against a public authority.
novox/hq ADR 0056
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
Piece A of ADR 0056 (selectable issuer). A provider that serves an empty root —
public-acme, whose root already ships in the OS trust store — leaves route-proxy's
CA bundle file existing but empty, because the mesh writes it unconditionally from
${bound:acme-ca:root}. Read that as "trust the system roots", the same as an unset
bundle, instead of failing with "holds no certificate this can trust". A bundle
that holds bytes but no parseable certificate is still refused.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
Work breakdown 1.4. The mesh's own authority certifies internal names
and always did; a name reachable from outside needs one the world
already trusts, and there was no ACME anywhere in this repository.
Uses acme/autocert from x/crypto, which was already a dependency — one
indirect addition (x/net, for idna) and no new direct one.
Three things worth more than the feature:
**Staging is the default** (novox/hq 04-ISSUES/004). Production issuance
is rate-limited per domain and per account and does not replenish
quickly. Defaulting to production would leave the safe path depending on
remembering to opt out, on exactly the work most likely to iterate. A
staging certificate is trusted by no browser, so the mistake announces
itself on the first request rather than a fortnight later.
**A certificate is only asked for on a name the mesh routes here.**
Without that policy, anything that can reach the port and send a name
triggers an order for it — a scan becomes a stream of failed orders
against the account's rate limit, and the proxy looks healthy
throughout. What it may certify is what it was told to serve.
**A private issuer is trusted by naming a file, never by skipping
verification.** Skip would still apply on the day this points at a
public issuer, and nothing would say so.
TLS is opt-in: without TLS_LISTEN the proxy serves plain HTTP exactly as
before, which is what an internal-only mesh wants. With it and no cache,
it refuses rather than defaulting — every restart would otherwise order
new certificates, silently, until the rate limit says it does not.
novox/hq 08-connectivity §3, built. The mirror of a database grant: there the
consumer supplies a name and receives credentials; here it supplies a target
and receives a name. Nothing new in the vocabulary — a route is a provision
like any other.
One field was missing and it is the one that matters for anything reaching
back: a contribution now carries where the mesh says that machine is. A reverse
proxy is told to send traffic to a consumer and has to open a connection, so
without it every provider implementing a provision would have to know how the
mesh names machines — a convention leaking into every module.
The proxy itself is an example, not part of the control plane: the contract is
the file, not this program. It replaces its table whole rather than merging,
because the file is the whole truth about who has a route and merging would
keep serving a name whose module was unassigned — the stale-route fault
08-connectivity lists as open, reintroduced one level down. A name it does not
serve is refused by saying which it does: a route withdrawn and a name that
never existed are different things.
jochen
jschoubben