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>
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>
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>
abrown38andClaude Opus 5.5