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.
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