The endpoint-comparison rules this branch introduced now live in util (PR
#7472 moved them there so the MDM conflict check could stop comparing URLs
as strings). Keeping a copy here is what produced that bug in the first
place: two implementations of "is this the same endpoint?" drift, and the
one that drifts starts refusing a URL that addresses the very server it
already points at.
So SameServiceURL delegates the port normalization to util.ServiceURLPort
and drops the local one, and SameServiceURLIncludingPath — endpoint plus
path, for the admin panel URL, which is opened rather than dialed — is
util.SameServiceURL plus the query, fragment and userinfo it adds on top,
so the local path normalization goes too.
What stays here is the distinction util does not make: SameServiceURL is
endpoint-only, because a management URL is dialed and only its host and port
are, while util.SameServiceURL includes the path.
Pure refactor. Verified as one: all 198 pairs of a 14-spelling matrix
(default and zero-padded ports, host case, trailing slash, path, query,
fragment, userinfo, both schemes, nil operands) answer identically for both
functions before and after.
The test comment described the null state in the present tense — "the config
a plain login writes leaves every one of them unset" — which was true before
this branch and is not any more: apply() now resolves those fields, so a
login writes them set. unsetOnDisk puts the null state back deliberately, to
stand in for a profile an older client wrote. Comments only.
apply() reports two different things through one bool: an input that changed
a value, and a field it had to fill in because the config carried none. The
update-settings gate reads that bool as "the caller asked for a change", so
any config still missing a default answered a request that asks for nothing
with a refusal.
Readers already hand out normalized configs — readConfig applies an empty
input for exactly this reason — which is why the gate got away with it. But a
handler that refuses a request must not depend on where its caller obtained
the config, and it must not start reading "this profile predates a field" as
"the caller asked for a change" the day someone adds one with a default.
WouldChange now runs the filling-in as a pass of its own and discards its
verdict, so the pass that answers the caller measures only what the input
did.
Seven Config fields mean "the effective default" when they hold no value:
the five SSH toggles, the SSH JWT cache TTL, and the network monitor. Every
consumer already reads a nil as that default, but apply() diffed them by
presence — `config.X == nil || *input.X != *config.X` — so an input restating
the default counted as a change.
That made the update-settings gate refuse `netbird up` outright. The CLI
sends every flag whose value came from an environment variable
(SetFlagsFromEnvVars goes through pflag's FlagSet.Set, which marks the flag
Changed), and the config a plain login writes leaves all seven unset, so a
container configured with, say, NB_ENABLE_SSH_ROOT=false restated a default
the file held as null on every start and was answered with
FailedPrecondition.
apply() now resolves the seven up front, the way it already did for
ServerSSHAllowed and RemoteJobsAllowed, which also repairs such a profile on
its next write. With the values named, the comparisons below diff values
instead of presence, so their nil branches are gone.
The network monitor keeps its platform default — on for windows and darwin —
and naming it as false elsewhere is what createEngineConfig already read a
nil to be. getJWTCacheTTL reaches the same 0 through its own default, and
Android's GetEnableSSH* getters already answered nil with false.
The endpoint comparison introduced for the management URL was applied to the
admin URL too, and that one is opened in a browser rather than dialed over
gRPC: a panel served under /netbird is not the panel served at the root. So a
config whose admin URL differed only by path reported no change, and the new
path was never persisted — a custom panel URL could not be updated at all.
SameServiceURLIncludingPath adds what a URL carries past its endpoint (path,
query, fragment, userinfo) while still treating equivalent spellings as equal:
a missing path and "/" are the same root, and so is a trailing slash. The
management URL keeps the endpoint-only comparison, since only the endpoint is
ever dialed.
Ports are also normalized numerically now, so ":0443" and ":443" are one port.
Reported by cubic-dev-ai on PR #7398 (two findings).
ReadOrGenerateConfig resolves a default config when the profile has no file
yet, and createNewConfig was minting the WireGuard and SSH keys while doing so.
That defeated the provisioning pair it was meant to serve: the CLI's foreground
login calls EnsureIdentity to find out whether it has to persist the keys, got
generated == false because the read had already generated them, and so never
wrote them out. The login then dialed management with an identity that only
existed in memory, and the next login registered a second peer.
createNewConfig no longer provisions. createProvisionedConfig is the variant
that does, and the callers whose contract is "usable as it comes back" use it:
CreateInMemoryConfig, whose callers connect with the result, and the two
create-and-write branches. A read gets a config with no identity, so the
caller's own EnsureIdentity reports the work and triggers the write.
Reported by CodeRabbit and cubic-dev-ai on PR #7398, both on the same defect.
apply() assigned the incoming mTLS certificate and key paths and set updated
unconditionally, without comparing them to what the config already held. It is
the same presence-instead-of-value mistake this branch set out to fix, one
layer down: a caller restating its own certificate paths was reported as
changing them, which trips the value-aware update-settings gate.
Reported by cubic-dev-ai on PR #7398.
apply() wrote the incoming sync message version through the stored pointer,
without checking it was there: a config that carries no version yet made it
dereference nil. Reachable from the update-settings dry run, which runs inside
a request handler — where failing closed is the worst acceptable outcome, and a
panic is not one.
The field is now reassigned like every other optional one, which also means
apply() no longer mutates anything the caller still holds through a pointer, so
the dry run's copy has one less field to detach.
Reported by cubic-dev-ai on PR #7398.
ReadConfig and GetConfig differed in one thing — what happens when the file is
absent — and neither name said which was which:
- ReadConfig -> ReadOrGenerateConfig (reads it, or generates one in memory)
- GetConfig -> GetExistingConfig (reads it, or fails)
Three comments went with them:
- GetConfig's said "return with Config and if it was created. Errors out if it
does not exist", which described a bool it does not return and a creation it
never performs.
- ReadConfig's explained that it does not write, which is what a reader is
supposed to do anyway.
- Server.getConfig's said it "errors out if it does not exist", which it does
not — it resolves a default config, and now provisions the identity too.
Reading a config wrote it back. profilemanager.readConfig persisted whatever
apply() had filled in, and ReadConfig created and wrote the file outright when
it was absent, so every reader was quietly a writer: a gate deciding whether to
refuse a request, a UI listing profiles, a mobile getter reading one preference.
The previous commit worked around that with a PeekConfig variant, which left
two read functions with opposite side effects and the antipattern still there
for everyone else.
Only one thing in a read genuinely had to be persisted: apply() generated the
WireGuard and SSH keys when it found them empty, and a generated key cannot be
recomputed — losing it means the peer comes back with a different identity and
registers again. Everything else apply() fills in is a deterministic default
that the next read recomputes anyway.
So identity provisioning is now its own step, Config.EnsureIdentity, and the
callers that provision write the result out themselves, in the open:
- Server.getConfig, the daemon's provisioning point;
- the CLI's foreground login, which is about to dial management;
- update() / directUpdate(), the config write paths — a stored profile can
legitimately carry no identity, since a mobile logout clears the keys in
place, and the next write is what has to mint a new one.
ReadConfig and GetConfig no longer write anything, PeekConfig is gone, and the
dry-run baseline no longer needs placeholder keys to keep apply() from minting
real ones.
One deliberate leftover: readConfig still calls util.EnforcePermission, which
chmods a config file whose permissions are too broad. It changes no content and
is idempotent, and dropping it would leave a legacy file world-readable until
its first write.
The dry run's baseline for a profile with no config file yet went through
createNewConfig, and apply() generates a WireGuard and an SSH key whenever it
finds those fields empty. The baseline is compared against and discarded, so
every evaluation minted a keypair it threw away — and logged "generated new
Wireguard key". The CLI retries Login in a backoff loop, so a first `netbird up`
on a fresh profile filled the daemon log with what reads like peer-key rotation.
The baseline now starts from the shared skeleton with placeholder keys, so
apply() has nothing to generate. No ConfigInput field maps to either key, so
the comparison is unaffected.
Three places in one request path each had their own notion of "same
management URL": the config layer compared the parsed URLs as strings, the
privileged-change gate compared scheme + host + effective port, and the MDM
conflict check compared strings after filling in the default port. Only the
middle one was right.
A string comparison answers the wrong question. "https://api.netbird.io",
"https://api.netbird.io/" and "https://API.netbird.io:443" are one endpoint
written three ways, so a client restating its own management URL with a
trailing slash — a normal way to write it — was still read as a client asking
to be repointed, and the update-settings gate refused it. The MDM check had
the same flaw against the enforced value.
profilemanager.SameServiceURL is now the single comparison: same scheme, same
host case-insensitively as DNS names are, same effective port. The config
layer, the privileged-change gate and the MDM conflict check all defer to it,
so there is one answer to "did this URL change?" instead of three.
The update-settings gate needs the stored config to decide whether a request
changes anything, so the previous commit moved that read ahead of the refusal.
The read is not side-effect free: profilemanager.GetConfig writes the config
back whenever apply() has to fill in a default the file was missing. A request
that the gate then refuses had therefore already rewritten the profile file.
PeekConfig is GetConfig without that write-back. The returned config is still
normalized in memory, which is what the decision needs; the file is left
exactly as it was found. Every caller of storedConfigAtPath feeds a gate that
can refuse, so they all peek.
Note for reviewers: the daemon still normalizes the file on startup and on
every real update, so nothing depends on a read performing that write.
The update-settings kill switch (--disable-update-settings /
NB_DISABLE_UPDATE_SETTINGS / the MDM DisableUpdateSettings key) forbids
changing settings, but it decided what a "change" was by looking at
whether a field was present in the request. The CLI fills the whole
config surface of SetConfigRequest and LoginRequest from its flags and
environment on every `netbird up` (setupSetConfigReq in cmd/up.go), so a
client configured by environment restates its own configuration on every
start and tripped the gate every time.
SetConfig only warned about that, but Login carries the same fields and
was gated the same way, and Login runs inside the CLI's backoff loop: the
daemon answered every attempt with codes.Unavailable, `netbird up` never
completed, and a container with NB_DISABLE_UPDATE_SETTINGS plus any
config env var (NB_MANAGEMENT_URL, for one) could not come up at all.
Both gates now compare values. Config.WouldChange is the dry-run half of
UpdateConfig: it runs the very same diff logic (Config.apply) against a
copy of the stored config, so the gate cannot drift from what an actual
update would do, nor go stale when a field is added. A request that
restates what the profile already holds changes nothing and is allowed; a
request that diverges is refused exactly as before, and a dry run that
cannot be evaluated fails closed. A profile with no config on disk yet is
judged against the config the daemon would create for it.
For Login, the compared input comes from loginOverridesInput, which
persistLoginOverrides also uses to perform the write, so the gate judges
precisely the two fields a login can persist (management URL, pre-shared
key) and no field it ignores.
Two adjacent defects surfaced while making the comparison exact:
- Config.apply compared URLs as raw strings, so the same endpoint spelled
without its default port ("https://api.netbird.io" vs
"https://api.netbird.io:443") counted as a new value and rewrote the
config. It now compares the parsed forms.
- UpdateConfig did not collapse the redacted pre-shared key, unlike
UpdateOrCreateConfig and DirectUpdateConfig, so a UI round-trip of the
mask replaced the stored key with asterisks.
The CLI warning for a refused SetConfig said the method was not available
in the daemon, which sent people looking for a version mismatch that was
not there; it now reports the refusal.
riccardom