Johnathan Corgan
5a5faa0857
The NAT-lab suites (cone, symmetric, lan, STUN faults and nostr publish/consume) share one strfry relay, and it has aborted in several runs. Three things made each abort cost a whole run and a misdirected diagnosis: only the publish/consume suite said what state the relay was in, the relay image moved with upstream's latest tag, and the relay never restarted. State the relay's condition in every NAT-lab suite. relay_verdict moves into testing/lib/relay-verdict.sh, taking the container as an argument, and is called first in every NAT-lab failure dump and on each success path, where a relay event the assertions survived is noted rather than made a failure. Before this, the cone, symmetric and lan dumps named the nodes and the network instead: hundreds of lines of socket tables and router counters, with the relay's crash lines unlabelled in an 80-line log tail. The STUN fault dump now also carries the relay's log, which it did not include. Pin the relay's strfry build. Dockerfile.app takes the strfry image as a build argument, defaulting to the same latest tag, so the user-facing example is unchanged, and the NAT lab's compose file passes the current multi-arch index digest. Which build a run exercised was never recorded before. This stops the drift; it does not select a build that does not abort, since upstream publishes no other tag to choose from. Restart the relay when it aborts. The relay ran with restart "no", so one abort left every suite sharing it without a relay for the rest of the run. It now restarts on failure up to three times, so a relay that keeps aborting still ends up exited and is reported rather than hidden in a crash loop. The restart policy is the containment. The verdict says the relay restarted under that policy and prints the fault lines from its log, which spans restarts of the same container, so a rescued run still names the event. The relay service also gains init: true, only so the restart can be exercised by an injected abort. It changes the relay's PID 1 from strfry (started with exec in the image's entrypoint) to docker's init, with strfry as its child. Without it, a SIGABRT sent with docker kill to strfry as PID 1 logged "caught a signal: SIGABRT" and left the container running with no restart, so that injection could not show the policy working. With the init, strfry signalled from inside the container exits it non-zero, which is what the real aborts did: clients saw the relay vanish. Those real aborts would restart under the policy with or without the init. Injected aborts (strfry signalled from inside the container the moment both cone nodes had connected) restarted the relay once each time; in eight of nine cone runs both nodes reconnected and peered 8 to 16 s after the abort. In the ninth, the initiator's offer went out in the second between its reconnect and the responder's, was lost, and the 30 s answer timeout pushed peering past the 45 s wait, so restart shortens the outage but does not guarantee the run. Without the restart policy the same injection left the relay exited and the cone suite timed out waiting for its peer, with no line in the dump naming the relay.
FIPS Testing
Integration and simulation test harnesses for FIPS, using Docker containers running the full protocol stack.
Test Harnesses
static/ -- Static Docker Network
Fixed topologies with manual scripts for building, config generation, connectivity tests (ping, iperf), and network impairment (netem). Useful for deterministic debugging and validating specific topology configurations.
| Topology | Nodes | Transport | Description |
|---|---|---|---|
| mesh | 5 | UDP | Sparse mesh, 6 links, multi-hop |
| chain | 5 | UDP | Linear chain, max 4-hop paths |
| rekey | 5 | UDP | Rekey integration test topology |
tor/ -- Tor Transport Integration
End-to-end Tor transport testing with Docker containers running real Tor daemons. Requires internet access for Tor bootstrapping.
| Scenario | Description |
|---|---|
| socks5-outbound | Outbound SOCKS5 connections through Tor to clearnet peer |
| directory-mode | Inbound via HiddenServiceDir onion service (co-located) |
nat/ -- NAT Traversal Lab
Real Docker NAT traversal tests for the Nostr/STUN bootstrap path,
using router containers with iptables-based NAT, a local Nostr relay,
and a local STUN responder.
| Scenario | Description |
|---|---|
| cone | Two NATed peers establish a UDP traversal path |
| symmetric | UDP traversal fails under symmetric NAT, TCP fallback wins |
| lan | Peers on the same LAN prefer local addresses over reflexive |
chaos/ -- Stochastic Simulation
Automated network testing with configurable node counts, topology algorithms (random geometric, Erdos-Renyi, chain, explicit), and fault injection (netem mutation, link flaps, traffic generation, node churn). 10 scenarios covering general stress and node churn, discovery over sparse topologies, spanning-tree and bloom-propagation regression, transport-specific validation (UDP, TCP, Ethernet), and ECN/congestion testing. Scenarios are defined in YAML and executed via a Python harness that manages the full lifecycle: topology generation, Docker orchestration, fault scheduling, log collection, and analysis.
interop/ -- Mixed-Version Interop Harness
On-demand harness that runs an N-node full mesh from a node-spec where
each node can run a different build of the FIPS daemon, then attributes
every FMP/FSP/rekey/connectivity failure to a specific version pair
(same-version vs MIXED). Used to catch interop regressions between
builds, not as a per-commit CI gate; not part of ci-local.sh.
mesh-lab/ -- Mesh Reliability Lab
On-demand harness that runs a chosen integration suite N times under a
configurable host-pressure profile (idle / light / github-runner-
equivalent / heavy via stress-ng), per-container netem impairment,
and optional trace-level RUST_LOG, capturing per-rep diagnostics and a
mechanism-match summary across the run. Used for statistical reliability
characterization of known flake classes under calibrated stress, not as
a per-commit gate; not part of ci-local.sh.
sidecar/ -- Network Sidecar Isolation
FIPS running as a sidecar container that owns the network namespace of
a companion application container, with iptables/ip6tables rules
confining the app to the mesh. scripts/test-sidecar.sh boots a
three-node chain of such pairs and asserts both connectivity and
isolation.
firewall/ -- nftables Baseline
End-to-end exercise of the production fips0 nftables baseline at
packaging/common/fips.nft, covering the default-deny, conntrack and
drop-in semantics.
acl-allowlist/ -- Peer ACL Enforcement
Six nodes with per-node allowlist files mounted at the runtime ACL paths, exercising insiders, outsiders and allowed remotes at once to check which peer pairs are admitted and which are rejected.
native-api/ -- Native Datagram API
Checks the experimental native datagram API: a client process opens a flow to a remote pubkey over a Unix socket, receives a file descriptor, and exchanges datagrams on it with no TUN device and no IPv6 emulation.
dns-resolver/ -- fips-dns-setup Backends
Runs fips-dns-setup against each supported Linux resolver backend in
systemd containers, verifying backend detection, generated config and
teardown, plus an end-to-end scenario that resolves a .fips name
through the configured backend.
deb-install/ -- Debian Package Install
Installs the built .deb in systemd containers for each
target distro and verifies unit enablement, conffile placement and
end-to-end .fips resolution as a user would meet it.
boringtun/ -- WireGuard Throughput Baseline
Two userspace WireGuard peers running Cloudflare BoringTun, measured
with iperf3, as a comparison baseline for FIPS tunnel throughput.
ble/ -- BLE L2CAP Spike
Standalone cargo project (ble_spike) that validates the bluer API
assumptions behind the BleIo trait against real adapters on two
machines. Not a Docker harness.
Running CI locally (ci-local.sh)
ci-local.sh runs the full local CI pipeline — build,
clippy, unit tests, and the integration suites (including the chaos
scenarios) — mirroring the GitHub ci.yml integration matrices. Run
./ci-local.sh --help for the full option list and --list for the
available suites. Every run starts with a parity check that verifies the
local suite set covers the same work as the GitHub matrix, per scenario for
chaos and per distro for deb-install, across every job that carries a
matrix; a divergence fails the run. GitHub
runs the same check as its own ci-parity job. --check-parity runs it
alone (see check-ci-parity.sh).
Per-run isolation and the FIPS_CI_RUN_ID override
Every invocation derives a run id and scopes all of its Docker resources to it, so two simultaneous runs on the same host (for example, one per git worktree, or an operator testing by hand while CI is in flight) never collide:
- Compose projects are named
fipsci_<run-id>_<suite>, so container, network, and volume names are all prefixed per run. - Build images are tagged
fips-test:<run-id>andfips-test-app:<run-id>, exported asFIPS_TEST_IMAGE/FIPS_TEST_APP_IMAGE, and every compose file and suite script reads those. The run does not writefips-test:latestat all: a bridge back to that shared mutable name would let a consumer that had been missed keep working while resolving whichever concurrent run wrote the tag last.:lateststays the hand-build name, produced bytesting/scripts/build.sh, and remains the default every consumer falls back to when the variables are unset. - The build context is a per-run copy at
testing/docker-<run-id>/, exported asFIPS_BUILD_CONTEXT. It is absolute because compose resolves a relative build context against the compose file's own directory rather than the working directory.testing/docker/is the hand-run context and a CI run does not write to it. Without this, two runs race on the contents of one directory and either can build a correctly-per-run-tagged image from the other's binaries. - Each parallel chaos child gets a unique, non-overlapping
/24in10.30.x(via the sim--subnetoverride).10.30.xsits outside Docker's default address pool and the fixed-subnet suites'172.xranges, so neither a sibling chaos child nor an auto-assigned network can swallow a pinned subnet.
By default the run id is <short-git-sha>-<random> — the SHA portion
records what code a container is testing, the random suffix keeps
simultaneous runs of the same SHA disjoint. Override it for a
reproducible, attach-by-name debug session:
FIPS_CI_RUN_ID=mydebug ./ci-local.sh --only static-mesh
# containers are named fipsci_mydebug_static_fips-node-a, etc.
Preemption-safety and exit codes
ci-local.sh is safe to cancel mid-run. A signal trap tears down every
compose project the run started (not just the current suite) and reaps
any in-flight parallel chaos children, bounded by a timeout so a stuck
compose down cannot wedge the trap. Exit codes distinguish a cancelled
run from a failing one:
| Code | Meaning |
|---|---|
0 |
all stages passed |
1 |
one or more stages failed |
130 |
interrupted by SIGINT — cancelled, not a failure |
143 |
terminated by SIGTERM — cancelled, not a failure |
A preempting CI worker (the push-triggered, CI-gated build pipeline that
kills an in-flight run when a newer same-branch tip arrives) maps
130/143 → cancelled (discard, do not record a failing commit), 0
→ green, any other non-zero → red.
Cleaning up leftover resources
Every CI-created container, network, and volume carries the label
com.corganlabs.fips-ci=1. If a run is hard-killed (SIGKILL, OOM, crash)
and leaves resources behind, reap them with:
./ci-local.sh --reap # or: ./ci-cleanup.sh
ci-cleanup.sh force-removes everything bearing the CI
label or a fipsci_ compose-project prefix; it is safe to run when there
is nothing to reap and safe to run repeatedly. Pass --project-prefix to
scope the sweep to a single run.
It also removes the chaos simulation's leftover host-namespace veth
interfaces (vh…a/vh…b), the one resource it touches that is neither a
docker object nor labelled — a host interface can carry neither a label
nor a compose project, so it is matched by name shape alone. That makes
the reach here asymmetric with everything above, and worth stating
plainly:
- A bare
chaos.shrun's containers survive a broad reap. Its compose project is notfipsci_, and the simulation labels only the network, not the services. - A bare
chaos.shrun's veth interfaces do not. An unscoped reap deletes them while they are in use, severing the Ethernet links of a live simulation and leaving its containers running.
So do not run a broad --reap while a bare simulation is up. Scope the
interface sweep with --veth-suffixes (which is what ci-local.sh's own
teardown passes) or wait for the simulation to finish. --project-prefix
does not help here: it scopes only the compose-project sweep.