jaap-jan
04faef6597
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.
22 KiB
What the design asked for and this build has not got
The Avalonia client's interface was rebuilt from a Claude Design project — a five-screen spec covering the chrome, hosts and terminals, file transfer, the vault, teams, and preferences.
Most of it landed. This file is the rest: every element of that design with nothing behind it, which project each piece would have to land in, and what the shipped interface does instead. That last column is the important one. This codebase states its limits rather than implying them — the README does it for revocation, for relay session recording and for what locking does not do — so nothing here was rendered with invented data to make a screenshot look finished. Where a feature does not exist, the interface either omits it or says so.
Read alongside the milestone plan. Most of what follows is not a defect; it is M2 and M3 arriving in a design before it arrives in the code.
The shape of the problem
Three facts explain nearly every row below.
An SSH connection here opens exactly one channel. ISshConnection offers OpenShellAsync and nothing
else (src/DodoSSH.Client.Ssh/SshConnection.cs). No port forwarding, no ProxyJump. That one fact removes
the FORWARDS chip, the status bar's port list, and every via bastion-eu in the design.
It used to remove the file-transfer screen too. M2 did not lift the restriction — it worked around it:
file transfer is a separate connection rather than a second channel, because SSH.NET's SftpClient owns
its own transport. See File transfer, which is the one place in
this document where what shipped differs from what the row predicted.
Teams are schema and nothing else. The team and team_membership tables exist from the first
migration, with entities in DodoSSH.Domain/Teams.cs and a TeamRole enum — and no endpoint reads or
writes any of it. VaultAccessService.ResolveAsync returns Denied for every vault that is not the
caller's own personal one. That removes the Teams screen entirely, and with it every role chip, scope and
"shared with" affordance the vault screen was drawn with.
The client has no preferences store. It writes exactly two files — cache.db and device.key — and the
cache has six tables, none of them settings. Nothing on the design's TERMINAL preferences panel can be
saved, and there is no frame on the terminal data plane that would carry a change to the renderer anyway.
One thing cuts the other way and is worth knowing before planning any of this: the wire protocol already
reserves the slots. SyncEntityType (src/DodoSSH.Contracts/SyncEntityType.cs) has HostGroup = 4,
Tag = 5, HostTag = 6, HostCredential = 7, Snippet = 8 and PortForward = 9 — reserved, unused, and
already covered by the AAD resource-type table. Groups, tags and snippets are new item types on an existing
protocol rather than a protocol change.
Chrome — titlebar, nav rail, status bar
| Design element | Layer | What it would take | What ships instead |
|---|---|---|---|
Org chip dodotech / platform |
contracts + server | An organisation name a client can read. VaultSummary.TeamId exists and is always null. |
The vault's own name, and the account this machine is enrolled as. |
SYNCED dot, always green |
client-app | Nothing — the design's claim is simply unconditional. | Green only when a connection is held, the last sync pass actually reached the server, and the outbox is empty; otherwise UNREACHABLE, the count of changes still waiting, or OFFLINE. Holding an IVaultServer proves a sign-in once succeeded and nothing more, so a laptop whose lid has been shut all afternoon still has one — reachability comes from the outcome of the last pass. A permanently green light is the same as no light. |
VAULT SYNCED 11:02 |
client-session | StoredSyncState.LastPulledAt/LastPushedAt are persisted, but VaultSession exposes the store as internal. A property away. |
Omitted. The one honest sync fact — the outbox depth — is in the titlebar and the status bar. |
⌘K command palette running commands |
client-domain | A snippet or saved-command item type (SyncEntityType.Snippet = 8 is reserved). |
Ctrl+K opens a real host search that connects on Enter. The box says "search hosts", not "search hosts · run command". |
Status bar · via bastion-eu |
client-ssh | Jump-host execution. See below. | Omitted. |
| Status bar port forwards | client-ssh | Port forwarding. See below. | Omitted. |
Status bar sftp · 2 transfers |
client-app | Nothing now — file transfer is built. What is missing is the count reaching the status bar, which is a screen away from where the queue lives. | Omitted from the status bar. The queue itself is on the FILES screen, with a row per transfer. |
Status bar locks in 09:41 |
client-app | An idle auto-lock. See preferences below. | Omitted. |
| IBM Plex Mono / IBM Plex Sans | ui | Shipping the font files as AvaloniaResource and registering them. The design loads them from Google Fonts, which a desktop app cannot. |
Inter (already embedded) for prose, and the system monospace stack the terminal already names. Named once in App.axaml as MonoFont, so the substitution is reversible in one place. |
⌘K, ⌥↵ |
ui | Nothing; the design is Mac-flavoured. | CTRL K. Development is Windows-only today (docs/platform-flags.md). |
Also worth knowing: custom chrome went in as SystemDecorations="BorderOnly", not by extending the
client area. ExtendClientAreaChromeHints was removed in Avalonia 12, so extending leaves the system
caption buttons and window title drawn on top of the application's own — two sets of window controls, and
"DodoSSH" printed twice. Measured, not assumed.
Hosts + terminal
| Design element | Layer | What it would take | What ships instead |
|---|---|---|---|
Tag chips (nginx, eu, pg16) |
client-domain | A tag item type and a host-tag join. Both reserved on the wire (Tag = 5, HostTag = 6), neither implemented, plus a payload schema bump on HostSecret. |
Omitted. The filter box searches name, address and notes instead. |
Groups PRODUCTION / STAGING / PERSONAL |
client-domain | A host-group item type (HostGroup = 4, reserved) or a group field on HostSecret. |
One collapsible heading, named after the vault — the only grouping a host actually has. A second appears when a second vault becomes reachable. |
Group badge TEAM·PLATFORM |
server | Teams. | Omitted. |
| Per-host status dot, three colours | client-ssh | The amber state would mean "reachable but not connected", and nothing here ever probes a host. | Two states, both real: green when a terminal is open on that host, grey when not. |
· ⤷ bastion-eu in the host subtitle |
client-ssh | Jump hosts are data-only. HostSecret.JumpHostIds is a JumpChain that is stored, encrypted, synced and three-way merged — and nothing reads it at connect time. SshConnectionRequest carries one host. |
Omitted. The stored chain is preserved untouched by every edit. |
SPLIT ⌘D and side-by-side panes |
client-ssh + ui | The renderer stacks panes and shows one (terminal.css: .pane { position:absolute; inset:0; display:none }). Tiling needs a real pane geometry and a splitter. |
Omitted. Tabs ship instead, over the same one-WebView multiplexing. |
⇄ FORWARDS · 2 |
client-ssh | Port forwarding. SyncEntityType.PortForward = 9 is reserved; nothing in the SSH layer forwards anything. |
Omitted. |
SNIPPETS panel, ↵ to run |
client-domain | A snippet item type (Snippet = 8, reserved). |
Omitted. |
Broadcast to all panes (⌥↵) |
client-ssh | Input is routed strictly by session id in TerminalDataPlane.Dispatch; there is no fan-out. Needs splits first. |
Omitted. |
Pane header 24ms |
client-ssh | Round-trip measurement. SSH.NET offers no RTT API. | Omitted. |
Pane header aes256-gcm |
client-ssh | The closest miss on this list. SshNetConnection holds the SshClient, so ConnectionInfo.CurrentServerEncryption is right there — it just is not on ISshConnection or surfaced by TerminalWorkspace. |
Omitted; the tab strip shows the account and endpoint actually dialled. |
Pane header showing the running command and following |
client-ssh | The host moves opaque bytes and never parses terminal output. Would need shell integration (OSC 133) on the remote. | Omitted. |
A local · zsh tab |
client-ssh | Every session here is an SSH channel. Needs ConPTY and a second session kind. | Omitted. |
Tab strip + button |
ui | Not missing so much as redundant: the real operation is select a host, press Connect, which the sidebar already is. | Omitted. Connect opens a tab; Ctrl+K opens one by name. |
Terminal font size (--termfs, 11–16px) |
client-storage | See preferences. | Fixed at the renderer's 13px. |
File transfer (the design's SFTP screen)
Built in M2. The screen ships: two directory panes, a breadcrumb trail on each, and a queue that moves one file at a time with progress, throughput and resume. What follows is what it does not do, and one thing this document got wrong before it was built.
The correction. The row below used to say an SFTP subsystem channel on ISshConnection was what it
would take. SSH.NET does not offer that: SftpClient derives from BaseClient and owns its own transport,
and there is no supported way to hand it a session an SshClient already has. So the transfers screen
opens a second authenticated connection to the host rather than a second channel on the terminal's. That
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 — so it is named for what it is: ISftpSessionFactory.OpenSftpAsync is a
connect, and it goes through the same host key gate, the same pin and the same two refusals a shell does.
| Design element | Layer | What ships |
|---|---|---|
| SFTP itself | client-ssh | ISftpSession over SSH.NET's SftpClient: listing, stat, offset-based read and write, mkdir, delete and rename. Delete is deliberately not recursive. |
Remote listing with NAME/SIZE/MODIFIED/PERMS |
client-ssh | All four. PosixMode renders drwxr-xr-x from the bits SFTP hands over; setuid, setgid and sticky are not shown, because SSH.NET does not surface them and rwx where rws is true would be worse than nothing. |
| Local listing | client-transfer | LocalDirectory, which is where this client's System.IO now lives. PERMS is blank on the local side rather than filled with a plausible-looking POSIX mode that is not a fact about a file on Windows. |
| Transfer queue, progress, throughput | client-transfer | FileTransferQueue. One transfer at a time, so the rate on a row is the rate of the link rather than a share of it. Throughput is measured over a half-second window, not averaged since the start. |
resume supported |
client-transfer | Within a run of the application. Every transfer writes to a .dodossh-part file beside its destination and is renamed into place at the end, so an interrupted one can never be mistaken for a finished one, and RESUME carries on from the part file's own length. A part file found at startup is not resumed: nothing records what wrote it, and resuming on the strength of a name matching is how a corrupt artefact gets delivered with nothing reporting a failure. Making it survive a restart needs the preferences store this client has not got — see below. |
| Design element | Layer | What it would take | What ships instead |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per-host last directory | client-storage | Somewhere to persist two panes' navigation state. There is still no settings table. | The remote pane opens on the account's home directory, which the server canonicalises during the handshake; the local pane opens on the user profile. |
sftp over bastion-eu |
client-ssh | Jump hosts, as above. HostSecret.JumpHostIds is still stored, synced, merged and read by nothing. |
Omitted. |
| Overwriting a file that is already there | ui | A prompt, which means a modal this window has no idiom for. | Refused, with the name that is in the way. The remote pane has DELETE and MKDIR so the refusal is not a dead end. |
| Dragging between the panes | ui | Drag-and-drop between two ListBoxes, plus a drop target that is a directory rather than a row. |
Two arrow buttons between the panes, pointing at the pane the file is going to. |
| Transferring a directory | client-transfer | Recursive enumeration on both sides, and a policy for what a partial directory means. | One file at a time. A directory cannot be selected as a transfer source. |
Not to be reached for: CreditWindow is a 256 KiB flow-control window for terminal output, not a
transfer primitive. The queue does its own 64 KiB copy loop and shares nothing with the terminal data plane.
Vault
The screen ships and is real: four categories over the vault's four item types, one table, a detail pane, and both editors. What follows is what the design drew around them.
| Design element | Layer | What it would take | What ships instead |
|---|---|---|---|
ACCESS column and your access → CONNECT-ONLY |
server | Per-item ACLs. EncryptedPayload.DataKeyId is documented as the seam for per-item grants in M5. VaultSummary does carry an opaque int Permissions, but nothing gives the bits a meaning on the wire — PermissionFlags itself lives in DodoSSH.Domain — and those are per vault, never per item. There is no ConnectOnly role in TeamRole at all. |
Omitted. The column shows sync state instead — whether a change is still sitting in this machine's outbox — which the design had no column for. |
SHARED WITH · 6 avatars |
server | The whole sharing stack: grants, a member directory, and re-wrapping a vault key for another account. | Omitted. |
| "Private key never leaves the vault. Sessions sign through the team agent (dodod)" | client-ssh | Both sentences are false here, and the second cannot be made true by this architecture. There is no agent of any kind, and the connect path decrypts the private key and hands the bytes to SSH.NET. | Omitted. The key editor already says what is true: the key and its passphrase are encrypted here and never reach the server in a readable form. |
Scope rail: PERSONAL / TEAM · PLATFORM / TEAM · DATA |
server | Team vaults. VaultAccessService.ListAsync filters to personal vaults owned by the caller. |
The real vault list, which today has one entry, with a line saying why. |
SCOPE column |
server | As above — and note scope here is a property of a vault, never of an item. | Omitted. |
LAST column (11:02, 1d ago) |
contracts | No last-used timestamp at any layer. VaultItem<TSecret> is (id, secret, version, three sync flags). |
Omitted. |
FINGERPRINT for SSH keys |
client-domain | SshKeySecret has no fingerprint field, and computing one means parsing key formats the type deliberately stores verbatim. |
The DETAIL column carries what is known — whether a passphrase and a public half are stored. Pins show their real fingerprint, in full and untruncated. |
•••• rotated jul 14 for passwords |
client-domain | CredentialSecret has no rotation date or password age. |
The account the password is for. |
IDENTITIES category |
contracts | A new item type, not even reserved in SyncEntityType. |
Omitted. |
CERTIFICATES category, expires 2026-09-01 |
contracts | Same ladder, plus certificate parsing. | Omitted. |
18 items · 12 shared |
server | The sharing stack. | N items · N not synced, counted over the rows on screen. |
added by anna@dodotech.dev |
contracts | The server records CreatedByUserId, but SyncChange carries no actor field and no other user's name is fetchable. |
Omitted, and the detail pane says in one line that items record no author, no timestamps and no sharing. |
created 2026-03-14 |
client-sync | Recoverable in principle — entity ids are UUIDv7 and carry a timestamp — but nothing surfaces it. | Omitted. |
TEST CONNECT |
ui | Connecting is host-scoped, not credential-scoped: there is nothing to test a credential against without a host. | Omitted. |
REVOKE |
server | Revoking someone else's access needs grants to revoke. Deleting an item is a different act and is already there. ADR 0001 also constrains how any future revoke may be presented: revocation is not retroactive. | Delete, named for what it does. |
SSH KEY · ED25519 |
client-domain | No algorithm field, and deriving it means parsing the armour. | The type without the algorithm. |
One + ADD CREDENTIAL button |
ui | — | Two buttons, one per kind that can be added. "Credential" is a specific item type in this codebase (a username and a password), so using it as an umbrella word would collide with the vocabulary. |
| — | — | — | HOST KEYS is the reverse case: a fully-backed, shipped category the design had no slot for. It is in the rail. |
Teams
Nothing on this screen exists. It is in the nav rail and reaches a screen that says so.
| Design element | Layer | What it would take |
|---|---|---|
| The team itself | server | Team endpoints. The server has eight routes and none is about people. |
| Shared vaults | server | Vault creation, grants, and membership evaluation. Exactly one vault exists per user, created as a side effect of enrollment. |
Roles (OWNER/ADMIN/MEMBER/CONNECT-ONLY/VIEWER) |
contracts + server | TeamRole exists in DodoSSH.Domain, is read by no code path, has no wire representation, and has no ConnectOnly member. |
| Members table | server | A member DTO and a directory endpoint. |
2FA ENFORCED and the per-member 2FA column |
server | No two-factor concept exists anywhere — the only hit in the whole worktree is an aside in docs/crypto.md. |
LAST ACTIVE |
server | UserAccount.LastSeenAtUtc exists and is written at just-in-time provisioning and at enrollment, and never on an ordinary authenticated request — so the column cannot answer "last active". |
| Avatars | server | MeResponse has no picture field, and no other user's display name is fetchable. |
| Pending invites, resend, revoke | server | An invitation entity, a token with a lifetime, and an outbound mail path. MembershipStatus.Invited and TeamMembership.InvitedByUserId are the only hints, and nothing writes them. |
SSO · OIDC · okta.dodotech.dev |
server | Per-team SSO. Authentication is one global JWT scheme bound to one authority. |
A trap for whoever builds this.
GET /api/v1/metaadvertisesfeatures: ["teams"]unconditionally (MetaEndpoints.cs). Do not gate a Teams screen on that string — it is true of every deployment today and means nothing.
Preferences
The screen ships with what is real — this machine's device key, locking, and syncing — and lists the rest as absent rather than omitting it silently.
| Design element | Layer | What it would take |
|---|---|---|
| Any preference, saved | client-storage | A seventh table in the client cache, or a preference item type in the vault. Which one matters: the vault syncs, so a preference stored there follows you between machines, and a terminal font size probably should not. |
| Terminal font, size, cursor style, cursor blink, scrollback | client-terminal | The store, and a frame to carry it. TerminalServerOpcode has four values (Output, SessionOpened, SessionClosed, SessionActivated) and none carries an option. |
| Font family picker offering IBM Plex Mono | ui | Shipping the font, as above. |
| Audible bell | client-terminal + ui | xterm.js 6 removed bellStyle and bellSound; what remains is an onBell event, so the page would have to make the sound itself. |
GENERAL section |
ui | There is no general setting to put in it. The theme is fixed by decision, and window size is not persisted. |
KEYS & AGENT section |
client-ssh | There is no agent, at all — no own agent, no forwarding, no Pageant or OpenSSH-agent interop. |
SYNC & VAULT section |
client-domain | Nothing here is adjustable. The auto-sync interval is a private static readonly with a remark arguing for its value. |
SECURITY & SSO section |
server | The SSO half needs team endpoints; there is no policy for the screen to show. |
SHORTCUTS section |
ui | There is no keybinding infrastructure and no rebinding surface. |
| Auto-lock after idle | client-session | An activity source, a decision about what counts as idle, and — the hard part — a policy for a shell mid-job. LockAsync's own remark already argues that an unattended timeout which killed a running job would be worse than the exposure it removed. |
| Require biometric to sign | crypto | Three separate falsehoods in one row. There is no signing service — the private key is decrypted and handed to SSH.NET whole, so there is no per-signature moment to interrupt; there are no connect-only keys; and per-use consent would need the key to live in the TPM, which is a different key hierarchy from the one in docs/crypto.md. |
| Pill toggle switches | ui | Purely presentational — App.axaml has no ToggleSwitch selector, so Fluent's default would appear un-themed beside the hairline chrome. |
Two things the import changed on purpose
Hosts left the vault column. They have their own sidebar beside the terminal, and the vault screen
holds keys, passwords and pinned host keys. This follows the design, and it is also the better split: the
host list is what you look at while you work, and the rest is what you go and manage. VaultSection lost
its Hosts member and gained All.
Tabs moved to the shell, not the vault. Locking disposes the vault and deliberately leaves shells
running, so a tab list rebuilt per unlock would lose track of sessions that are still connected — the very
sessions the unlock screen already counts. TerminalWorkspace gained SessionActivated on the wire,
IsSessionLive, and a SessionEnded event so a tab can stop claiming to be connected.