A cell reads allow, block or partly (some new connections let through,
the rest not), with its exceptions counted by what they do (+3 -1), and
what they let through: services with the addresses they are limited to,
under the grid in hc matrix and in each cell on the Matrix page. A zone
to itself is marked: only traffic routed between its interfaces passes
the firewall. The details list each rule's hits. hc matrix pads the
grid by visible width: the colours' escape codes had thrown it out of
line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Fixes from an audit of the importer, each of which could change what an
imported ruleset does: two base chains on one hook imported their rules
twice (and hoisted the second's built-ins), now in priority order with
the stricter policy; raw rules from a jumped-to chain lost the jump's
condition, now put in front; a jump and a rule matching one field are
combined only when one's addresses lie within the other's; a second
match on a field replaced the first, and != on hop limit and TCP flags
read as ==, now kept raw; a forward accept without ct status dnat no
longer folds into the port forward, nor an interface-limited IPv6
accept into an open pinhole; raw rules' set references are renamed
(NAME_v4/_v6) or written out, so nftables takes them; DNATs with
matches a forward can't hold are left out with a note.
Sets with flags timeout become dynamic sets; a DNAT of several ports one
forward per port. Zone names: --zone IFACE=NAME (and on the Import
page), VLAN defines, more suffixes, and a note on where each name came
from. testdata/audit.nft covers the cases, checked with nft 1.1.3.
make test and make e2e (246 checks) pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The boot unit fails closed: if ruleset.nft doesn't load, it loads
ruleset-fallback.nft (render.Fallback), saved beside it from the same
configuration: nothing new in from external zones, established, the
ICMPv6 IPv6 needs and DHCPv6 replies let in, the inside left alone and
masqueraded, and the unit marked failed with a critical message.
housecarld replaces it when it applies; status, the dashboard and
/healthz say while it is in force. no_external_zone now also says the
fallback closes everything without an external zone.
The boot ruleset has no flowtable: nftables on Debian 13's kernel
refuses one naming a device that doesn't exist yet (ppp0 before PPPoE),
and with it the whole file. internal/linkwatch listens to rtnetlink link
messages; housecarld applies again when a flowtable device appears or
comes back as a new interface (by ifindex), under the engine's lock.
docs/flowtable.md: what it does, when to use it and when not, how.
GET /healthz reports firewall (applied, unconfigured, fallback,
missing), changes on probation and the machine's warnings, with 503
unless in force, read at most every five seconds.
Renaming a zone, set or service changes what names it in the same
change (one history entry, one undo); dynamic sets keep their names.
The importer keeps a chain's head in order: once a would-be built-in
stays a rule, the ones after it do too, so the maintainer's ICMPv6
accepts stay behind the invalid drop as written. hc settings set
--flowtable none empties the list.
make test (nft 1.1.3) and make e2e (242 checks, with VLAN
sub-interfaces, the fallback and the flowtable) pass.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
internal/stats samples every minute what the kernel already counts: the
interfaces' counters (per zone too), Housecarl's table (hits per rule,
built-in and policy; drops by chain; quotas; per-device sets), the
connection tracking table, and housecarld's and the host's memory, CPU
and load. Logged drops feed top lists of sources and what they tried.
Aggregates go to a database of their own (stats.db; per minute 7 days,
per hour 90 days, per day 2 years), with the store and queries from
Jarl's.
Traffic per inside device is a setting (stats_per_device): counting sets
stats_up/down_v4/v6 and rules at the top of the forward chain, IPv6 per
/64, carried across reloads. Set names starting with meter_, conn_,
quota_ or stats_ are reserved (set_name_reserved).
GET /stats/{status,summary,timeline,top,hits,heatmap}, hc stats, a
Statistics page with Jarl's charts, two charts on the dashboard, and a
conntrack_full warning. e2e: 188 checks.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
internal/matrix walks each pair's rules in order, as nftables would, for
new connections: zone → zone (forward), zone → the firewall (input) and
back (output), with the built-ins that act on new connections. A rule
for the whole pair decides it; one for part of its traffic (addresses,
services, times, rates, a quota) is an exception; the rest falls to the
policy. Rules whose addresses all lie in networks connected to other
zones are left out of a pair. GET /matrix (with ?changeset, pending
changes), hc matrix [FROM TO], and a Matrix page whose cells open their
rules.
e2e: 166 checks, among them the matrix of the maintainer's imported
ruleset.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Connections: the kernel's tracked connections, read and closed over
ctnetlink (internal/conntrack, raw netlink like the drop log), with
their NAT and TCP state; closing one makes the rules check its next
packet again (GET /connections, POST /connections/close; hc
connections; Traffic → Connections).
- Rules can check every packet (every_packet, --every-packet): before
established connections are accepted, so a drop or reject also stops
connections already open. They can't accept.
- A packet tracer (internal/trace): a table of its own, inet
housecarl-trace, marks the packets a filter picks, `nft monitor trace`
reports every rule and policy they meet in every table, and the tracer
names what accepted or dropped them, Housecarl's rules by name (POST,
GET, DELETE /trace; hc trace; Traffic → Trace). One trace at a time,
at most 200 packets and 20 a second; the table goes when it ends.
e2e: 157 checks, among them an upload a normal block doesn't stop and an
every-packet one does, and a trace naming the blocking rule.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Undo is staged like any edit: in review mode the web UI's Undo, and hc
history undo with -C or HOUSECARL_CHANGESET, add a revert operation
that checks, when replayed, that nothing it touches changed since;
applied, History links the entries. Imports and takeovers still can't
be staged.
- The rules page sums up a chain's built-ins in one line; a window lists
them with what they do and their hits, and switches them.
- Warnings about the machine (dashboard, hc status): nftables.service
enabled (it loads /etc/nftables.conf at boot and flushes every table
when stopped), and the imported table still in force beside
Housecarl's. The docs say to disable nftables.service but not stop it.
- A raw rule with other fields set is refused (raw_conflict) instead of
silently ignoring them; the rule dialog's nftables section hides what
it replaces, and the importer's raw rules carry only their text.
- A dynamic set with configured entries is refused
(set_dynamic_entries): they were silently ignored. The set dialog
shows entries or the entry timeout, as fits.
- The rule dialog's chain choices are just the chains' names.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
A change made over the network answers with a one-time confirm_token
and closes its connection (HTTP/2: a GOAWAY). The web UI and hc send the
token straight back to /confirm, which accepts it only for the newest
change, from the same user and API token, the same address, and over a
new connection: proof that the client can still reach the API through
the new ruleset (an established connection would get through anyway). A
change that cuts its client off can't be confirmed so, and rolls back by
itself. The setting manual_confirm (hc settings set --auto-confirm off)
and hc --no-confirm leave confirming to a person. Changes through the
local socket still need no confirmation. e2e: 136 checks, among them a
lockout change rolled back without anyone confirming.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Changesets, as in Jarl: configuration changes are operations that can be
staged in a changeset, checked as they are added (validation and nft -c),
reviewed with the diff of the ruleset, and applied together as one
history entry, then on probation like any change made over the network.
The web UI collects edits for review by default (pending rows, a bar with
Review and Apply now, a Changes page, a switch for live edits); hc stages
with -C ID or HOUSECARL_CHANGESET (checked like JARL_CHANGESET) and has
hc changeset create/list/show/diff/apply/discard/remove. Undo, import and
takeover refuse a changeset. --dry-run shows the ruleset's diff.
Bandwidth and quotas: rate limits in bytes, per source or destination;
quotas per rule or per address that reset daily, weekly, monthly on a
day, or by hand, with their usage carried across reloads, saved for
reboots, shown by hc quotas and on the rules page, and reset with hc rule
reset-quota. Rules that count traffic are checked before established
connections are accepted (so they see every packet) and can't accept.
Per-address limits group IPv6 by /64 by default (--group-v4/-v6).
Per-source rate meters use update. The importer turns meters, byte rates
and quotas into these fields.
The examples in the web UI, hc's help and the docs use documentation
addresses and generic names instead of the maintainer's network.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Zones, address sets (IPv4 and IPv6 mixed, dynamic sets with timeouts) and
services, ordered rules in the early, input, forward and output chains,
port forwards with hairpin NAT and IPv6 pinholes, source NAT, redirects,
and switchable built-ins (loopback, conntrack, ICMPv6, antispoofing, MSS
clamping, DHCPv6 client, flowtable). Every change is validated, checked
with nft -c and applied in one transaction to Housecarl's own table,
inet housecarl; changes made over the network roll back unless
confirmed, and the confirmed ruleset is loaded at boot by
housecarl-ruleset.service. An empty configuration applies nothing.
Also: hit counters and the drop log (nflog), 'hc import' of an existing
nftables ruleset and 'hc takeover', the hc CLI, the REST API and the web
UI, users, scoped tokens (sets:write:NAME), the audit log, the web UI's
certificate through Jarl, Debian packages, docs, unit tests with real
nft 1.1.3, and an e2e test with real traffic (71 checks).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Housecarl will be a firewall manager for nftables, built the way Jarl and
Steward are: housecarld (a daemon with a REST API and web UI), hc (the
CLI) and SQLite.
- The logo: a carved Nordic doorway in Jarl's blue (artwork/logo.svg),
with a small version without the carvings, lighter on dark
backgrounds. scripts/logo.py builds the web UI's copies and
scripts/banner.py the README banner.
- The HOUSECARL wordmark in Jarl's and Steward's angular letters, with
new H, O, U and C (assets/brand.js), and the UI's color tokens.
- housecarld and hc print their version; the Makefile, version package,
AGENTS.md, CHANGELOG and the design sketch (docs/design.md).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
abrown38andClaude Opus 5.5