Commit Graph
15 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
jaap-jan 8a77b7ca68 Say how far a connection has got while it is still being made
ci / build and test (pull_request) Failing after 2m34s
ci / desktop nightly (pull_request) Skipped
ci / api image (pull_request) Skipped
ci / android head (pull_request) Successful in 3m28s
The connecting card set its status string once, when the tab was created, and
never touched it again. Every connection therefore looked identical from the
outside: one three seconds into a key exchange, one waiting out a fifteen-second
timeout against a machine that is asleep, and one that had hung all drew the
same "connecting…". The card now draws the five steps of getting there, each lit
at the moment the handshake reports reaching it, over an amber track that fills
as they finish.

◆ NOTHING ON THE LIST IS INVENTED. Every row changes state because a layer below
it said so, at the instant the thing it names actually began.

That is the whole reason it is worth showing, and it is why most of this commit
is plumbing rather than XAML: there was no progress reporting anywhere in the
stack to hook a step list onto, and a card animating plausible progress would
have been indistinguishable from one that had stopped receiving any.

SshConnectionPhase names four phases and deliberately not more. SSH.NET runs the
entire handshake inside one ConnectAsync and raises exactly one event from the
middle of it — HostKeyReceived, once the key exchange has produced a key to show
— so that event is the only interior moment there is to report. Everything
before it is Reaching and everything after it is Authenticating. A fifth phase
in that assembly would have to be a timer, so there is not one. OpeningShell is
reported by TerminalWorkspace instead, because that is where it happens: the
factory's work ends with an authenticated connection, and asking for a
pseudo-terminal on one is a separate round trip. The SFTP path passes null — a
second connection opened behind an already-open shell has nobody watching a step
list for it.

The card's fifth step, "Starting the terminal", is the renderer wait and lives
in the shell rather than in the SSH assembly, which has never heard of a
renderer. On the first connection after a cold start it is a real wait with a
real failure mode of its own — a missing WebView2 runtime — so a list that began
at "reaching the host" would leave the one wait most likely to hang unnamed.

Amber for the step in flight, and that follows the palette's rule rather than
bending it. Green is what is true and purple is what you can press; a step still
happening is neither, and it is exactly the caveat-worth-reading that amber
exists for. Steps behind it go green as they become true. Nothing animates,
which is the argument TransfersScreen.axaml already makes for its own track,
reaching a screen with far more reason to want a spinner: a spinner is furniture
invented to fill a state nobody measured, and these states are measured, so the
track fills to what has finished and then waits there.

A refusal keeps the step it stopped on, in red, with the ones behind it still
green. That is the half a progress bar could not do, and it is the difference
between "that host is not there" and "that host is there and would not have me"
— a question the reason sentence alone frequently does not settle.

The strip's dot goes amber while a tab is connecting, on both heads. It was
grey, and so is a tab whose shell has exited: the two states in that strip with
the least in common, one worth waiting for and one over. PhoneShell's own
comment already recorded half of this — the dot stopped being green before
anything had answered — and this is the other half.

Progress is raised inline rather than through System.Progress<T>, which captures
whatever synchronisation context it was constructed on and posts to it. That
reads like a convenience and is really a second place the marshalling decision
gets made: silently, differently under a test with no context, and out of order
with respect to the failure that follows a phase. The shell marshals once, in
one handler, through a new optional post parameter on MainWindowViewModel — the
same seam TransfersViewModel already uses, and for the reason its own remark
gives. The three Dispatcher.UIThread.Post calls that predate it are the ones
this suite's comments record as out of reach; they are left alone rather than
swept in here.

Both heads draw the list. They differ in one place: Phone.axaml's mono class
sets a colour and a size along with the family, so the caption rule names its
own family instead of composing the two and asking two rules for one Foreground.
The desktop's mono sets the family alone, which is why ConnectingCard does
compose them. Each head also gains SHOW LOGS beside the button that gives up —
the step list is this attempt and the log is every other one, which is what a
connection taking too long actually raises.

Seven tests, and the two that matter most run against the container rather than
a fake: a real handshake reports its phases in order, and a host-key refusal
never claims to have authenticated. A fake asserting what it was written to
assert would have established nothing about either. The rest cover the tab
advancing while the connection is gated, the step a refusal stops on, and a
phase reported after the user has given up on the tab. 1,861 tests, none
failing.

The Android head's layout is not verified by anything. It compiles, and
compiled bindings mean every new binding path resolves, but that project is not
in DodoSSH.slnx, there is no test project for it and no device here — so unlike
the desktop card, whose shapes the layout harness measures, these rows have not
been drawn. Vertical fit is reasoned, not observed.
2026-08-10 15:47:45 +02:00
jaap-jan e41eca01a8 Stop the SSH suite's server refusing connections at random
ci / build and test (pull_request) Successful in 2m21s
ci / desktop nightly (pull_request) Skipped
ci / android head (pull_request) Successful in 3m20s
ci / api image (pull_request) Successful in 4s
The suite fails intermittently with SshConnectionException "The connection
was closed by the remote host", within tens of milliseconds, on whichever
test happens to connect first. It has been seen in CI and reproduces
locally. This raises sshd's MaxStartups in the fixture, which is the most
likely cause and is worth doing regardless.

sshd's compiled-in default is 10:30:100: past ten unauthenticated
connections in flight it refuses new ones at random, thirty percent of the
time, rising to always at a hundred. The image ships the line commented
out, so that default was what ran. xUnit runs test classes in parallel and
most of the classes here open a connection, so ten in flight is reachable
during the opening seconds — and a refusal presents to the client exactly
as observed, because a dropped connection and a server that never answered
are indistinguishable from that end.

◆ IT IS A MITIGATION AND NOT A DEMONSTRATED CURE, AND THE COMMENT SAYS SO.

The flake rate could not be measured. On the Windows development machine
the identical unmodified suite ran 85/85 clean and, an hour later, failed
13 runs out of 15; a Linux container gave 30/30 clean and then failed on
the first run of the next batch. Docker throughput on that host swings far
enough to swamp the effect, so every before/after comparison taken there
was noise — including two that were briefly believed.

It is committed on the narrower argument that it is right either way. A
connection throttle is hardening this suite has no interest in
reproducing: it exists to test an SSH client, not to survive a rate limit,
and a test server that drops connections at random is a bad test server
whether or not it is the cause of this particular flake.

The other candidate was the reload window — pkill returns when SIGHUP is
delivered, not when sshd has finished closing its listeners and re-execing,
so a connection immediately afterwards can be refused the same way. A wait
that required three consecutive banner reads before returning was written
and then removed: it could not be shown to change anything either, and a
fixture carrying two unproven fixes for one symptom is worse than one,
because the next person has to disprove both. Both candidates, and how to
tell them apart with sshd's own log, are recorded in the fixture and in
docs/platform-flags.md.
2026-08-10 11:46:14 +02:00
jaap-jan 8209f15741 Let a session's transport say what it negotiated
ISshConnection and ISftpSession both carry Cipher now — the server-to-client
algorithm off SSH.NET's own ConnectionInfo, captured once because a rekey is
not an event that library raises — and TerminalWorkspace.GetSessionFacts hands
that plus the host key's algorithm back per session, without ever handing over
the connection itself. Nothing reads either yet; the status bar that will is
the next commit.
2026-08-08 20:54:14 +02:00
jaap-jan 82966af37b Let a connection be reached through a proxy on this machine's loopback
ci / build and test (push) Successful in 2m8s
ci / android head (push) Successful in 3m20s
ci / desktop nightly (push) Successful in 46s
ci / api image (push) Successful in 23s
Step 1 of docs/reaching-a-host-you-cannot-dial.md, and it is not the step that document said it was.

SshConnectionRequest carries an optional SshLoopbackProxy and BuildConnectionInfo hands SSH.NET its proxy
ConnectionInfo when there is one. Nothing passes one yet: the callers are jump hosts and the relay, which
are steps 2 and 3.

◆ THE BRIDGE WAS THE WRONG FIRST STEP, AND BUILDING IT WOULD HAVE BEEN THE MISTAKE THIS DOCUMENT IS ABOUT.
ADR 0004 says the relay's loopback bridge "also provides ProxyJump via a SOCKS5 dynamic forward — one
mechanism, two features", and the plan took that to mean the bridge was the shared foundation. It is not:
ForwardedPortDynamic *is* the listener for a jump host — SSH.NET accepts on it, speaks SOCKS5 on it and
tunnels through the bastion — so nothing is left for a bridge of ours to do on that path. The relay is the
case with no SshClient to hang a forward off, so it is the bridge's only consumer, and the bridge belongs in
the commit that uses it. What the two actually share is one level down and a tenth of the size: being told
to reach a target through a loopback proxy while staying about the target. That is what this is.

Three properties, one test each.

A port and nothing else, so a proxy anywhere but loopback cannot be expressed. The failure that shape rules
out is an open SOCKS proxy on the user's network for the life of a shell, which nothing would report — so it
is made unrepresentable rather than validated, on the same grounds AuthenticationChoice carries a kind.

SOCKS5 rather than a dumb pipe, which is what keeps host key pinning honest. The target's own name and port
stay in the request, travel to the proxy in the CONNECT, and are what the gate pins — so a machine reached
through a bastion is pinned under its own name instead of under 127.0.0.1 on whatever ephemeral port that
day's forward got, which is not an identity at all. A pipe would have meant handing SSH.NET a stand-in and
remembering everywhere else that it was one.

And a proxy that is not listening fails as a connection error rather than as an unknown host key. The gate
turns "no host key seen" into a fingerprint prompt, and a connection that never reached a server has seen
none either; the prompt would offer to fix the wrong thing, with no fingerprint to show.

TWO THINGS THE TESTS MEASURED RATHER THAN ASSUMED, both found by the first run failing.

The target is resolved at the *bastion*, not here — a SOCKS CONNECT names it and the far end looks it up. So
the test asks for localhost:2222, the address inside the container, and the published port this host would
use means nothing there. That is not a quirk of the fixture; it is what ProxyJump means, and it is why an
ssh_config writes the target's internal address beside its jump host. Getting it wrong is a SOCKS "general
failure" that names neither end.

And the test server refuses forwarding. linuxserver/openssh-server ships AllowTcpForwarding no, which a
dynamic forward does not notice — opening one asks the server nothing — so every connection through it is
refused at channel-open and reported as the same general failure. The fixture patches it and HUPs sshd.
There are two sshd_config files in that image and the running server uses /config/sshd/sshd_config; the
first attempt patched /etc/ssh/sshd_config, which is the one a search finds first, changed the text and
nothing else, and left the failure exactly where it was.

VERIFIED. Build clean with no new warnings, 85 tests in Client.Ssh.Tests against the real sshd, and the
solution builds. The proxy test was seen to fail — proxy.Port + 1 in BuildConnectionInfo — and seen green
again. An earlier mutation attempt did not compile, and the log said 85 passing because the run never
started and the previous log was still on disk; the second attempt deletes the log first, which is worth
copying whenever a mutation "passes".

dotnet format reports one pre-existing IDE1006 in DodoSSH.Api/Features/Events/EventsEndpoint.cs, in a
project nothing here touches. Left alone.
2026-08-07 13:48:15 +02:00
jaap-jan 6728a0a597 Let the desktop client replace itself, and give the repository one version
Packaging for Windows, and the updater that only exists once something is
packaged. Velopack, win-x64, fed from the project's own forge — never from the
deployment a client signs in to, which is ADR 0011 rule 2 carried over
unchanged and is why the feed address is a constant in the code rather than a
setting. See docs/adr/0012-desktop-distribution-and-updates.md.

**Nothing is ever installed while somebody is using it.** A newer build is found
on a six-hourly pass, downloaded in the background, and then waits — for a
restart the user presses, or for the next launch they were going to do anyway.
That is a policy rather than caution: this application argues at length that
locking keeps shells running, because a lock that destroyed work would stop
being used, and a restart does not keep them. Having taught that, it owes the
user the choice at the one moment it stops being true, and the sentence saying
so counts the shells it would close.

**The version is now derived from the v* tag**, by MinVer, for everything. There
was no version before this — no property anywhere, so every assembly reported
the SDK's 1.0.0 and the API served that string as its serverVersion to every
client that asked. The tag was already the version of record for the container
image; this makes it the version of record full stop. MinVer's failure mode is
answering plausibly rather than failing, and here a wrong version is a client
that never updates, so it is guarded twice: fetch-depth 0 on every checkout, and
a step that fails a tag build when the tag and the computed version disagree.

**The pack id is DodoSSH.Desktop and not DodoSSH**, which is the one decision
here that would have destroyed data. Velopack installs to %LOCALAPPDATA%\<packId>
and removes that whole directory on uninstall, and %LOCALAPPDATA%\DodoSSH is
where ClientPaths keeps the encrypted cache, the outbox of changes not yet
pushed, and the device key. The obvious id would have had the uninstaller
silently delete work the server has never seen — the thing the application
refuses to do without a counted confirmation. Velopack's own advice to move user
data to roaming %APPDATA% is declined for the reason ClientPaths already gives.

**Releases are cut by a person, and CI gains no job that could.** The tempting
argument is that a forge write token is not a signing key. It does not survive
contact with what the token does: Velopack clients trust their feed and do not
verify a package signature when they apply one, so whoever can write a release
can ship an update every install runs. That is the capability ADR 0011 rule 1
puts on a machine which is not a runner, reached through a different door. The
mechanical objection — vpk needs Windows and the runners are Linux — is the
smaller of the two and is recorded beside it, because somebody will fix one and
believe they are done.

Unsigned for now, deliberately and with the cost stated where a user reads it:
SmartScreen warns once per person, on Setup.exe, because Mark-of-the-Web is
applied by the browser that downloaded it. In-app updates are fetched by the
application and applied from a local file, and never trip it.

The banner is a fourth row of the window rather than an overlay. Anything drawn
in the terminal's rectangle is sliced by the native child window that composites
above it — the defect this window has shipped once — and a sibling row is the
arrangement TitleBar and StatusBar already prove works.

----

Three defects surfaced on the way, none of them in the feature being built.

**A settings key absent from the file came back as the CLR default, not the
declared one.** The JSON source generator builds a record through a synthesised
parameterised constructor and assigns every property from its argument array, so
a property initializer runs and is then overwritten by a default for anything the
file did not contain. A settings.json of {} read back a font size of 0, clamped
up to the 8px floor rather than the 13px the renderer draws at. It could not bite
while there was one setting, because that setting was written on every save and
so was never absent; adding a second would have turned automatic update checks
off for every existing profile, silently, the opposite of the documented default.
Reflection-based deserialisation of the same JSON answers correctly, which is why
every way of checking it by hand agrees except the one that ships. The defaults
now live on the constructor parameters, which is the only place the generator
reads them from.

**Declaring a RuntimeIdentifier on the desktop head broke the server's image
build.** It is the obvious way to let a self-contained publish restore under
locked mode, and it writes a net10.0/win-x64 target into the lock file of every
project the head references transitively — including DodoSSH.Contracts and
DodoSSH.Crypto, which the API builds too. The Dockerfile restores those with no
RID and fails NU1004. Found by running docker build rather than by reading. The
RID stays out of the committed state; the two commands that need one ask for it
unlocked, and the release script puts the lock files back.

**A Docker ARG named VERSION silently sets MSBuild's Version.** An ARG is an
environment variable for the rest of the stage, MSBuild reads environment
variables as properties, and property names are case-insensitive. With the
workflow passing main-<short sha> on a main build the publish died with
NETSDK1018 pointing at DodoSSH.Contracts, a project nobody had touched. The build
stage's argument is ASSEMBLY_VERSION now, empty except on a tag build.

All three are in docs/platform-flags.md, which is where the next person will look.

----

Verified: the whole solution builds and restores locked; 289 shell, 93 layout and
54 session tests pass, including the regression test for the settings defect and
a measurement of the banner at the window's minimum width. vpk pack runs end to
end and reports "Verified VelopackApp.Run()" against Program.Main. The API image
builds correctly both as a main build and as a tag build, carrying 1.0.0 and
0.1.0 respectively.

Not verified, and it needs a published release to be: installing, updating and
uninstalling on a real machine. That is Phase 15 of docs/manual-checks.md, and
the pack id and the WebView2 profile fix are reasoned and commented but only
proved by walking it. Two things to watch at the first upload — the reverse
proxy's body-size limit for a 64 MB asset, and whether vpk upload gitea is happy
with Gitea 1.27.1.
2026-08-04 17:04:41 +02:00
jaap-jan 5cbda59a34 Merge branch 'main' into claude/host-management-ui-plan-7f20ab
Seven files needed a hand. Most were two branches adding something in the same
place, but three were one branch changing what the other had moved or renamed,
and those are the ones worth reading.

The shell keeps both new fields and both constructor lines: the connection
recorder this branch built and the teams view model main did. Where main put a
teams load inside OnScreenChanged, it now sits beside the logs refresh rather
than inside RaiseSurfaceState — this branch extracted that notification block
and it is called from two properties, so a screen-specific side effect in there
would fire on every terminal switch as well.

Main gave four row types a vault id and a vault name, and this branch had moved
one of them — KnownHostRowViewModel — into its own file when the pinned keys
became a screen. Git resolved that as "deleted here, modified there" and took
the delete, which compiles as long as nobody looks: the moved copy still had
the two-argument constructor and the call site had grown to four. Carried over
by hand, along with the ordering the pins list now does on them.

The status line's quiet rule was the subtle one. Main extracted it into
IsWorthReporting; this branch had changed the same condition to read item
counts rather than raw ones, because every user action queues a log entry a
moment later and this machine reads its own entries back on the next pull. Take
main's structure and the merge builds, passes, and silently restores a bug this
branch existed partly to fix — every save's message overwritten a second after
it appears. The method now reads PulledItems and PushedItems, with the reason
in its remarks.

Two conflicts were prose that had gone stale rather than code. The keychain
screen's comment said team vaults are refused by the server's access service,
which was true when it was written and is not now; main's replacement stands,
in this branch's vocabulary. The design-gaps row for groups was claimed by both
— real host groups here, per-vault headings there — and they are different
things, so both rows stay and the difference is stated: a group is a shelf the
user chose, a vault is who can read the item.

One defect the tests found and the compiler could not. Generating a key opens
the same editor as pasting one, but not through NewKey — so it never set the
target vault main added, and a generated key was filed into whatever vault was
edited last, or none. Both key-generation tests failed on it. Fixed where the
editor opens, with the reason recorded there.

One gap is left deliberately and is written down rather than half-built. Hosts,
keys, credentials and pins are read across every vault this session holds a key
for; groups are read from the active vault alone, so a host a teammate filed
shows under UNGROUPED. Nothing is lost or misfiled — it is what the sidebar
already shows for a group that has been deleted — but closing it needs a vault
id on every group row for rename and delete, and a way to tell two vaults'
identically-named groups apart under a layout with one heading per group. Both
are worth doing and neither is a merge's business. It is in the remarks on
ReloadGroupsAsync and in docs/design-import-gaps.md.

dotnet build, dotnet test and dotnet format --verify-no-changes are all clean:
1282 tests, including the end-to-end suite against real containers.
2026-07-31 20:44:39 +02:00
jaap-jan d07b336868 Free the terminal from the Hosts screen, and fill the room it left
The WebView sat inside the Hosts grid, so navigating to Files or the keychain
hid every open terminal and the strip that named them. A connection you had
opened was invisible from four of the five screens. The window now has two
surfaces rather than one: a nav rail that says which page you are on, and a
terminal strip that is always there and switches the whole content area to a
shell. Screen keeps meaning "which page" and never becomes a sixth kind of
page, which is why this is two properties instead of one enum with a terminal
member in it.

Every screen lives inside one wrapper panel that collapses when a terminal is
showing. That is not tidiness — the WebView hosts a Win32 child window that
composites above everything Avalonia draws, so a screen left visible over its
rectangle is a screen sliced in half, and this window has shipped that defect
once already. One decision point, IsTerminalShowing, and a nested panel rather
than five compound bindings nobody would remember to extend.

The focus choreography is the part no test in this repo can see. Every reveal
path now focuses in the same turn the WebView appeared, so all three of them
post at DispatcherPriority.Loaded and let the native control re-push its bounds
first. Going the other way had a real bug: the screen-changed branch called a
bare Focus() where it had to release the keyboard from the native child, so
switching from a terminal to Files silently ate the first keystrokes. Rare
before this commit and the primary gesture after it.

The tab strip grew a cross inside each tab, a plus that opens the quick-connect
palette, and middle-click close. Nested buttons are correct here: Avalonia
handles a left press on the cross and deliberately does not handle other
buttons, which is exactly what lets middle-click bubble up from the cross as
well as the tab. The test is PointerUpdateKind rather than
IsMiddleButtonPressed, because the latter reports button state and is also true
for a left press made while the middle button happens to be held. The handler
is on the tab and not the strip, so the background closes nothing by
construction. Plus opens the palette rather than a flyout, since a menu
dropping into the WebView's rectangle may or may not composite above a child
HWND and this repo does not make rendering claims it has not photographed.

Everything a user reads now says keychain. The wire, the database and the
cryptographic spec still say vault, deliberately: renaming those is a migration
and a protocol change for a word. That split is written down rather than left
to be rediscovered as an inconsistency.

Four things that were squeezed into the keychain's category rail, or into
nothing at all, now have screens. Pinned host keys get one, with fingerprints
never truncated and a filter that matches them, because comparing what you have
against what the operator published is the whole workflow; the approved date is
read out of the item's UUIDv7 rather than added as a column, and says so, since
it means first approval and not last use. Keys can be generated in the client,
which needed the openssh-key-v1 container written by hand — there is no BCL or
NSec helper, and the PKCS#8 route is unverified in the SSH library this uses.
The armour carries no passphrase: encrypting it needs bcrypt_pbkdf, which is
Blowfish with a swizzle, in a project whose crypto is otherwise entirely
libsodium, for a protection the key's own remarks argue is redundant inside a
vault. Generation fills the existing editor and stops, so SAVE stays the one
thing that writes. ~/.ssh/config can be imported behind a preview that is
ticked per row and writes nothing until the button; IdentityFile records the
path and imports the key material only on an explicit opt-in, because reading
somebody's private key into a vault is precisely the act this product exists to
make deliberate. Match blocks and ProxyJump are reported rather than obeyed —
one cannot be evaluated statically and the other has nothing behind it to route
with, and a preview that implied otherwise would be worse than one that admits
it.

Files can be dragged in all four directions that are honestly available. Remote
to Explorer does not ship and is not pretended to: the shell wants the bytes
during the drop, which needs a virtual file and a native COM data object,
outside what Avalonia offers. Note for the next person that Avalonia 12
replaced the drag model outright — DataObject and DataFormats are no-op stubs
and IDataObject is not in the reference assembly, so every tutorial written for
11 does not compile here.

Hosts can be grouped, flat and never nested. A parent id merged as a scalar
lets two offline clients each re-parent A under B and B under A, producing a
cycle inside an encrypted payload that no server can police and every reader
would have to detect for ever. Membership lives in that payload rather than in
the one plaintext concession ADR 0001 allows, whose test is that the relay
cannot function without it — nothing on the server reads a group, so what
plaintext would hand over is a clustering of the estate for nothing. The
plaintext column reserved for it is dropped, provably always null, and the
server now refuses a client that sends one; it was never populated, was copied
on apply, and was not cleared on delete, so a group id would have outlived the
host it described.

Snippets insert through xterm rather than through the pump, because xterm is
the only thing that knows whether the remote has bracketed paste on, and that
is what makes a shell treat embedded newlines as text instead of as execute.
The host process moves opaque bytes and never parses output, so it would have
to guess, and guessing wrong runs every line. Running is off by default and the
copy says the text goes into whatever is there — the terminal has no notion of
being at a prompt, and may be in vi or at a password prompt with echo off, so
the Enter the user presses themselves is the entire safety property.

Connections and keychain changes are recorded as synced encrypted items, which
is what makes them auditable by a team later and costs the server knowledge of
connection rate and timing from row counts alone. ADR 0001 already concedes it
cannot hide that class of metadata; the trade is now written into it rather
than left implicit. A connection entry is written once, at close, which is what
makes a synced log tractable: nothing to merge, one outbox row, no chance of
colliding with itself. Live sessions come from memory, not from the log. The
write is void by contract and posts to a bounded channel, because putting an
encrypt-and-write on the teardown path of every session is how closing the
application comes to take four seconds. A ticket opened before a lock still
closes afterwards, since a shell outlives the vault. The activity log hooks the
one generic repository every kind writes through, so it cannot miss a caller —
which is also why the log kinds themselves declare they are not audited, or the
first entry would write an entry about writing an entry. It records the names
of the fields that changed and never their values; a log with an old password
in it would be a plaintext credential store with no vault around it. Retention
is 90 days or 5,000 entries, whichever bites first, pruned on the sync loop
rather than on a second timer.

That log traffic then broke the status line, which is worth recording because
the fix is a shape and not a patch: background sync counted its own log rows as
pushed items, so the quiet rule stopped being quiet and every action's message
was overwritten a second later by a sync report. The report now separates log
rows from user items and the rule reads the latter.

S3 buckets appear as a remote in the file browser, behind the same interface an
SFTP session implements, so the queue and both panes did not have to learn what
they are talking to. Uploads go through a pipe, because the queue wants to
write and the SDK wants to read; memory is then bounded by the part size
instead of buffering a file to disk twice.

Finally, the Windows device key store moved out of the session project, which
was the one thing keeping it from being portable — everything else in it is
platform-neutral, and a Windows CNG dependency in the middle of the vault code
meant a second head could not reference it without dragging Windows along. The
seam that made the move free was already there. docs/android-port.md is the
audit behind that: what ports, what does not, in order of cost, the four
decisions taken, and an inventory of every screen and state the interface has
to carry, written so a design can be made from it directly.

dotnet build, dotnet test and dotnet format --verify-no-changes are all clean:
1240 tests at zero warnings, including the end-to-end suite against real
containers. The manual checks that headless Avalonia cannot make — the drag
from Explorer, a generated key against a real host, twelve tabs at the minimum
window width — are listed in docs/manual-checks.md and are still outstanding.
2026-07-31 20:30:05 +02:00
jaap-jan 03e902a2d2 Colour the host's file rows by what their mode says
ci / build and test (push) Failing after 2s
The remote pane's NAME column was blue for a directory and plain for everything
else, and the PERMS column was faint whatever it said. Two colours now come off
the mode, split across those two columns on purpose: NAME says what a row is,
so a file with an execute bit is green there, and PERMS says what is notable
about how it is set, so a file anyone may write to is amber over the characters
that actually say so. Because the two never compete for one TextBlock, a
world-writable executable shows both facts instead of one winning an argument.
No new blue is spent, which is what App.axaml asks for: it reserves blue for a
directory, a distinct scope, and calls it deliberately rare.

Both are files only, and each exclusion is a wrong answer avoided rather than a
case not got to. Every symbolic link is lrwxrwxrwx by convention and its mode
governs nothing — what may be written is the target, whose mode an lstat
listing never fetched — so amber there would fire on every link on the host. A
world-writable directory is /tmp, made safe by a sticky bit PosixMode does not
render, and warning about it would be warning about the half of the mode that
is on screen while the half that answers the warning is not. And the execute
bit on a directory means "may be searched", which is true of very nearly every
directory a host has, so green there would paint the whole pane and mark
nothing.

The two questions read back the string PosixMode wrote rather than carrying its
nine booleans through SftpEntry as well. That is the point rather than a
shortcut: two representations of one fact is how a row ends up coloured for a
bit the column beside it does not show. A mode of the wrong length answers
false rather than throwing, since these decide a colour and a listing is not
worth failing over one.

The amber is Warn rather than WarnText, which is the muted amber a warning card
writes its sentences in. At 9.5px against TextFaint that one is a shade rather
than a signal, and a marker nobody notices is the same as no marker.

The local pane is untouched, on the grounds it already gives for having no
PERMS column at all: a POSIX mode is not a fact about a file on Windows, and
colouring one there would invent exactly what the column declines to print.

Twenty cases in RemotePathTests, which needs no container — the execute bit in
any of the three triples rather than only the owner's, the others-write bit
alone, a mode of the wrong length, and the file-only rule for both questions
from all three kinds. dotnet format is clean and the app and layout suites pass
at 109 and 35.
2026-07-31 12:17:56 +02:00
jaap-jan 04faef6597 Move files to and from a host over SFTP
M2's file transfer, built bottom-up: an SFTP session on the SSH layer, a
transfer queue in a project of its own, and the two-pane browser the design
asked for replacing the screen that said it did not exist. Remote listings
carry names, sizes, modification times and a real drwxr-xr-x — nothing in this
repository could render a POSIX mode before — and the queue moves one file at a
time with progress, throughput and resume.

The design import assumed this would be an SFTP subsystem channel on
ISshConnection, beside the shell on a transport that is already up. SSH.NET
does not offer that: SftpClient derives from BaseClient and owns its own
transport, and there is no supported way to hand it an SshClient's session. So
file transfer opens a second authenticated connection, and it is named for
that rather than dressed up as a channel — OpenSftpAsync is on
ISftpSessionFactory, not on a connection. The difference is visible to a user:
the host records a second login, and a host whose password is typed each time
asks for it again on this screen. It goes through the same host key gate, the
same pin and the same two refusals a shell does, so a fingerprint approved for
a terminal is approved here and one approved here reaches the other machines
with the next sync. docs/design-import-gaps.md is corrected, and marked as the
one row where what shipped differs from what it predicted.

Nothing is written at its final name until it is complete. Every transfer goes
to a .dodossh-part file beside its destination and is renamed into place at the
end, so an interrupted transfer can never be mistaken for a finished one —
which matters most for what this screen is actually for, which is copying a
build artefact onto a server and then running it. A destination that already
exists is refused outright rather than overwritten: the queue has no way to
ask, and silently replacing a file somebody's process is serving is the worse
of the two failures. The remote pane has DELETE and MKDIR so that refusal is
not a dead end. A test against the container pins the assumption underneath all
of this — that SFTP's rename does not clobber.

Resume works within a run of the application and not across a restart, and the
limit is deliberate rather than unfinished. Nothing records which source wrote
a part file, and resuming one on the strength of its name matching is how a
corrupt artefact gets delivered with nothing reporting a failure; a part file
found at startup is started over. Making it survive a restart needs the
preferences store this client still has not got. The offset a resume starts at
is the part file's own length rather than the transfer's recorded progress: a
cancellation can land between a write completing and the counter moving, and
only one of those two is a fact about the bytes that are there.

The queue and its connection outlive a lock, as shells do. LockAsync already
argues that locking must not destroy work in flight — it is what somebody does
when they walk away from the machine, which is exactly when a long transfer is
most likely to be running — so TransfersViewModel is created once and the vault
is attached on unlock and detached on lock. What locking takes is the host
list, and it has to: those rows carry decrypted secrets.

DodoSSH.Client.Transfer is a new project rather than more of Client.Ssh. The
two answer different questions — one is about reaching a host, the other about
moving bytes and what to do when moving them stops halfway — and this is the
only client project that deliberately touches the local filesystem.

Three defects the tests found, none of which review would have. SftpPath.Name
answered an empty string for the root. NavigateRemoteAsync wrapped itself in
the busy guard, so navigating from inside another command did nothing at all
and the remote pane simply stayed empty after connecting, with no failure
anywhere to explain it. And opening an SFTP session per test made two
handshakes per test — this client learns a host key by being refused — which
pushed the SSH assembly past sshd's MaxStartups and failed a different few
unrelated tests each run; the session is shared through the fixture now, with
the reason written where the next person will hit it.

1004 tests green across 18 projects, 24 of them new: the SFTP subsystem against
the OpenSSH container, the queue against a real temporary directory and a fake
host, and three more layout measurements because a screen this window has never
laid out is a screen never checked.

Not verified: the screen has not been looked at running. The layout harness
measures it at the window's minimum in three shapes, which is the class of
defect that has shipped here before, but reaching it in the application needs
the compose stack, the migrations, the API and a browser sign-in. What is still
absent — the status bar's transfer count, dragging between the panes,
transferring a directory, and sftp over a bastion — is in
docs/design-import-gaps.md.
2026-07-31 11:07:29 +02:00
jaap-jan 94e11f5e38 update packages
ci / build and test (ubuntu) (push) Canceled after 0s
ci / build (windows) (push) Canceled after 0s
2026-07-31 10:12:05 +02:00
jaap-jan 211eba0666 Keep host key trust in the vault, and make it withdrawable
ci / build and test (ubuntu) (push) Canceled after 0s
ci / build (windows) (push) Canceled after 0s
A fingerprint approved once is now approved on every machine and survives a
restart, because host key trust is a vault item type rather than a dictionary
that dies with the process. InMemoryKnownHostStore was what shipped, so the user
was asked to verify a fingerprint on every single connection — which is the gap
most likely to train somebody to click through the one warning that actually
matters. A warning that appears when nothing is wrong teaches that nothing is
ever wrong.

The fourth item type, and like the third it cost no sync logic: a row, an EF
configuration, a migration, a server kind; a secret, a codec, a merge, a cipher,
a repository facade and a session property. One row in the client registry. The
reconciler, the mirror, the repository, the outbox and the pull filter were not
touched. SyncEntityType.KnownHostKey and AadResourceType.KnownHostKey were
already reserved, so neither the contract nor docs/crypto.md changed.

One item per (host, port, algorithm), because a server legitimately offers
several host keys and which one gets negotiated is not ours to predict. Pinning
per endpoint would make an algorithm change indistinguishable from an attack.

The label is derived rather than stored, which is the one place this type
departs from the other three. A user never names a pin — there is nothing to
name it after but the three fields it already has — and a stored label is a
second copy of data that can disagree with the first after a merge. Relabel
returns the secret unchanged, and says why.

The store answers the handshake without touching the disk. SshNetConnectionFactory
calls FindAsync from inside SSH.NET's synchronous HostKeyReceived event, over
.GetAwaiter().GetResult(), which cannot be avoided; doing SQLite I/O plus an AEAD
open per lookup there would put the handshake behind the cache. So decryption
happens in OpenAsync and RefreshAsync — on unlock and after each sync pass,
exactly where the host and key lists already reload — and FindAsync is a
dictionary read under a lock with no await inside it.

That snapshot is where the one real bug in this change lived. Install originally
merged the live pins over the freshly loaded snapshot, to protect a TrustAsync
that had landed while the read was in flight. It would also have resurrected
every pin the user had just forgotten, and stopped a withdrawal made on another
machine from ever taking effect — the store would have healed the deletion back
into existence on every refresh. Replacing wholesale and discarding the read
instead is correct because writes are the rare case: every write bumps a
generation counter, and a refresh whose stamp is stale throws itself away rather
than winning. Nothing found this but reading the method again; it is the kind of
mistake that passes every test written before it, because the test that catches
it is the one the bug tells you to write.

Forgetting is new, and persistence is what made it mandatory rather than
convenient. A mismatch is a hard refusal with no way to continue — deliberately,
and that stays — so pinning a key permanently is also a way to make a
legitimately rebuilt server permanently unreachable. Before this change the pin
died at exit and the problem solved itself; now it does not.

ForgetAsync drops every algorithm for an endpoint, and it is reachable from the
host editor rather than from the warning. Putting it on the mismatch banner would
have made it two clicks from "this may be an attack" to "connect anyway", which
is the affordance the hard refusal exists to deny. The banner already promised
the key could be removed in the host's settings; that promise is now true and
points at the button.

Trust recorded on another machine becomes visible at the next sync pass, not
immediately, and that is a decision rather than an oversight. The failure it
produces is a first-contact prompt for a host a colleague approved a minute ago:
answerable, and self-correcting on the next pass. The opposite trade — polling
the vault on the handshake thread to close a one-minute window — buys nothing
and costs the property above. The dangerous direction is not reachable at all: a
pin recorded here enters the snapshot as part of recording it, so a refresh can
never discard a local trust decision.

The server learns nothing, and this is the item type where the temptation was
real. A plaintext host column would let a known-hosts screen sort and page
without decrypting anything, and it would hand the operator the map of every
user's estate — assembled, as these things are, out of facts that are each
individually harmless. A host row concedes an address only when relay is
switched on and the database refuses to store one otherwise (ADR 0004); there is
no equivalent excuse here. The table has no column to put one in, and the EF
configuration says so where somebody adding it would be standing.

Two things about the migration in this commit are worth knowing, because both
came out of getting it wrong.

It was hand-written first, including its .Designer.cs, and that version is not
what is here. Verifying it turned up something that had been quietly assumed:
Migration_AppliedCleanly_WithNoPendingModelChanges does not check the model
snapshot. It asserts that migrations applied and that none are pending, which a
wrong snapshot satisfies perfectly — the snapshot only matters as the diff base
for the *next* migrations add, so an incorrect one passes the whole suite and
corrupts the following migration instead. The real check is to generate a
throwaway migration and confirm its Up and Down come out empty. They did, and
the generated designer was byte-identical to the transcribed one across all 1255
lines, so the hand-written work was in fact correct.

Then dotnet ef migrations remove --no-build deleted the wrong migration. With
--no-build the tool reads the previously compiled assembly rather than the files
on disk, and the probe had just changed which migration was last, so it removed
AddKnownHostKeyItem and reverted the snapshot. That turned out to leave exactly
the right diff base, so the migration here is EF's own output rather than a
transcription — a better outcome than the one that was interrupted, arrived at
by accident. Never pass --no-build to migrations remove.

Mutation tested, all three sabotages detected: dropping the algorithm from
KnownHostIdentity.For, merging instead of replacing in Install, and pointing
KnownHostKeyCipher at PortForward — which is what a cast from the wire enum's 10
would silently produce. Each is caught both by an assertion about the mechanism
and by a behavioural test that never mentions it; the resource-type sabotage is
caught by the table from d10a38d and nothing else, which is what that table is
for.

The end-to-end slice now approves the real sshd's host key through the vault,
pushes it, and reads it back on the second simulated machine — including a check
that the server learned no address, and that the second machine answers null for
an algorithm never offered.

845 tests green. Zero warnings, dotnet format clean.

Three things are deliberately not fixed. A tombstone queued over a create that
was never pushed is refused by the server as Invalid and parked; that is
pre-existing for all four item types, and the fix belongs in
VaultItemRepository.DeleteAsync rather than here. Deleting a host, or changing
its address, orphans its pins — both are correct as trust decisions, since a pin
describes an endpoint and not a bookmark, but nothing surfaces the leftovers.
And there is no interface listing pins at all: trust is created at the connect
prompt and withdrawn in the host editor. A known-hosts list is where the orphans
would become visible, and it wants the vault column rework first, for the same
reason the credential editor does.
2026-07-30 11:00:39 +02:00
jaap-jan e3fd3e1728 Sync and authenticate with SSH keys on the client
Completes the client half of SSH keys: they sync alongside hosts, appear in
their own list, and can be selected to authenticate a connection instead of
typing a password.

The reconciler and the repository were Host-typed throughout, so the choice was
to generalise them or to keep a second copy per item type. Generalised, because
ItemReconciler's whole premise is that the pull and the push paths must answer
the same collision the same way — two copies would drift the first time one of
them was fixed. What is genuinely per-type now arrives through
IItemKind<TSecret>: the cipher, the merge, the plaintext columns, and the noun
to use when telling a person what happened to their item. Generic where the
server's IItemKind is not, and for the reason that reverses there — the client
needs the concrete type, because it merges field by field.

The pull filter is derived from the same registry that builds the reconcilers.
That is the specific failure being designed out: an item type that encrypts,
merges and lists perfectly and is never once requested from the server, so it
works on the machine that made it and exists nowhere else.

No client cache migration. The item table's primary key and the outbox's unique
index already carry the entity type, and AadResourceTypes already mapped SshKey
— so a host and a key may share an id and never see each other's rows, which
SshKeySyncTests now arranges deliberately.

A key hands the server nothing in plaintext. There is a public_key_fingerprint
column and it would be accepted; leaving it null is deliberate. A fingerprint is
not secret but it is a stable identifier for a key pair, so filling it would let
an operator tell which of their users hold the same key and correlate one across
vaults, for a column nothing reads. The design allows itself one plaintext
concession — the relay address, which the relay cannot work without — and this
is not that.

A key is chosen per connection rather than bound to a host, which works the way
ssh -i does. Binding one needs a field on HostSecret and therefore a payload
schema bump, which makes every host written afterwards read-only on an older
build; worth doing deliberately rather than as a side effect of adding keys.

Three things this found, all of them by being falsified rather than by review:

- Making the reconciler generic silently turned a record comparison into
  reference equality, because == on a type parameter is not value equality. The
  effect would have been a conflict recorded on every pass for an unacknowledged
  create that had in fact landed. Sabotaging the fix left all 73 tests passing —
  nothing covered that branch — so ConflictMatrixTests now has
  AnUnacknowledgedCreateThatDidLand_IsDroppedQuietly, which fails without it.

- A test asserting that a blank passphrase reaches SSH.NET as null was vacuous:
  it exercised the editor, not the credential path, and passed with the guard
  deleted. Resolved by making SshKeySecret.Passphrase normalise an empty string
  to null, so there is one spelling of one state — which also keeps two clients
  from producing different payload bytes for an identical key. That exposed a
  wider gap: SshKeySecret, its codec and its merge had no direct unit tests at
  all. They have 25 now.

- The reason first given for that normalisation was false. It claimed SSH.NET
  rejects a passphrase supplied for an unprotected key; measured against a real
  sshd it ignores it and authenticates anyway. Corrected everywhere it was
  stated and recorded in docs/platform-flags.md. The same test file also closes
  a real hole: SshPrivateKeyCredential had never been exercised against a
  server, because the existing key test builds SSH.NET's auth method directly
  and bypasses the path a vault-held key actually takes.

Only one editor may be open at a time. Both sit in the same 340-pixel column as
Auto rows and their heights together exceed it at the window's minimum size, so
two open editors put the lower one's Save and Cancel past the bottom edge — the
same failure this window already shipped once with the setup screens. Expressed
as a state rule because that is the only form of it this repository can check:
nothing here loads a .axaml. The refusal keeps what was typed, since in the key
editor that is a pasted private key the user may have nowhere else.

The end-to-end slice now carries a key as well as a host, so both item types go
through the real API, the real PostgreSQL and the real crypto in one pass — the
three hand-kept mappings between enums that do not line up are the reason that
is worth doing rather than trusting the unit suites.

735 tests green, including the container-backed SSH and end-to-end suites. Zero
warnings, dotnet format clean.
2026-07-29 20:27:23 +02:00
jaap-jan d459dac600 Stop a dead WebView2 hanging Connect with the busy flag stuck
VaultViewModel.ConnectAsync awaited TerminalWorkspace.WaitForRendererAsync
with no timeout and no token, and RunAsync clears IsBusy only after the
work returns. Whether the renderer attaches at all depends on a runtime
this application does not install: with a missing or policy-blocked
Evergreen runtime, or an AppContainer that cannot reach loopback, the
socket never arrives — so Connect never returned, the window stayed
disabled on "Connecting…" for the rest of the session, and nothing on
screen said why. Left out of 0500e43 to keep that change focused, and
recorded in docs/platform-flags.md as worth fixing on its own merits.

The gate itself is unchanged and has to stay: TerminalDataPlane.SendAsync
drops frames when no renderer is attached rather than queueing them, so a
session opened before the renderer arrives loses its SessionOpened frame
and then streams output at a terminal that was never created. Only the
wait changed — RendererAttached.WaitAsync(timeout, cancellationToken),
with the command's own token threaded through.

Fifteen seconds, on TerminalWorkspaceOptions.RendererTimeout. Attaching is
normally near-instant, since WebView2 starts with the window and the page
has usually attached while the passphrase was still being typed, but a
first run on a cold profile creates a user-data directory and starts a
process tree of some thirty-five processes first, which on a loaded
machine is seconds rather than milliseconds. A renderer that will never
attach will not attach however long the wait is, so being generous costs
only how long a broken runtime takes to say so, while being tight costs
telling someone their runtime is broken when it was merely slow.
Injectable because both new tests would otherwise sit out that budget.

The timeout is caught in VaultViewModel rather than left to RunAsync's
generic handler, because TimeoutException.Message is "The operation has
timed out" — which sends someone looking at their network or their host.
The status now names the WebView2 runtime and says to install it.

TerminalWorkspaceTests covers the half that was missing: the wait gives up
(329 ms against a 250 ms budget) and obeys its token (2 ms against a
five-minute one). Before the bound, the first of those would have hung
rather than failed. ShellFlowTests never starts its workspace, which from
the view model's side is indistinguishable from a WebView2 that failed to
initialise, so it asserts that the status names WebView2 and that IsBusy
is cleared; changing the catch to another exception type makes it fail
with "The operation has timed out.", so neither assertion is vacuous. The
success path is untouched and still covered end to end by
TerminalEndToEndTests against a real sshd container, which now passes the
test's cancellation token.

One byproduct: the doc comment on WaitForRendererAsync carried two
double-encoded em dashes, fixed now that the block is rewritten.
2026-07-29 15:26:53 +02:00
jaap-jan 5fccd53824 Add the Avalonia app and the xterm renderer, and fix two real bugs
The terminal works end to end. A new integration test drives a real sshd in
a container through a real PTY, the real pump, the real loopback WebSocket
with its token and origin checks, and a ClientWebSocket standing in for the
page: the login banner arrives, typed input round-trips, and `stty size`
reports the 100x30 the session asked for. The only untested link left is
xterm drawing bytes it was handed.

The WebView is de-risked on Windows, which was the plan's largest risk. Not
by assertion: with the app running there is an established TCP connection
from msedgewebview2 to the data plane port, so WebView2 launched, navigated
to the loopback page, executed terminal.js, and completed the WebSocket
handshake against the real token and origin checks. Linux remains unproven
and the package's own release notes now corroborate the concern -- Linux uses
a WPE backend, and it ships a NativeWebDialog described as useful where
embedded WebViews may be unavailable.

Two bugs found by building it, both of which would have shipped:

- ShellStream.Write buffers and needs an explicit Flush. Without one a
  keystroke is accepted, reported as written, and never reaches the remote:
  the terminal displays output perfectly and simply stops responding to
  input. SSH.NET's own WriteLine flushes, which is why the earlier spike
  never hit it. Found by isolating the pump against real SSH and reading
  BytesRead=51 -- banner and prompt through, nothing after.
- The Windows app manifest needs a supportedOS list, or Avalonia's native
  control host fails outright and the terminal never starts.

Also fixed a genuinely flaky test I happened to catch: SyncCursorTests
tampered with the *last* base64url character, whose low bits the decoder
ignores when the input length is not a multiple of three -- so a tampered
cursor sometimes decoded to identical bytes and verified. It failed roughly
one run in thirty, depending on a random key. Now tampers the penultimate
character, which is fully significant at every length; 40 consecutive runs
are clean.

xterm 6.0.0 plus the fit and webgl addons are vendored as UMD bundles rather
than built with npm, so a clean clone needs only the .NET SDK. Provenance
and licences are recorded next to them, along with the UMD global names
terminal.js depends on -- a bundle that switched to ES modules would load
without error and leave Terminal undefined.

The renderer acknowledges output from term.write's completion callback, not
on receipt. Acknowledging early would return flow-control credit for bytes
the screen has not caught up with, which is the one thing the credit window
exists to measure.

TerminalWorkspace moved into DodoSSH.Client.Terminal: it has no Avalonia
dependency, and having it there is what let the end-to-end test exist at all.

404 tests pass, zero warnings on a clean rebuild, format clean.
2026-07-28 22:30:42 +02:00
jaap-jan 885fb17bdc Clear the SSH gate: window-change reaches the remote, and licence as MIT
Licence is MIT, set solution-wide rather than only on the packable project:
DodoSSH.Contracts is published so clients can build against it, and a
package with no licence expression is one a corporate policy scanner
rejects outright.

The SSH.NET spike is the M1 client gate and it passes. SSH.NET 2025.1.0
exposes ShellStream.ChangeWindowSize, but a method existing is not the
remote observing it, so the tests read `stty size` back from a real sshd
after resizing rather than asserting the call did not throw. Repeated
resizes each take effect too, which matters because dragging a window edge
produces a stream of them. The IChannelSession fallback is not needed.

Also verified against a real sshd: password and public-key auth, that the
host key arrives as a raw blob we can fingerprint ourselves rather than
reading SSH.NET's MD5 property, and that refusing the key via CanTrust
actually aborts the connection -- without which the TOFU dialog would be
decoration.

Kept as a permanent suite, not deleted after the spike. An upgrade that
silently stopped sending the request would present as wrapped output only
after a resize, which is easy to misattribute to the terminal emulator.

Two bugs in the test itself, both worth naming because either would have
been read as "resize does not work":

- A PTY emits CRLF, and the anchored regex rejected the CR. The output
  visibly contained `24 80` while the match failed.
- Each read can begin with output still buffered from the previous command,
  including its size line. Taking the first match would have reported the
  pre-resize size.

platform-flags.md now records window-change as resolved rather than
unverified -- a stale flag is worse than none -- plus the three real SSH.NET
limits found on the way: ShellStream does not override ReadAsync so every
idle session parks a pool thread, one connection cannot serve both
SshClient and SftpClient, and agent forwarding needs an upstream change.
2026-07-28 16:52:09 +02:00