The managed interface supersedes both. They go together because apart
they are useless: attaching needs an interface somebody prepared, and
tun-setup existed only to say how to prepare one.
This also corrects what the last commit's README claimed. It said the
manual route was needed on macOS and Windows; it was not, and could not
be. The recipe printed Linux `ip` commands, and a persistent TUN that a
second process can attach to is a Linux concept — macOS creates a utun
by opening a control socket and there is nothing to hand over. So those
platforms were never served by this path, and their honest state is that
a real interface waits on a provisioner, with --no-tun meanwhile.
Gone with it: the interface-existence check, the /proc/net/if_inet6
address inspection and its DAD flag decoding, and the --interface flag,
which had one mode left.
Kept: the check that the allocated IPv4 address is really on a local
interface. The agent now assigns that address itself, so the check is no
longer telling a user what to run — it verifies the outcome instead of
trusting it, which is worth keeping precisely because the assumptions
around Linux address behaviour have been wrong here more than once. Its
message says which interface should have had the address rather than a
command to run.
Boxing Up(UpArgs) is fallout: TunSetupArgs had been masking how much
larger that variant is than its siblings.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The agent printed a list of `ip` commands and asked a human to run them.
That is fragile in the way hand-held setup always is: a persistent TUN
does not survive a reboot, a changed address allocation needs another
manual round, and a run that died leaves a half-configured interface the
next run trips over.
On Linux the agent now creates the interface, sets the MTU, brings it up
and assigns both overlay addresses itself, over netlink in process. No
`ip` is invoked, so nothing this path does can be influenced by PATH, a
shell, or anything a remote peer said.
Cleanup stops being an action. The interface is tied to an open file
descriptor and is deliberately not persistent, so the kernel removes it
when the agent goes — cleanly, by panic, by SIGKILL or by power loss
alike. That also retires `keep_addr_on_down` and `nodad`, which existed
only because an interface nobody held open lost carrier.
Anything still left behind is repaired rather than tripped over: an
abandoned TUN is replaced along with its stale addresses. Two cases
refuse instead of guessing — a link that is not a TUN, because a name
collision is no reason to destroy somebody's bridge, and a TUN another
process holds open, because that is a working overlay belonging to
someone else.
CAP_NET_ADMIN is kept out of the effective set except around the calls
that use it. Two facts shape how: capabilities are per thread, and
netlink checks the credentials of whichever thread calls sendmsg, which
with an async client is the connection task rather than the caller. So
netlink runs on one dedicated thread with a current-thread runtime where
nothing is polled outside a block_on, and opening the TUN descriptor is
synchronous with no await between the guard and its release.
The decision of what to change is a pure function, tested on every
platform; only the execution is behind the provisioner trait. macOS and
Windows get an implementation that refuses with an explanation and falls
back to attaching to a prepared interface, plus a mock host the tests
drive the whole plugin lifecycle against.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>