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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@@ -100,6 +100,10 @@ The blocked lists only see what is **logged**: the input and forward
policies' drops with `hc settings set --log-drops on`, and rules with
logging. The drop counts above see everything.
In shadow mode ([shadow.md](shadow.md)) the drops, and the blocked
lists, are what Housecarl would have dropped: the packets went on. What
the policies would drop is always logged there.
A counter that goes down (an interface that came back, a quota reset)
counts again from zero. What happens while housecarld is stopped isn't
counted.