Issue 146 diagnosed: four faults stacked, three fixed, the fourth is genesis

Raising a first node hits them in order: the bundle's bus image named for a
registry that is gone; the certificate made by openssl in an image that has
none; enrolment dialling TLS at a bus that speaks first, then refusing its own
token for the empty bus. Each was right until the bus changed and nothing has
raised a foundation since.

The fourth is not a patch: the installer carries the bus's first user list and
the controller composes the rest through the bus being a module, and at genesis
there is no module — so the first node cannot be let onto the bus it just
raised.

04-ISSUES/146-the-foundation-cannot-be-raised-on-the-bus-the-mesh-runs-on/00-report.md

@@ -1,7 +1,7 @@
 ---
-status: open
+status: located
 opened: 2026-09-29
-located-in: []
+located-in: [mesh-host examples + internal/link, mesh-controller internal/broker]
 ---
 
 # 146 — the foundation cannot be raised on the bus the mesh runs on

04-ISSUES/146-the-foundation-cannot-be-raised-on-the-bus-the-mesh-runs-on/01-diagnosis.md

@@ -0,0 +1,96 @@
+# Diagnosis
+
+*2026-09-29, by raising a first node in the lab over and over and writing down each thing it hit.*
+
+Not one fault. **Four, stacked**, each hidden behind the one before it, and every one of them the
+same shape: a step that was right while the mesh ran on the previous broker and was never asked a
+question again after the bus changed. Nothing had raised a foundation since, so nothing said so.
+
+## 1 — the bundle's bus image is named for a registry that is gone *(fixed)*
+
+The newer bundle pins `<a lab registry>/nats@…`, which resolves nowhere outside the lab that
+raised that registry. The lab already rewrites the store's and the previous broker's references to
+upstream ones for a machine with an uplink; the bus had no such rule because no bed had ever tried
+to raise this bundle. Added (`mesh-lab test/integration/harness.ts`). The digest is the bundle's
+own — what the registry served was a copy, so the same digest resolves upstream, and this is a
+prefix being removed rather than a reference being replaced.
+
+## 2 — the bus's certificate was made by a tool the bus does not have *(fixed)*
+
+```
+failed bus-certificate … docker exited 127
+```
+
+The step ran `openssl` inside the broker's image. The previous broker's image carried it; the bus's
+does not — it is Alpine with a shell and no `openssl` — and neither does any other image the bundle
+names, so there was nothing to substitute. **The program that needs the certificate now makes it**:
+`mesh-controller broker certificate --into <dir>`, with `--check` as the step's verify. The
+controller is already on the machine at that point (the schema step ran it) and needs nothing from
+the image it writes into. Self-signed, as before and on purpose — a host pins this server's exact
+certificate ([ADR 0004](../../02-DECISIONS/0004-a-node-and-how-it-joins.md)) and at that moment
+there is no authority to ask. Idempotent, because a second certificate is one every host that
+pinned the first no longer believes. It runs `--user 0:0`: the volume is root's, and the control
+plane's image runs as nobody, which is right for the long-lived server and wrong for a one-shot
+writing into a fresh volume.
+
+## 3 — enrolment dialled TLS at a bus that speaks first *(fixed)*
+
+```
+mesh-host: cannot reach the broker at …:5671: tls: first record does not look like a TLS handshake
+```
+
+Enrolment opened a raw TLS connection to check the pinned certificate before saying anything. NATS
+speaks its own protocol and upgrades afterwards, so the handshake met a plaintext greeting. The pin
+was never the problem: the same pinned configuration is handed to the client that presents the
+token, and the verification runs inside *that* handshake — so what
+[ADR 0004](../../02-DECISIONS/0004-a-node-and-how-it-joins.md) requires still holds, and holds
+better, because the one-time secret is sent only after the certificate has been checked. The raw
+dial is gone from the enrolment path and kept only as what its tests always proved: that a wrong
+certificate is refused before a byte of application data is sent.
+
+**Then, immediately behind it:**
+
+```
+mesh-host: this token is for the "" bus, and the mesh's bus is nats
+```
+
+The enrolment left the transport empty and meant *whatever the mesh runs today*, which was true
+while two buses existed and became a refusal the moment one did. The host knows which bus the mesh
+runs; it says so now.
+
+## 4 — a first node cannot be let onto its own bus *(open, and this is the real one)*
+
+```
+mesh-host: cannot reach the bus at …:5671 as anchor: nats: Authorization Violation
+```
+
+The bus's user list is a file beside its configuration. The installer carries the first one — the
+controller's own account at a bootstrap password — and **the controller composes every user after
+that** (design 25 §6; the controller's own test asserts the carried list matches what it would
+derive). On the running mesh that composition reaches the bus because the bus is a *module*, with
+the list delivered to it the way anything is delivered to a module.
+
+At genesis there is no module. The foundation's bus is raised by the installer, the control plane is
+given no way to write beside its configuration — it mounts the certificate and nothing else — and so
+the account a joining node needs cannot come into existence. **The first node cannot join the mesh
+it just raised.**
+
+That is not a line to fix in a bundle. It is the open half of the mesh delivering its own components
+([ADR 0142](../../02-DECISIONS/0142-the-mesh-delivers-its-own-components-as-binaries.md)) and of the
+bus becoming a module: either the installer's bus is raised as the module the mesh will go on
+managing, or genesis carries a user list that includes the first node's enrolment and the controller
+takes over from there. Both are decisions, not patches, and both belong to the genesis step that was
+deliberately left until last.
+
+## Where it belongs
+
+`mesh-host` (the bundle and the enrolment path) and `mesh-controller` (the certificate command, and
+the composition that cannot reach the bus at genesis). Three of the four are fixed on branches; the
+fourth is the genesis work.
+
+## What it cost, for the next person
+
+Every lab bed still names `foundation-first-node.lock` in its own instructions, and that bundle
+raises the previous broker with a control plane that refuses to start without `MESH_BUS_NATS`. Until
+the fourth fault is answered and the two bundles become one, a bed runs with `MESH_LAB_BUNDLE`
+pointing at the NATS bundle by hand, and stops at the enrolment.