Shadow mode: Housecarl beside the firewall in force, changing nothing

shadow.enabled in housecarl.yaml loads Housecarl's ruleset so that it
blocks, rejects and translates nothing: drops and rejects count and
accept (an accept only ends Housecarl's chain), policies accept and log
what they would drop, NAT only counts, MSS clamping and the flowtable
are left out, and raw rules that do more than accept, drop or reject are
left out with a warning. Comments mark what would happen ([would drop]).
Filter chains run after the other firewall's (+10) or before (-10); NAT
chains always first. Every change is checked by nftables in both forms.
No probation; takeovers and closing connections are refused. The boot
fallback filters nothing. internal/tablewatch puts the table back after
a flush ruleset. Mode in status, healthz, whoami, the web UI, the log
and the tracer; hc ruleset --enforcing. docs/shadow.md.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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abrown38andClaude Opus 5.5 committed 2026-10-20 18:11:01 +01:00
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@@ -58,6 +58,12 @@ over half of the forwarding cost, which shows up as speed only when the
CPU was the limit, and otherwise as a cooler, quieter, more responsive
machine.
In shadow mode ([shadow.md](shadow.md)) Housecarl leaves its flowtable
out: an offloaded connection skips every table's forward chain, the
other firewall's too. If that firewall has a flowtable of its own, the
same goes for Housecarl's forward chain: it only sees each connection's
first packets.
## When not to use it
**When the CPU keeps up anyway.** If the speed test already reaches your