The page shown while the site is hidden was still in the old style — a coloured
square and system fonts — on the two hostnames a visitor is most likely to try.
It now uses the site's own plate, typeface and registration marks, still
entirely self-contained because it is shown precisely when the asset build may
not exist. Both it and the error pages lighten the accent in dark mode: the tone
is chosen for contrast against paper, and on the ink plate the small text is the
first thing to stop being readable.
The VPN investigation ended somewhere useful, and not where it started.
The blank page on the phone is the reverse proxy refusing the request — `respond
404` sends no body. It refuses because the phone is not on the tunnel: the
client config lists only the management subnet in AllowedIPs, so a request to
the console's public hostname goes out over the mobile network and arrives from
a carrier address. It also explains "last contact: never", since WireGuard only
performs a handshake when it has traffic to send, and nothing is ever routed
into the tunnel.
The obvious fix — add the server's public address to AllowedIPs — is written
down here as a comment and a test rather than as code, because it cannot work.
The WireGuard endpoint is that same address, so routing it into the tunnel
routes the handshake packets into the tunnel they are trying to establish. The
result is a loop and a connection that never comes up: the same blank page, now
with no way in at all.
Reaching the console over the VPN needs an address INSIDE the subnet — the proxy
answering on the hub address, and a name that resolves to it. That is a
deployment change, not something a config line can express.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
While the product is still being built, the marketing site and the customer
portal should not be reachable — but they must stay reachable for us.
- A toggle in the console (site.manage, Owner/Admin) stored in a new
app_settings table, because this has to be flippable without a deploy.
- Outsiders get a placeholder with 503 + noindex, not 200: a 200 invites search
engines to index the placeholder as the site's content, which is far harder
to undo than to prevent.
- Anyone on the management VPN, and any signed-in operator, sees the real site.
The console, Livewire's endpoint, the Stripe webhook and the health check are
always reachable — otherwise the switch could only be flipped once.
- robots.txt is generated by the app and follows the switch. It had to stop
being a static file: nginx short-circuited it and Laravel's stock file said
'Disallow:' with an empty value, so crawlers were never told anything.
- Settings reads fall back to the default when the table is unavailable. The
gate reads one on every request, so a deploy running new code before migrate
would otherwise answer the entire site with a 500.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude
nexxo