CanuteTheGreat's BLOG

Tag: Patronus dev log

  • Patronus dev log 2: Kubernetes, a React UI, and a Rust workspace that wouldn’t build

    Patronus dev log 2: Kubernetes, a React UI, and a Rust workspace that wouldn’t build

    Part 2 in the Patronus dev log series.

    Backdated, written in November 2026 from the git log and CI records. Part 1 covered October 8 to 11.

    October 12 to 14

    The run continues. A Kubernetes operator with a Helm chart and CRD generation (the log calls it Sprint 36 and 37), “Integration Testing & CI/CD Pipeline” as Sprint 39 (October 12), a project status document as Sprint 40, then a topology visualization, LZ4 compression for WAN links, a React dashboard hooked up to the Rust backend, and OpenTelemetry tracing on the 13th. One commit on the 14th, then nothing until December.

    In total, 98 commits in October 2025, and all 15 CI runs that month were skipped.

    December

    December has commits on four days. On the 12th: “Remove GitHub CI/CD configuration”. I moved off GitHub Actions to my own Forgejo, the same week I did it for Horcrux (part 2 of that series). Same reason as there: GitHub likes to block things, and the repo is still mirrored to GitHub.

    December 16: “fix: Complete Rust workspace compilation and dependency resolution”, 54 files. Its message lists missing workspace dependencies (uuid, sysinfo, reqwest, chrono), API breaks from base64, axum and sysinfo upgrades, netlink imports, missing nix features, an async recursion that needed Box::pin, “syntax errors in derive macros and missing brackets” and missing feature flags. The workspace claimed 19 crates and 45,000 lines on day one, and two months later it hadn’t compiled cleanly. That contradicts the “Complete Implementation” commit from part 1.

    December 17, “Comprehensive code review fixes and feature completions”: unwrap() calls replaced in backup and validation code, NaN-safe float comparisons in the detection modules, and “wire web handlers to actual sysinfo metrics (CPU, memory, disk, network)”. So until then the dashboard metrics weren’t coming from the machine. Also: alert conditions now checked against system metrics, CIDR matching for NetworkPolicy completed, and a hardcoded address removed from HA election.

    December 19 added flow tracking, an installer crate and eBPF/XDP enhancements. The repo then goes quiet until September 24, 2026, nine months.

    What I think of this period

    In those weeks the repo’s documents described a finished product, while the code still needed a compile fix, and then a review pass before the dashboard showed real numbers. The 15 skipped runs in October and 11 more in December mean CI never tested any of it.

    The commits from this period say what was done and never why, so I have no design decisions to report.

    Other parts: Part 1.

  • Patronus dev log 1: a firewall that claimed 100% feature parity on day one

    Patronus dev log 1: a firewall that claimed 100% feature parity on day one

    Part 1 in the Patronus dev log series.

    Backdated. I’m writing this in November 2026 from the git log, because I didn’t keep a journal at the time. It covers the first four days, October 8 to 11, 2025.

    Patronus is a firewall and router OS in Rust, aimed at Gentoo. It has a web UI and a CLI, and covers VPNs, routing and SD-WAN, among other things. Like Horcrux it’s Rust, for memory safety and compile time checks. I’ve used Gentoo since 2006 and I’ve done pentesting.

    Day one

    October 8 has 20 commits. The second one is titled “Patronus Firewall v0.1.0 – Complete Implementation”: 176 files, 51,695 insertions. Its message reads like a product launch:

    - 100% feature parity with pfSense/OPNsense
- 10-100x faster performance (eBPF/XDP: 40-100 Gbps)
- Enterprise-grade security (A+ rating, zero unsafe code)
...
- 19 crates, ~45,000 LOC
- Performance: <100μs latency, 1M+ concurrent connections

    I can’t find any benchmark, any test run or any CI result from that week that measures a single one of those numbers. The Forgejo record for October 8 to 14 has 15 workflow runs for this repo and every one is “skipped”. Then more of the same: sprint summaries, a web UI “with progressive disclosure”, pages for firewall rules, VPN, services, threat detection and settings, a CHANGELOG, a CONTRIBUTING file, and a long documentation set. Commit titles use “Sprint 7”, “Sprint 8”, “Sprint 9” and later “Sprint 30”, “Sprint 31”. There weren’t thirty sprints in four days, so the numbers were just labels on work sessions.

    Days two to four

    On the 9th: login and sessions, WireGuard QR codes for phone setup, WebSockets for live updates, a GitHub Pages site, and an SD-WAN design: per the commits, sites announce themselves with Ed25519 signatures and peer over WireGuard automatically, plus path monitoring and Kubernetes NetworkPolicy enforcement. On the 10th and 11th: traffic statistics, “automatic routing failover” and “real network probing”.

    Design decisions I can actually source

    The repo has a blog draft from October 9, 2025, “Why I Built Patronus”. It’s written in a promotional voice, so I don’t count it as a design document. Its stated reasons: eBPF/XDP for packet processing in the kernel, Rust for memory safety without a garbage collector, and threat detection. It claims a 100x throughput improvement over the traditional path. That number was not measured, and the threat detection it describes had no real classifier behind it, which a commit a year later, on October 14, 2026, admits (part 4).

    My own reason for Rust is memory safety and compile time checks.

    docs/GENTOO-INTEGRATION.md has a “Why Gentoo?” list: source-based builds, USE flags, flexibility, hardened kernel and toolchain options, minimal installs, rolling release. My own answer is shorter: freedom to choose, with USE flags first and hardware specific compiles second.

    State at October 11

    No measurements and no CI run that executed.

    Other parts: Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5.