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authorCalvin Morrison <calvin@pobox.com>2026-08-19 10:41:03 -0400
committerCalvin Morrison <calvin@pobox.com>2026-08-19 10:41:03 -0400
commitf05383bb3447f7fbd44c9051c4e273caeb33352f (patch)
treed2d2da9c9c5596bc42574a036b79d23faad20351 /pim/lib
parentdee31d66b705734be68c1bb21ff5dfc7bdaae23b (diff)
fw: a dead firewall leaves the network down, and can be restarted into it
Two things can happen when a firewall dies: the traffic it was filtering carries on unfiltered, or it stops. Only the second is defensible. A machine briefly off the network is a machine somebody notices and fixes; a machine briefly on the network with no rules is the thing the firewall was installed to prevent, and nobody notices it at all. fw already does the second, in all three modes, and by mechanism rather than by care. Measured rather than assumed: before fw device: /net/ether1 addr: 10.9.9.1 route: 10.9.9.254 fw running device: pkt0 addr: 10.9.9.1 route: 10.9.9.254 fw killed device: addr: route: pktmedium is unbindonclose, so the interface and the address go when fw's fds close, and the card is left bound to nothing with nothing reading it. In a namespace it is harder still: /net answers "i/o on hungup channel" and bind -a '#I' /net answers "mount/attach disallowed", because the device mask was dropped before the program started. So todo item 1 -- "a dead fw takes the network with it", open since the first commit -- was the requirement written down as a defect. It is now design.md and a FAILURE section in fw(8), and the tests assert it, which is the point: this is exactly the property a later helpful change reverses without meaning to. putback() was that change, written and never run; deleting it removed a fail-open path, not just dead code. What was actually broken is recovery, and in a way nobody had reached: a fw that dies leaves its control filesystem mounted, and a corpse of a mount fails everything asked of it -- including the access() check fw makes before touching a card, which then refuses the restart: fw: /tmp/rdbg/ctl: clone failed; not touching /net/ether1 until it exists That check exists so fw does not take a card it cannot then serve, and it was keeping fw from ever coming back. Now the dead mount is cleared first, the same way reclaim() clears the pkt interface the same dead fw left behind: both are its own wreckage. With that and -a/-g in the service file -- so a restart does not need the address it just lost -- the whole cycle works and never passes through open: crash, network down, restart, network up and filtered. Ten checks, three of which fail against the previous fw.c. 87 pass. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Diffstat (limited to 'pim/lib')
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