The operator's direction: mesh, node and home. A plugin carries the first
two; the home scope places items the module owns path by path; instructions
follow the same layering.
Skills, subagents and hooks have no machine-wide place but a plugin, and
hand-copied homes have drifted and gone stale on every machine. Records the
evidence, what the vendor allows, and the options a decision must settle.
Rules for what the agent may do were set by hand per machine, invisible to
the mesh, and a session cannot loosen its own permissions; design 36 now
takes them as a module setting under the mesh's own keys.
What runs since 2026-10-04 and what its first live use showed: refused
requests as timeouts, a late machine reading the whole set, the partial
secrets guard; the agent module and the licence manager on every machine.
225: a grant secret is composed with the account that reads it — the node's
account for a bundle, the declared secrets-owner for a container. Zero EACCES
since 12:30:10 where there had been 4330, both users created, mongodb logging
Authentication succeeded for each. The harness also stops calling a permanent
refusal a race, which is the half that cost three hours.
226: normalising moved to the records, where the provenance is known, and a
reference the sweep will not address is skipped rather than ending the sweep.
The first build after the roll-out collected 200 and said 1126 remain — the
backlog falls with every build instead of standing at 1681 for ever.
227: the three photo modules publish the endpoint they declare, and a
catalogue-wide test makes it a rule: a container publishes only a port its
module declares, or the mesh has nothing to assign and the number escapes.
232 came out from under 225: photos asked for a database its user does not
live in, invisible while no user existed at all.
Found fixing 225: with the secrets readable the provisioner created both
users at once, and photos still could not connect because it asks for admin
while its user lives in its own database. The password was never wrong — the
grant secret and the consumer's environment hash identically.
One fault wore the other's clothes: while no user existed anywhere, the
error was a complete account of 225. Worth keeping as a habit — fix the
first and look again.
Eleven node seats; a display as a provision with the machine's reach; other
modules' lines through the tool's own drop-in directory or ADR 0204's slots,
now also for xinitrc and xresources; the display server's module writes the
session's start.
A service needs node-service-manager held on its node, a package
node-package-manager, a container node-container-runtime: derived from the
resources, never stated; refused at assign, reported at composition until the
three holders are on every node. Glossary: depends on a seat; nothing claims a
package.
The operator's flow: clients publish what their credentials file holds, the
manager takes in a licence it does not own and rotates it from then on. The
token itself cannot be published (design 32 §10, ADR 0201), so a node reports
fingerprints and identity as state and hands the grant over only when the
manager asks; adopting is refreshing, newest login first; bindings with a
generation replace the rotated/switched events. Designs 36 and 39 and to-be 40
amended; a pointer note on ADR 0183.
jochen
mesh-admin
jschoubben