Edge nodes are deployed to arbitrary locations by arbitrary people, so the
broker has to be reachable from the internet and secured on its own merits
rather than by a VPN.
Three defects made that impossible. The broker only had a plaintext 1883
listener; every node shared one drb-node password; and the ACL pattern used
%c, the client-supplied client id, so any holder of that shared password
could set client_id to another node and take over its namespace. The comment
claiming this cryptographically prevented cross-node access was wrong and is
gone.
Authentication now uses mosquitto 2.x's built-in dynamic-security plugin on
the stock eclipse-mosquitto image. c2-core administers it over the control
topic, creating each node's client on approval with username=<node_id> and
password=<its node_keys api_key>, attached to a role whose ACL is nodes/%u/#
against the authenticated username. One credential, one revocation point.
An HTTP-callback plugin was implemented first and rejected: that project is
archived upstream, which is not an acceptable dependency on an
internet-facing broker.
Because dynsec state is a second source of truth alongside Firestore,
approve/reissue/delete now write to the broker first and surface a 502
rather than drifting, and c2-core reconciles every approved node into dynsec
on startup.
Adds node self-enrollment (POST /nodes/enroll, GET /nodes/{id}/credentials)
so a new node can obtain its key over HTTPS without an operator handling
secrets by hand. Enrolling an already-approved node_id is refused on the
fleet token alone — otherwise a leaked token plus a guessable id would let
an attacker steal a live node's key before the real node asked for it.
Pickup secrets are stored hashed and returned once, and the endpoint is rate
limited per source IP.
Infrastructure: an 8883 TLS listener fed by Caddy's certificate via a
systemd path unit, a firewall rule for it, and Caddy now 404s /internal/*
so the api vhost cannot proxy internal routes.
Also fixes CORS, which allowed https://app.<domain> while the frontend is
served on the bare domain — every call from the portal would have failed —
and widens the vault gitignore to a glob, since ansible-vault leaves
backup siblings that the exact-name rule left committable.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Only drb.cusano.net and api.drb.cusano.net have public A records, so the
app.<domain> vhost had no cert to present and the bare domain — the record
that actually exists — matched no site at all, producing
ERR_SSL_PROTOCOL_ERROR in the browser.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Compose interpolates the top-level .env, so a password containing "$fP" was
read as the variable $fP and replaced with an empty string — hence the
repeated "The \"fP\" variable is not set" warnings on every compose command.
The env_file templates are not interpolated, so c2-core kept the literal
password while mosquitto's entrypoint received the mangled one. The two sides
disagreed and c2-core could not authenticate to the broker. Escaping $ as $$
here (and only here) makes compose collapse it back to the real value.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
docker-compose.prod.yml: compose merges `ports` by appending, so the prod
override left the base file's 8888:8000 and 3000:3000 in place next to the
127.0.0.1-scoped ones. Each container tried to bind its port twice and the
second bind failed with "address already in use", so c2-core and frontend
could never start. It also meant the localhost-only binding never applied —
both ports were published on every interface. Marked both `!override`, the
same way mosquitto already used `!reset`.
infra/ansible:
- add the missing "Reload Caddy" handler; the Deploy Caddyfile task notified
a handler that did not exist, which aborts the play
- guard mkswap/swapon on whether /swapfile is already active, so a second run
does not fail on "mounted" / "Device or resource busy"
- git task now updates instead of clone-once, otherwise a re-run redeploys
whatever code was on the VM at first clone
- vault.yml.example: correct the registry token comment to read-only scope
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Terraform: e2-micro VM (us-east1-b, free tier), static IP, SSH/web
firewall rules, IAM bindings for Firestore + GCS; imports existing
drb-calls bucket and c2-server Firestore database into state
- Gitea CI: build c2-core, discord-bot, frontend images and push to
git.vpn.cusano.net registry; SSH deploy pulls pre-built images (no
build on VM)
- Ansible: first-time setup only — git clone, env files from vault,
Caddyfile, docker login + compose pull + up; no rsync or on-VM builds
- docker-compose: add image: ${REGISTRY}/name:latest alongside build:
so local dev and CI registry both work
- gitignore: add Terraform state, lock, tfvars, ansible secrets
Provisions e2-micro VM (us-east1-b, free tier) with static IP, SSH and
web firewall rules, Docker + Caddy startup script, and IAM bindings for
Firestore and GCS access via ADC. Imports existing drb-calls bucket and
c2-server Firestore database into state. Ansible roles handle first-time
setup (swap, docker group) and all subsequent deploys via rsync + docker
compose, with secrets managed via Ansible Vault. DNS stays on AWS Route 53.
Logan CusanoandClaude Opus 5