ADR 0143: a consumer verifies the grant it is given

A grant is four facts and a credential — the provision, the machine, the port, and who the consumer is when it connects — and it is the whole mechanism by which anything in the mesh reaches anything else. The mesh asserted it and never found out whether it was true. Issue 145 is what that cost: eleven hours of 'every module current with its source' while a module could not reach its database. The consumer verifies it, from its own network position. Not the control plane, which reaches the address by a path no consumer uses. Not the machine, whose own packets carried a source address the filter admitted while every container's was refused — so a host-side check would have passed throughout the outage it exists to catch. That is inference from the rule that was loaded, stated as such. A connection and nothing more; speaking each provision's protocol would be a second implementation of every provision. One failure is not news, only consecutive ones, and the count is reported rather than the last attempt. A consumer that is not running reads unchecked, which is a different sentence from broken. What it costs to be wrong is the constraint on all of it: a check that calls a working provision broken trains a reader to ignore the report.
Merge pull request 'Issue 145: a machine reads healthy while its modules cannot reach each other' (#179 ) from issue/145-healthy-while-broken into main
2026-09-29 13:07:18 +02:00 · 2026-09-29 10:37:10 +00:00 · 2026-09-29 12:37:08 +02:00 · 2026-09-29 00:50:28 +00:00 · 2026-09-29 02:50:25 +02:00 · 2026-09-29 00:33:13 +00:00
25 changed files with 2152 additions and 9 deletions
@@ -164,6 +164,12 @@ def check_rests_on(failures, records):
                # decision is exactly what as-is is for."
                if rel(path).startswith("03-DESIGN/00-as-is/"):
                    continue
+                # A withdrawn record's citations are history. It instructs nobody -- every reader
+                # is sent to its superseder -- so what it was built on may itself be withdrawn.
+                # Refusing that would mean rewriting the lineage of a record whose reasoning is
+                # the thing the immutability rule protects.
+                if frontmatter(read(path)).get("status") == "superseded":
+                    continue
                # An extension that supersedes legitimately names what it replaced.
                this = ADR_FILE.match(os.path.basename(path))
                supersedes = records[number]["front"].get("superseded-by", "")
@@ -241,13 +247,20 @@ def check_supersession_symmetry(failures, records):
            failures.add("supersession", rel(record["path"]), f"superseder does not exist: {by}")
            continue
        other = records[match.group(1)]
-        claims = os.path.basename(str(other["front"].get("supersedes", "")))
-        if claims != record["name"]:
+        # `supersedes:` may name one record or several. One decision replacing two is a real
+        # situation -- two records that built and refined the same wrong mechanism are withdrawn
+        # by the one record that removes it -- and a check that allows only one would force
+        # either a chain of pro-forma records or an unmarked supersession.
+        claimed = other["front"].get("supersedes", "")
+        if isinstance(claimed, str):
+            claimed = [claimed] if claimed else []
+        claims = [os.path.basename(str(entry)) for entry in claimed]
+        if record["name"] not in claims:
            failures.add(
                "supersession",
                rel(other["path"]),
                f"ADR {number} says this supersedes it; this record does not say so "
-                f"(supersedes: {claims or 'absent'})",
+                f"(supersedes: {', '.join(claims) or 'absent'})",
            )


@@ -0,0 +1,117 @@
+---
+topic: what runs on it
+status: superseded
+date: 2026-09-28
+deciders: jochen
+extends: 02-DECISIONS/0100-a-node-in-use-is-adopted-before-it-is-converged.md
+reconstructed: false
+superseded-by: 02-DECISIONS/0140-the-filter-constrains-what-arrives-from-outside.md
+---
+
+# 137. A machine says which networks it routes
+
+## Context
+
+The filter the mesh derives denies forwarding by default, because without a forward chain it says
+nothing about a container's published port
+([ADR 0100](0100-a-node-in-use-is-adopted-before-it-is-converged.md), [issue 047](../04-ISSUES/047-the-firewall-does-not-cover-published-container-ports/00-report.md)).
+To keep a machine's own containers working it then allows two ranges: the container runtime's
+default bridge pool, and the pool its compose files are given. Those two are named in the
+controller's code, with a comment saying what the gap is:
+
+> A machine whose runtime is configured with something else needs this to say so — which is a thing
+> the mesh cannot derive and a reason this list is named here rather than computed.
+
+**There was no way to say so.** The list was a constant. A machine whose guests live anywhere else
+was filtered by a rule that looked deliberate and was a guess.
+
+**Measured, on the day a workstation was converged.** Flipping it cut egress for five of its
+container networks at once, and for every network its test beds create — the beds allocate a fresh
+range per run, from a pool neither default covers. Nothing reported a fault. The containers could
+not reach anything, the machine went on reporting that it had applied what it was told, and the
+converge preview had said nothing about it either, because the preview lists what *listens* and
+routing is not a listener.
+
+**And two questions, not one.** A guest also asks its host for an address and for names. Both arrive
+at the input chain, where nothing declared them, so denying by default left the guests of a routed
+network with no address and no resolution — which is not a closed port but a network that does not
+function, asked for by this machine's own guest.
+
+**Why the machine cannot simply be read.** A test bed creates its bridge while it runs, between one
+declaration and the next, so a filter derived from what the machine last reported would be correct
+only for the networks that already existed when it was composed. A declared range covers the ones
+that do not exist yet.
+
+## Decision
+
+**A machine says which networks it routes for what it hosts, and the filter forwards them.** A
+node-level fact, beside the node's public domain
+([ADR 0066](0066-public-routing-is-name-agnostic.md)) and for the same reason: the
+machine routes them, and the module that loads the filter holds a seat and may be replaced.
+
+**Added to the runtime's defaults, never replacing them.** A machine that names one range has not
+stopped hosting whatever was already on the runtime's own pools, and replacing would trade one
+silent breakage for another.
+
+**Their guests keep address and name service.** For a network that was named, the input chain admits
+that network's own DHCP and DNS, and nothing else: everything else a guest might want from its host
+is a port somebody declares, like every other port on this machine.
+
+**Said in CIDR form and checked when it is said.** An entry that does not parse is a line nftables
+refuses, and a refused ruleset is a machine filtering nothing while its unit reports a fault — so
+the refusal happens where a person can read it, not on the machine.
+
+**A machine that says nothing is filtered exactly as before.** Every machine already converged is
+untouched by this.
+
+## Options considered
+
+1. **Leave it constant and edit the code per installation.** Rejected: the value is a property of
+   one machine, the code is the whole mesh's, and the two ranges as they stand describe a machine
+   whose runtime was left at its defaults. It is also how this got here.
+2. **Derive it from what the machine reports.** Rejected as insufficient, not as wrong: it cannot
+   cover a network created between two declarations, which is precisely the case that was broken. It
+   would also make the filter follow whatever appeared on the machine, which is a firewall that
+   widens itself.
+3. **A per-node setting on the module that loads the filter.** Rejected: the machine routes the
+   networks. The filter module holds a node-scoped seat and is meant to be replaceable, and a
+   replacement must not lose the machine's own truth.
+4. **Replace the defaults with what is said.** Rejected: see the decision. The first machine to name
+   its bed range would lose its containers.
+5. **Admit all input from a routed network, not only address and name service.** Rejected: that is
+   every port on the machine open to anything it hosts, which is the derivation abandoned.
+
+## Consequences
+
+**The converge preview says what a machine routes**, including when it routes nothing but the
+defaults, with the command that changes it. The preview's own sentence about traffic it cannot
+preview stays, because a tunnel and the found firewall's NAT are still not previewable.
+
+**A machine whose guests are already broken by an earlier flip is fixed by saying its networks and
+pushing**, with no flip to undo.
+
+**The list is one more thing that can be wrong and stale.** A range removed from the machine and
+left here keeps forwarding for a network that no longer exists, which admits nothing, because there
+is no guest on it to admit. That is the safe direction of being out of date.
+
+## How this is checked
+
+- **What a machine says it routes is forwarded, and its guests keep address and name service.** A
+  test renders a ruleset for a machine that names one range and asserts both chains, per chain body
+  so a line in the wrong chain cannot pass it. It fails against the previous behaviour, which is how
+  it was written.
+- **The runtime's own defaults survive naming a range.** Asserted in the same test.
+- **A machine that names nothing renders byte-identically to one that names nil**, so every machine
+  already behind this filter is untouched.
+- **Each family is matched in its own syntax.** A test with one v4 and one v6 network asserts
+  `ip saddr` and `ip6 saddr`, because one set holding both is a syntax error and a ruleset that does
+  not load is a machine filtering nothing.
+- **An entry that is not a network is refused where it is said**, by the parse in the setter.
+
+## References
+
+- [ADR 0100](0100-a-node-in-use-is-adopted-before-it-is-converged.md) — the derived filter this completes
+- [ADR 0066](0066-public-routing-is-name-agnostic.md) — the precedent for a node-level fact
+- [issue 047](../04-ISSUES/047-the-firewall-does-not-cover-published-container-ports/00-report.md) — why there is a forward chain at all
+- [issue 137](../04-ISSUES/137-converging-a-machine-cut-off-its-own-guests/00-report.md) — the measurement that produced this
+- mesh-controller `internal/catalogue/filtering.go` — the constant whose own comment named this gap
@@ -0,0 +1,179 @@
+---
+topic: what runs on it
+status: accepted
+date: 2026-09-28
+deciders: jochen
+reconstructed: false
+extends: 02-DECISIONS/0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md
+---
+
+# 138. An assignment binds an endpoint and says how far it reaches
+
+## Context
+
+[ADR 0045](0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md) settled that a machine's
+packet filter is derived from what its modules declare they listen on, and that the `from` of a
+listen "is the whole of public-versus-internal". That was true of the packet filter, and it turned
+out to be true of nothing else.
+
+Reachability is now settled three times, in three places, by three mechanisms that cannot disagree
+out loud ([issue 140](../04-ISSUES/140-an-endpoints-reach-is-not-declared/00-report.md)):
+
+- **The filter** reads a listen's source, and a per-node setting may override it. That setting has
+  exactly one caller in the control plane — the function that builds the node's rules.
+- **The names** come from a route contribution, which names a label and a port and says nothing
+  about reach. The reverse proxy composes a **public** name and an **internal** name for every route
+  it is given, because it can.
+- **The certificate authority** follows from which names exist. Measured on the control-node: an
+  identity provider carries a public certificate valid 90 days and an internal one valid 24 hours and
+  renewed daily. No assignment asked for either.
+
+So *this endpoint must not be public* cannot be written. It is therefore enforced by nothing, while a
+public certificate for that very name is obtained automatically — the fault
+[how-we-build.md](../00-META/how-we-build.md) names, an unenforced rule being indistinguishable from
+a wrong one, with the additional cost that the wrong thing is done eagerly.
+
+And a port that is not routed cannot be spoken about at all beyond the filter. The forge serves git
+over ssh; that endpoint has no name, no certificate and no way to be called public except a key only
+the filter reads.
+
+**Two per-node settings already exist and are half of this.** One gives a module's declared port a
+machine port. One overrides a declared port's source. They key on port numbers, so nothing ties a
+port to the route that serves it: a route contribution names a port too, and the two are equal only
+by coincidence.
+
+**Where this belongs is already decided.** [ADR 0046](0046-a-module-configuration-is-its-assignments-not-its-manifest.md)
+says a module's configuration is its assignments. Whether the forge answers git-over-ssh from the
+public internet is a fact about one installation and one machine, not a property of the software —
+and [ADR 0112](0112-a-module-definition-names-no-node-mesh-or-path.md) already refuses an
+installation's decisions in a definition.
+
+## Considered Options
+
+1. **Leave reach in the manifest, as `from` today.** Rejected: it is an installation's decision
+   written into the definition, and it cannot differ between two machines running the same module —
+   which is exactly the case the forge presents.
+2. **Extend the existing source override to the names and the certificate, without naming
+   endpoints.** Rejected: it keys on a port number. A module's route contribution names a port as
+   well, and nothing says the two are the same thing, so one statement cannot be made to reach all
+   three mechanisms. Naming the endpoint is what makes that possible.
+3. **Derive reach from whether the node has a public domain recorded.** Rejected: that is a property
+   of the machine, and two endpoints on one machine differ — a database and a web front end on the
+   same host.
+4. **A fourth reach for "public name, internal authority"** — a name that resolves publicly and must
+   not appear in a public issuance log, obtained by DNS-01. Deferred, not rejected: it is a real case
+   and it is a question about which challenge an authority uses, not about how far an endpoint
+   reaches. Left to the certificate work as an open question.
+5. **Make the manifest silent on reach and require every assignment to state it.** Rejected for the
+   transition: every endpoint reachable today would close until an assignment named it, which is a
+   flag day across the whole catalogue.
+
+## Decision
+
+**A module declares named endpoints.** An endpoint is one port the module serves, with a name the
+module chooses, its protocol, and what it is for. A route contribution **names the endpoint it
+routes** rather than repeating a port number. The manifest says what the module serves and what it
+would serve it to by default; it does not say what this installation does with it.
+
+**An assignment binds each endpoint and says how far it reaches.** Per node: the machine port the
+endpoint is published on, and its **reach** — one of `internal`, `public` or `both`. An assignment
+that states nothing keeps the manifest's default, so no machine changes until an assignment says so.
+
+**Reach means all three mechanisms at once, and is the only thing that decides them.**
+
+- `internal` — the filter opens the machine port to the private network; the proxy serves the
+  internal name and not the public one; the certificate comes from the mesh's own authority.
+- `public` — the filter opens it to anywhere; the proxy serves the public name; the certificate
+  comes from the public authority.
+- `both` — both names, each from its own authority, and the filter opens to anywhere.
+
+**An endpoint that is not routed is reached but never named.** An endpoint with no route contribution
+yields filter rules and nothing else: no name is composed and no certificate is requested. Git over
+ssh is that case, and it is the case the model could not express.
+
+**The authority stops being chosen by which names happen to exist.** The proxy composes the names the
+assignments asked for, and asks each name's own authority for it. A name nobody asked for is not
+composed, so it is not certified.
+
+**The two existing settings are this, completed.** The per-node port mapping becomes the endpoint's
+binding. The per-node source override becomes its reach, widened from the filter alone to the names
+and the certificate as well.
+
+## Progressive insight — 2026-09-29, from building it
+
+**Reach does not mean the same thing to the filter for an endpoint the proxy serves.** The decision
+above says `internal` means "the filter opens the machine port to the private network" and `public`
+means "the filter opens it to anywhere". For a routed endpoint the second half is wrong, and
+[ADR 0045](0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md) already said so before this
+record was written: *a public service is exposed through the proxy, not by opening its own port* — it
+listens `from: mesh`, only the proxy reaches it, and it is exposed by name.
+
+Found by trying to express one real module, not by review. Its routed name must be public, because
+browsers post to it; its machine-side port must not be, because that port serves the dashboard in
+cleartext. Under one value driving both, saying "public" would have reopened a port an operator had
+just closed. Measured the same evening: that module's routed name answered from the internet over TLS
+while its machine-side port was refused from the same place. The port is not the path.
+
+So the reach of a **routed** endpoint asks for names, and its port keeps what the manifest said. The
+reach of an **unrouted** endpoint — git over ssh, a mail port, the bus — governs the port, because
+there is no name and the port is the only way in. That is the same split this record already draws in
+*an endpoint that is not routed is reached but never named*; what it got wrong was carrying the filter
+across it.
+
+This corrects a fact, not the decision: one statement per endpoint, three things derived from it and
+none of them deciding on its own, all stand. The table in the decision should be read with the filter
+column applying to an unrouted endpoint.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- **A manifest gains endpoint names, and a route contribution names an endpoint instead of a port.**
+  Every routed module's manifest changes. The word ships one release before any manifest uses it, and
+  reaches the build machine and the control plane first.
+- **One derived value is read by three things** — the filter's rules, the proxy's contributions, the
+  certificate request — so they can no longer disagree, and a disagreement becomes a refusal at the
+  assignment rather than a surprise on a machine.
+- **A name that must not be public becomes writable, and therefore checkable.** It also gives
+  [issue 129](../04-ISSUES/129-nothing-makes-a-machine-trust-the-meshs-authority/00-report.md) a
+  declared answer to read: which endpoints are internal is what says whose root must be installed
+  where.
+- **[Issue 139](../04-ISSUES/139-an-internal-route-name-resolves-to-the-consumers-node/00-report.md)
+  becomes answerable**: the endpoint's assignment names the machine that serves it, which is the fact
+  the internal name should be composed from.
+- **Reach becomes reportable.** The mesh can say, per endpoint, where it is reachable from and which
+  authority holds its certificate — neither of which `status` can say today.
+- **This narrows [ADR 0045](0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md).** Its
+  decision stands: the firewall is derived and host-applied, not a provider. What no longer holds is
+  that a listen's `from` is the whole of public-versus-internal; it is the filter's share of a
+  statement that also governs names and certificates.
+- **What got harder:** every endpoint needs a name, including a module that serves exactly one port
+  and had no reason to name it. And an installation that wants a module public must now say so on the
+  assignment rather than inheriting it from the definition, which is more to say and the reason it is
+  right.
+
+## How it is checked
+
+- **One module, two endpoints, different reach.** A module declaring an internal endpoint and a
+  public one renders a filter opening one to the private network and one to anywhere, asserted per
+  chain body so a rule in the wrong chain cannot pass.
+- **The names follow the reach.** The same module's routed endpoint composes the internal name only
+  when internal, the public name only when public, and both when both — and a certificate is
+  requested from the matching authority for each name composed and for no other. This fails against
+  the previous behaviour, where both names and both certificates are always composed, which is how
+  it is written.
+- **An unrouted endpoint is filtered and never named.** Asserted for an endpoint with reach and no
+  route contribution: rules rendered, no contribution, no certificate request.
+- **An assignment naming an endpoint the module does not declare is refused where it is said**, as is
+  a reach that is not one of the three — before it reaches a machine, because a ruleset that does not
+  load is a machine filtering nothing.
+- **An assignment that states nothing renders byte-identically to today**, so every machine already
+  converged is untouched until its assignment says otherwise.
+
+## References
+
+- [ADR 0045](0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md) — narrowed here
+- [ADR 0046](0046-a-module-configuration-is-its-assignments-not-its-manifest.md) — where reach belongs
+- [ADR 0066](0066-public-routing-is-name-agnostic.md) — the public name this composes
+- [ADR 0112](0112-a-module-definition-names-no-node-mesh-or-path.md) — why reach is not a definition's
+- [issue 140](../04-ISSUES/140-an-endpoints-reach-is-not-declared/00-report.md) — the measurement
+- [issue 139](../04-ISSUES/139-an-internal-route-name-resolves-to-the-consumers-node/00-report.md),
+  [issue 129](../04-ISSUES/129-nothing-makes-a-machine-trust-the-meshs-authority/00-report.md)
@@ -0,0 +1,137 @@
+---
+topic: what runs on it
+status: superseded
+date: 2026-09-28
+deciders: jochen
+reconstructed: false
+extends: 02-DECISIONS/0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md
+superseded-by: 02-DECISIONS/0140-the-filter-constrains-what-arrives-from-outside.md
+---
+
+# 139. A network is forwarded because a module declared it
+
+## Context
+
+[ADR 0137](0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md), decided the same week, gave a machine a
+way to say which networks it routes for its guests. It was written because the derived filter's
+forward chain allowed two ranges named as constants in the control plane's source — the container
+runtime's bridge pool, and part of the pool its compose files are given — with a comment admitting
+the gap: *a machine whose runtime is configured with something else needs this to say so, which is a
+thing the mesh cannot derive.*
+
+**It can be derived, and from the right place.** Measured on the last machine still to be converged
+([issue 141](../04-ISSUES/141-the-forward-chain-does-not-follow-the-modules/00-report.md)): twenty-one
+container networks, nine inside the runtime's bridge pool, twelve in the other private range, and six
+of those outside the constant's lower bound — so the flip would have cut their guests off exactly as
+it did on the workstation that produced 0137.
+
+Naming a range to cover the six is what 0137 provides for, and it is the wrong instrument. Of those
+six networks, **four are networks the mesh's own modules declare**, present as network resources in
+the node's plan and created by the host because a module asked for them. **Two are the predecessor's
+leftovers** — compose networks of services the mesh does not run. Any range wide enough to keep the
+four forwards the two as well: a firewall widened by hand to protect networks that should not exist.
+
+The mesh already knows which of the twenty-one are its own, because it made them.
+
+**And the node's configuration is meant to follow the modules assigned to it.** That is the mesh's
+founding shape — the machine runs modules, and its files, its filter and its accounts are composed
+from what runs there ([ADR 0005](0005-the-node-host.md),
+[ADR 0010](0010-delivery.md),
+[ADR 0045](0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md)). The forward chain is the
+one derived thing that consults a constant and a list a person types.
+
+## Considered Options
+
+1. **Keep 0137 as it stands** — two constants plus a named list. Rejected: the list is written in
+   addresses, and addresses are what the runtime allocates, so the only entry safe enough to keep a
+   machine working is wider than the truth. It cannot distinguish a network the mesh made from one
+   left behind, which is the distinction that decides whether forwarding it is correct.
+2. **Derive it from what the machine reports.** Still rejected, on 0137's own grounds: a test bed
+   creates its bridge between one declaration and the next, and a filter that follows whatever
+   appeared on a machine is a firewall that widens itself. **This decision is not that** — see below.
+3. **Have the control plane allocate each module network's range from a pool it owns,** so it can
+   render the address itself. Rejected: more machinery for no gain. The runtime already allocates and
+   the host already knows, and taking allocation over means the mesh owning an address space it has no
+   other reason to own.
+4. **Have each module declare its network's range.** Rejected by
+   [ADR 0112](0112-a-module-definition-names-no-node-mesh-or-path.md): a definition names no address,
+   and the same definition runs on machines whose runtimes have allocated differently.
+
+## Decision
+
+**A network is forwarded because a module declared it.** Per node, the forward chain forwards the
+networks of the modules assigned there, and by default nothing else. A module unassigned stops being
+forwarded at the next reconcile.
+
+**The host resolves a declared network to its addresses.** A network resource carries a name; the
+runtime allocates the subnet when the network is created. So the control plane declares *forward the
+networks these modules asked for* and the host — which made them, and already resolves a container by
+its name — renders the addresses. [ADR 0005](0005-the-node-host.md) holds: the host applies, it does
+not decide.
+
+**Deriving from the declaration is not deriving from the machine.** Both of 0137's objections fall
+away. The set is known before the network exists, because a module declared it, so a network created
+between two declarations is already in the one that asked for it. And it cannot widen itself: a
+network nobody declared is never forwarded, however it appeared on the machine.
+
+**The runtime's own default bridge is forwarded, from what the runtime reports.** Containers that name
+no module network attach to it, and it belongs to the runtime rather than to any module — so the host
+renders it from what the runtime says, not from a range named in the control plane. The constants go.
+
+**What a machine says is for guests no module declares.** A test bed is not a module and its range is
+not a module's; that is the case 0137's mechanism is for, and it keeps it — added to the derived set,
+never replacing it, as 0137 decided. Narrowed to that, it is named for it.
+
+**Their guests keep address and name service**, per declared network, unchanged from
+[ADR 0137](0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md): the input chain admits that network's own
+DHCP and DNS and nothing else.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- **The two constants are removed**, and with them the class of fault that a machine's guests depend
+  on a range that describes some other machine.
+- **This is a behaviour change, not a refactor.** On the machine measured, the derived set and the
+  constant do not cover the same ground — that is the whole reason for the record. A machine whose
+  module networks happen to fall inside the old ranges renders the same rules.
+- **A range that exists only to keep a leftover alive becomes visible as such**, because it will not
+  be in the derived set and has to be said out loud to survive.
+- **`node networks` narrows** to guests no module declares, and the preview says which of a machine's
+  networks are the mesh's and which are not, so the difference is readable before a flip rather than
+  after.
+- **A module's declaration gains nothing.** It already declares its network; what changes is that the
+  filter reads it.
+- **What got harder:** the host renders part of the forward chain from what it created, so the
+  control plane no longer holds the whole rule set as text. The rule the mesh states is the set of
+  networks; the addresses are the machine's.
+
+## How it is checked
+
+- **Only declared networks are forwarded.** A node with two modules that declare networks renders
+  forward rules for exactly those two, and none for a third network present on the machine that no
+  module declared. This fails against the previous behaviour, which forwards by range and cannot tell
+  them apart, and that is how it is written.
+- **Unassigning a module removes its network's rule** at the next reconcile, asserted on the rendered
+  chain rather than on the intent.
+- **Guests of a declared network keep address and name service**, asserted per chain body so a line in
+  the wrong chain cannot pass — carried from 0137.
+- **The runtime's own default bridge comes from the runtime**, asserted by rendering for a runtime
+  whose default bridge is somewhere other than the range the constant named.
+- **A machine that names a range for guests no module declares still gets it**, added to the derived
+  set and not replacing it.
+- **Each family is matched in its own syntax**, carried from 0137: one set holding both is a syntax
+  error, and a ruleset that does not load is a machine filtering nothing while its unit reports a
+  fault.
+
+## References
+
+- [ADR 0137](0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md) — narrowed here; its mechanism keeps the
+  case it is right for
+- [ADR 0005](0005-the-node-host.md) — the host applies; the addresses are the machine's
+- [ADR 0045](0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md) — the filter is derived from
+  what runs there
+- [ADR 0112](0112-a-module-definition-names-no-node-mesh-or-path.md) — why a module does not name its
+  range
+- [issue 141](../04-ISSUES/141-the-forward-chain-does-not-follow-the-modules/00-report.md) — the
+  measurement
+- [issue 137](../04-ISSUES/137-converging-a-machine-cut-off-its-own-guests/00-report.md) — the
+  breakage that produced 0137
@@ -0,0 +1,146 @@
+---
+topic: what runs on it
+status: accepted
+date: 2026-09-28
+deciders: jochen
+reconstructed: false
+extends: 02-DECISIONS/0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md
+supersedes:
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0139-a-network-is-forwarded-because-a-module-declared-it.md
+---
+
+# 140. The filter constrains what arrives from outside, and says nothing about a machine's own guests
+
+## Context
+
+The filter the mesh derives blocks traffic passing *through* a machine unless something allows it,
+because a container's published port is traffic passing through rather than traffic arriving at the
+machine itself ([ADR 0100](0100-a-node-in-use-is-adopted-before-it-is-converged.md),
+[issue 047](../04-ISSUES/047-the-firewall-does-not-cover-published-container-ports/00-report.md)).
+Having blocked all of it, the filter then had to let the machine's own containers reach outward again.
+It does that by listing the address ranges those containers sit on.
+
+As rendered on a converged workstation today:
+
+```
+policy drop
+ct state established,related accept
+ip saddr 172.16.0.0/12 accept
+ip saddr 192.168.128.0/17 accept
+ip saddr 10.0.0.0/8 accept
+ip saddr 192.168.16.0/20 accept
+... four more
+```
+
+Two of those ranges were constants in the control plane's source. The rest were typed by the operator
+after [ADR 0137](0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md), which existed to make the typing
+possible, because converging that workstation had cut every one of its containers off from the
+internet and nothing reported a fault
+([issue 137](../04-ISSUES/137-converging-a-machine-cut-off-its-own-guests/00-report.md)).
+
+**The list is the mistake, not its contents.** Every attempt to make it correct fails the same way.
+A constant describes one machine. A typed range goes stale, and cannot tell a network the mesh made
+from one a predecessor left behind — measured on the control-node, where six such ranges fall outside
+the constants and two of the six belong to services the mesh does not run
+([issue 141](../04-ISSUES/141-the-forward-chain-does-not-follow-the-modules/00-report.md)).
+[ADR 0139](0139-a-network-is-forwarded-because-a-module-declared-it.md) tried to generate the same
+list from the modules and put half the rule set on the machine to do it. Three records, one list, and
+the list should not exist.
+
+**Because the mesh has no policy about a container reaching outward.** What the filter is for is
+stated in [ADR 0045](0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md): which port is open,
+and to whom. That is about what arrives. A container of this machine's own opening a connection to
+something else is not a port being opened to anybody, and enumerating the addresses it might do so
+from is bookkeeping about the machine's internal plumbing, which the mesh neither owns nor can know.
+
+**The system being replaced never had this fault, and its rule says why.** The chain still protecting
+the control-node applies only to traffic arriving on that machine's outward link, and leaves
+everything else alone. The mesh's filter dropped that distinction and replaced it with a list of
+addresses.
+
+## Considered Options
+
+1. **Keep the list and generate it better** — from the modules' declared networks, or from what the
+   machine reports. Rejected: [ADR 0139](0139-a-network-is-forwarded-because-a-module-declared-it.md)
+   is that, and it puts part of the rule set on the machine, which makes the rule set partly the
+   machine's and the derivation advisory.
+2. **Name the guest links instead of their addresses, and allow only those.** Rejected as more than is
+   needed: it fails in the safe direction, but it is still a list that has to keep up with the
+   machine, and the thing it protects against — a container reaching outward — is not a thing the mesh
+   has a position on.
+3. **Do not block traffic passing through at all.** Rejected: that is
+   [issue 047](../04-ISSUES/047-the-firewall-does-not-cover-published-container-ports/00-report.md),
+   where a published port was reachable from anywhere because no rule mentioned it.
+4. **Constrain what arrives from outside, and nothing else.** Adopted.
+
+## Decision
+
+**The filter constrains traffic arriving from outside the machine, and says nothing about traffic that
+did not.** Traffic passing through the machine is allowed unless it arrived on one of the machine's
+outward links, in which case it is allowed only where a declared endpoint's reach admits it
+([ADR 0138](0138-an-assignment-binds-an-endpoint-and-says-how-far-it-reaches.md)). A container of this
+machine's own reaching anywhere is not filtered, because the mesh has no position on it.
+
+**A machine says which of its links face outside.** One node-level fact, reported by the machine the
+way it already reports the kind of firewall it found and the tunnel it carries — not a setting, not a
+list of addresses, and not something anybody types. It does not change when a module is added or
+removed, which is what separates it from the list it replaces.
+
+**A machine that has reported no outward link is sent no filter.** Rendering a rule around a link
+whose name is not known produces a rule set that does not load, which is a machine filtering nothing
+while its unit reports success. The refusal happens in the control plane, where a person reads it, and
+the machine keeps the filter it already has.
+
+**No addresses of the machine's own networks appear in the filter.** The two constants are removed and
+`node networks` is removed with them, along with everything any machine was told to say through it.
+Ports continue to follow the modules exactly as before: a module assigned to a machine opens the port
+its assignment says it reaches on, and nothing about a network is said anywhere.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- **Three records collapse into one rule.** 0137 and 0139 are superseded. What 0137 was right about —
+  that converging a machine had silently cut off its own containers, and that nothing previewed it — is
+  answered by removing the cause rather than by giving the operator a way to compensate for it.
+- **Every machine already converged loses its declared ranges and keeps working**, because the traffic
+  those ranges allowed is now allowed by not having arrived from outside. The workstation's five ranges
+  and the laptop's one are deleted rather than migrated.
+- **A machine's test beds stop being a special case.** A bed's network is created while the machine
+  runs and was the case no list could cover; it is now covered by not being mentioned.
+- **A new fact travels in the report**, and the control plane refuses to compose a filter without it,
+  so the order of the roll-out matters: the machines report before the control plane depends on it.
+- **A machine with more than one outward link says so**, and a machine that acquires one while the mesh
+  is not looking is treated as internal until its next report. That window is the cost of this shape;
+  it is bounded by the report interval, and it exists on machines whose outward link changes, which
+  are the machines with nothing published to the outside.
+- **What got harder:** nothing in the declaration, and one more thing a machine must be able to work
+  out about itself. A machine that cannot say which link faces outside cannot be given a filter.
+
+## How it is checked
+
+- **A machine's own container reaches outward with no network named anywhere.** A bed converges a
+  machine carrying containers on several networks, none of them mentioned in any setting, and each
+  reaches out afterwards. This fails against the previous behaviour, where the same flip cut them off,
+  and that is how it is written.
+- **A port declared reachable from outside is reachable; one that is not, is not.** Probed from off the
+  machine's private network, for a published port and for an undeclared one, before and after the flip.
+- **A network created after the filter was composed needs no new filter.** A network is made on the
+  machine after its last declaration and a container on it reaches out, with nothing re-sent.
+- **No address of a machine's own networks appears in a rendered filter**, asserted on the text so a
+  range cannot creep back in.
+- **A machine that reports no outward link is sent no filter, and the refusal names it** — asserted in
+  the control plane, and that the machine's existing filter is left alone.
+- **A machine reporting two outward links has both constrained**, asserted per chain body so a rule
+  covering one and not the other cannot pass.
+
+## References
+
+- [ADR 0045](0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md) — what the filter is for
+- [ADR 0138](0138-an-assignment-binds-an-endpoint-and-says-how-far-it-reaches.md) — what admits traffic
+  arriving from outside
+- [ADR 0100](0100-a-node-in-use-is-adopted-before-it-is-converged.md) — why traffic passing through is
+  filtered at all
+- [ADR 0137](0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md),
+  [ADR 0139](0139-a-network-is-forwarded-because-a-module-declared-it.md) — superseded here
+- [issue 137](../04-ISSUES/137-converging-a-machine-cut-off-its-own-guests/00-report.md),
+  [issue 141](../04-ISSUES/141-the-forward-chain-does-not-follow-the-modules/00-report.md)
@@ -0,0 +1,154 @@
+---
+topic: what runs on it
+status: accepted
+date: 2026-09-29
+deciders: jochen
+reconstructed: false
+extends: 02-DECISIONS/0005-the-node-host.md
+---
+
+# 141. The host delivers its own successor, and versions live side by side
+
+## Context
+
+[Issue 142](../04-ISSUES/142-the-host-is-the-one-thing-the-mesh-does-not-deliver/00-report.md). A
+merge builds every changed module and the control plane — which is itself a module — and the result
+reaches the machines running it with nobody asking. The host is the exception: it is not a build
+target, no declaration delivers it, and every machine in this mesh runs a byte-identical binary that
+somebody built on a workstation and copied out.
+
+The half that *recovers* from a bad host exists. `internal/upgrade` can tell that the executable this
+process started from was replaced on disk, and it records which version last completed a reconcile.
+The launcher counts consecutive failed starts, calls a rollback at the limit, and treats a clean exit
+as the host standing aside so that the next loop runs whatever is on disk now. That supervision is
+complete and correct.
+
+Two things make it dead code:
+
+- **`Replaced()` is called by nothing but its own tests.** Nothing tells the running host that a
+  successor is waiting.
+- **The rollback resolves a version through the machine's package manager** — `pacman -U` from the
+  package cache. No machine here has the host installed as a package, so the recovery cannot run on
+  any of them; and being written in one package manager's terms, it cannot run on two of the three
+  operating systems the host is built for — [ADR 0005](0005-the-node-host.md) builds one binary per
+  operating system, pinned at link time.
+
+**The record already points at the answer.** What is kept is a *version*, not a path. Keeping a
+version is only useful to something that can choose between versions present on the machine, which is
+what the package manager was being asked to do. The versions can simply be on disk.
+
+## Considered Options
+
+1. **Deliver the host as a package, as the rollback assumes.** Rejected: it needs a package built and
+   a repository trusted per operating system, three of each, and the existing `package` resource
+   asserts presence and deliberately never a version — "version is the package manager's business and
+   the mesh does not hold a second opinion about it" — so it cannot ask for a particular host anyway.
+   Heaviest of the three and the only one that is different on every machine.
+2. **Write the new binary over the running one.** Rejected on a fact: a running executable cannot be
+   truncated, and `archive` opens what it unpacks with `O_TRUNC`. It could be made to write and
+   rename, which is better hygiene and worth doing for its own sake, but it buys nothing here that
+   option 3 does not, and it leaves rollback with nowhere to go back to.
+3. **Versions side by side; the newest retires the old.** Adopted.
+
+## Decision
+
+**A host version is delivered as an archive into a directory named for it, and never over a running
+one.** The declaration names it like any other archive — fetched by digest, the digest checked before
+anything is unpacked. Nothing new travels, no new resource kind, and no change to how archives are
+applied, because the path being written is not the path being executed.
+
+**The launcher starts the most recently delivered version.** That is what "the newest" means: the
+version whose directory arrived last. It reads no pointer and follows no link — the mesh creates no
+links ([ADR 0012](0012-the-mesh-creates-no-symlinks.md)) — and the version is in the path, so nothing
+has to be told what is running.
+
+**The running host stands aside for a successor, and only between reconciles.** Finding a newer
+version delivered, it finishes the reconcile it is in and exits cleanly. The launcher already reads a
+clean exit as exactly this and starts what is on disk now. A host that stood aside mid-apply is the
+half-configured machine this project exists to prevent, so the check happens at the boundary and
+nowhere else.
+
+**A version that completes a reconcile records itself, and retires what came before it.** The
+known-good record is written as it is today. Then versions older than the one before the running one
+are removed: the running version and its predecessor are kept, which is exactly what a rollback
+needs, and nothing else accumulates.
+
+**Rollback starts the previous version instead of reinstalling a package.** At the failure limit the
+launcher pins the known-good version and starts that, once. The second failure is still a different
+diagnosis — the previously working version does not run either, so it is the machine and not the
+binary — and the halt is unchanged. No package manager, no package cache, and the same script on every
+operating system.
+
+**A machine says which host version it is running,** on the report it already sends, beside the other
+facts it states about itself. Without it nothing can say a machine is behind, so "every machine
+current with its source" cannot include the host.
+
+## Progressive insight — 2026-09-29, the same day
+
+**The delivery is not "nothing new", and this record said it was.** The decision above stands and is
+built: versions side by side, the newest runs, the running host stands aside between reconciles, a
+completed reconcile retires what is older than the predecessor, rollback picks a directory. What was
+wrong was a claim about how a version reaches a machine. The paragraph on delivery said the
+declaration "names it like any other archive… nothing new travels, no new resource kind"; the second
+half is true and the first is not, because two things the delivery needs do not exist:
+
+- **Nothing can compile it.** A `bundle` artifact is compiled by a closed list of toolchains —
+  typescript and python — whose own comment says adding a language is a decision, because a language
+  used by *modules* needs an SDK carrying the broker client, the event envelope and tool serving. The
+  host uses none of that: it is what applies modules, not one of them. So the obligation that list
+  warns about attaches to a module written in a language, not to the language being buildable, and
+  the control plane — also written in Go — is built as an image from a Dockerfile rather than through
+  a toolchain at all.
+- **A version cannot reach the path.** An `archive` resource names a fixed path in the manifest, and
+  nothing interpolates the built version into it, so nothing can ask for
+  `…/versions/<version>/`.
+
+Neither changes what was decided, which options were weighed, or any consequence: the shape is
+unaffected and the host half is merged and tested. What it changes is the cost, which this record
+understated as none. The remaining work is a way to build the host and a way to name a version in a
+path, and until both exist nothing delivers a version and every machine takes the fallback — which is
+what every machine does today.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- **The host becomes a build target and a module** — a module whose resource is the next host, applied
+  by the host that is running. The bootstrap is not circular because the two are different versions in
+  different directories.
+- **Rollback becomes usable on every machine**, having been usable on none. It also stops being
+  written in one operating system's terms.
+- **One copy by hand remains, once.** The first host that understands versioned directories cannot be
+  fetched by a host that does not. That copy is the last, and it is the honest cost of the change
+  rather than a step in the design.
+- **Two versions occupy disk instead of one.** About nine megabytes. The predecessor is the price of a
+  rollback that does not depend on a cache somebody else may clean.
+- **What got harder:** a host must now be able to find its own successor and to judge when it is safe
+  to stand aside. Both are between reconciles, which is the only moment the host is not mid-change.
+- **A machine that is never told a newer version keeps running what it has**, indefinitely and
+  visibly, because its report says which version that is.
+
+## How it is checked
+
+- **A delivered version is run, and the old one is not.** A bed delivers a second version to a machine
+  running the first; the host exits between reconciles, the launcher starts the new one, and the
+  machine reports the new version. This fails against the previous behaviour, where nothing notices a
+  delivered version at all.
+- **It stands aside between reconciles and never inside one.** Asserted by delivering a version while
+  an apply is in flight: the apply completes, and the exit follows it.
+- **A version that will not start is rolled back to its predecessor, once**, and the second failure
+  halts with the machine named rather than the binary — asserted with no package manager involved.
+- **A completed reconcile retires what is older than the predecessor**, and never the predecessor
+  itself, because that is what a rollback needs. Asserted on the directory afterwards.
+- **The report names the running version**, asserted end to end rather than on the function that reads
+  it, since the point is that the control plane can tell a machine is behind.
+- **The launcher picks the newest delivered version** with no pointer file and no link, asserted by
+  delivering two and checking which runs.
+
+## References
+
+- [ADR 0005](0005-the-node-host.md) — the host, and what its supervision is for
+- [ADR 0010](0010-delivery.md) — a declaration is owned resources; this adds no kind to it
+- [ADR 0012](0012-the-mesh-creates-no-symlinks.md) — why the version is in the path
+- [ADR 0005](0005-the-node-host.md), *it is built per operating system* — why a rollback written in
+  one package manager's terms was wrong for two of three
+- [issue 142](../04-ISSUES/142-the-host-is-the-one-thing-the-mesh-does-not-deliver/00-report.md) — the
+  measurement
@@ -0,0 +1,158 @@
+---
+topic: the mesh
+status: accepted
+date: 2026-09-29
+deciders: jochen
+reconstructed: false
+extends: 02-DECISIONS/0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor.md
+---
+
+# 142. The mesh delivers its own components as binaries, not as container images
+
+## Context
+
+Measured on the control-node, 2026-09-29:
+
+| what | how it runs | publishes |
+|---|---|---|
+| host | a binary on the machine | — |
+| controller, catalogue, builder, vault | containers | nothing |
+| store, registry, broker | containers | ports |
+
+**The mesh's own software is delivered two ways, and the difference is not a property of the
+software.** The host and the controller are both written in the same language, both the mesh's own,
+both doing the mesh's own work. One is an image fetched from a registry. The other is a file somebody
+copied to four machines, owned by no package, built by nothing
+([issue 142](../04-ISSUES/142-the-host-is-the-one-thing-the-mesh-does-not-deliver/00-report.md)).
+
+**The reason is not a judgement about either, it is that images are the only delivery that works.**
+There is no way to put a binary on a machine. The host is hand-copied because of that, and the
+controller is an image because of that. Neither was chosen on its merits.
+
+What it costs, all of it measured rather than argued:
+
+- **Genesis must raise a container runtime before the control plane can exist.** The bundle carries
+  three images and one of them is the controller, *"in the bundle for the same reason they are: there
+  is nothing to fetch it with yet"*
+  ([design 07](../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/07-the-foundation.md)). So the hardest moment in the mesh's life
+  has a prerequisite that the thing being started does not need.
+- **Updating the control plane depends on the control plane.** Its image is fetched from the registry,
+  which is a container the controller manages.
+- **A change to the host cannot be rolled out at all.** Every machine here runs a byte-identical
+  hand-copied binary. A change merged yesterday reached none of them.
+- **Compiling the language the mesh is written in is not a capability of the builder.** The bundle
+  toolchains are typescript — real, with a registered base module — and python, which is named in the
+  list and absent from the catalogue. The controller is built as an image from a Dockerfile, which is
+  the per-repository incantation the bundle toolchain exists to abolish
+  ([design 18](../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/18-building-a-module.md)).
+
+The half that *receives* a binary safely is already built and tested
+([ADR 0141](0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor.md)): versions side by side in directories named
+for them, the newest run, the running one standing aside between reconciles, retirement keeping the
+predecessor, and a rollback that chooses a directory. What is missing is everything that puts one
+there.
+
+## Considered Options
+
+1. **Leave it as it is.** Rejected: it is not a design, it is the reach of one mechanism. And it is
+   what makes a host change undeliverable.
+2. **Containerise the host too**, so everything is delivered one way. Rejected: the host is what
+   starts the container runtime and what applies containers. A host in a container is the bootstrap
+   problem made total, and the machine would have no way back from a bad one.
+3. **Deliver the mesh's components as operating-system packages.** Rejected for the reason
+   [ADR 0141](0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor.md) rejected it for the host: a package and a
+   trusted repository per operating system, three of each, and the `package` resource asserts presence
+   and deliberately never a version.
+4. **Binaries for the mesh's own components, containers for third-party software.** Adopted.
+
+## Decision
+
+**The mesh's own components are delivered as binaries on the machine.** The host, the controller, the
+catalogue, the builder, the vault — the software this project writes. They are delivered by the
+mechanism [ADR 0141](0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor.md) built: an archive, fetched by
+digest, unpacked into a directory named for its version, with the running one standing aside between
+reconciles and a rollback that chooses the predecessor.
+
+**Third-party software stays a container.** The store, the registry, the broker. They are somebody
+else's build, they are already adopted as modules
+([ADR 0078](0078-the-store-and-broker-are-modules.md)), and an image is the right way to carry
+somebody else's software. **The container runtime remains required** — modules use it — so this
+removes a dependency from the control plane, not from the machine.
+
+**The builder compiles the languages the mesh is written in.** A toolchain for Go, with a base module
+providing the compiler, exactly as typescript has. The obligation the toolchain list warns about — an
+SDK carrying the broker client, the envelope and tool serving — attaches to a *module* written in a
+language, not to the language being compilable. None of these components is a module in that sense;
+the host is what applies modules.
+
+**An artifact says what it targets.** A compiled binary is per operating system, pinned at link time
+([ADR 0005](0005-the-node-host.md)), and a toolchain deliberately takes nothing from the module,
+because anything a module could override there it would be writing a Dockerfile to override. So the
+target is a property of the artifact rather than of the recipe, and one artifact declared per target
+is one build each.
+
+**A component's version comes from where it sits, not from its linker.** It is unpacked into a
+directory named for its version, so it can read its own version from its path. The stamp goes, and
+with it the need for a build to know what it will be called.
+
+**Genesis carries a binary reference where it carried an image reference.** The principle does not
+change — the bundle names a thing by digest and the host fetches it, pinned because nothing can
+resolve a version when no mesh exists — and the container runtime stops being a prerequisite for the
+control plane. It stays a prerequisite for the store and the broker, which is where it belongs.
+
+**The order is staged, and each step stands alone.** Compiling Go; an artifact naming its target;
+delivering a binary; the host as the first component delivered; the controller, catalogue, builder and
+vault out of their containers; genesis last. Genesis is last for the reason it is always last: it
+matters for a machine nobody has yet, and every earlier step is provable on a mesh that exists.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- **One delivery for the mesh's own software**, so a change to the host ships the way a change to the
+  controller does, and neither is copied by hand.
+- **The control plane stops depending on a container runtime and on its own registry.** Both remain on
+  the machine for other reasons; neither gates the control plane's own life any more.
+- **`Replaced()`, the known-good record and the launcher's rollback stop being dead code.** They were
+  written for this and have been called by nothing but their tests.
+- **Four more components gain a rollback they do not have.** Today a bad controller image is recovered
+  by an operator; under this it is recovered the way a bad host is.
+- **Two versions of each component occupy disk.** Around nine megabytes each. The predecessor is what a
+  rollback needs.
+- **Genesis gets smaller, not larger.** One fewer image to carry and one fewer runtime to raise before
+  the control plane.
+- **This does not make the components smaller or simpler.** They are the same programs; what changes is
+  how they arrive. A reader expecting the containers to have been hiding complexity will not find any.
+- **What got harder:** the builder gains a language, artifacts gain a target, and the mesh gains a
+  second kind of thing it must deliver correctly — one where getting it wrong takes the control plane
+  down rather than a module. That is why the host is first: it is the component whose recovery is
+  already built and tested.
+
+## How it is checked
+
+- **A component is delivered and runs, with nothing copied by hand.** A bed builds the host from its
+  repository, delivers it to a machine running an older one, and the machine reports the new version.
+  This fails today at the first step, because nothing builds it.
+- **Each target is built once and only the matching one is delivered.** Asserted by declaring an
+  artifact per operating system and checking that a machine is offered the one it can run — a host
+  built for another is what ADR 0005's link-time pin exists to refuse.
+- **A component reads its version from its path**, asserted by unpacking the same bytes into two
+  differently named directories and seeing each report its own.
+- **A bad component is rolled back without an operator**, for the host first: a version that will not
+  start is replaced by its predecessor once, and the second failure halts naming the machine.
+- **The control plane comes up with no registry reachable**, which is the dependency this removes —
+  asserted by raising it with the registry stopped.
+- **Genesis raises a control plane with no container runtime running**, and raises the store and the
+  broker afterwards. Last, and on a machine with nothing on it.
+- **A published port count that does not change.** The mesh's own components publish nothing today, so
+  moving them out of containers must not open anything — asserted on the machine's reachable set before
+  and after, which the converge preview already reads.
+
+## References
+
+- [ADR 0141](0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor.md) — the receiving half, already built
+- [ADR 0005](0005-the-node-host.md) — the host, its supervision, and one binary per operating system
+- [ADR 0078](0078-the-store-and-broker-are-modules.md) — why third-party software stays a container
+- [ADR 0006](0006-the-substrate-and-the-control-plane.md) — what genesis must raise, and in what order
+- [issue 142](../04-ISSUES/142-the-host-is-the-one-thing-the-mesh-does-not-deliver/00-report.md) — the
+  measurement that started this
+- [design 07](../03-DESIGN/01-to-be/07-the-foundation.md) — the bundle's three images, one of them the
+  controller
@@ -0,0 +1,134 @@
+---
+topic: what runs on it
+status: accepted
+date: 2026-09-29
+deciders: jochen
+reconstructed: false
+extends: 02-DECISIONS/0010-delivery.md
+---
+
+# 143. A consumer verifies the grant it is given
+
+## Context
+
+A **grant** is what the mesh writes on a consumer's machine so it can reach a provider. The real one
+the forge receives for its database, as it arrives:
+
+```
+provision  postgres-database
+at         <the provider's machine, by name>
+port       the machine port the provider is published on
+as         the role the provider created for this consumer
+```
+
+with the credential sealed in a separate file. Four facts and a password, and they are the whole
+mechanism by which anything in the mesh reaches anything else.
+
+**The mesh asserts that claim and never finds out whether it is true.**
+[Issue 145](../04-ISSUES/145-a-machine-reads-healthy-while-its-modules-cannot-reach-each-other/00-report.md):
+converging a machine dropped the path from a container to a port on its own machine, and for eleven
+hours the mesh answered *all doing what they were told, all heard from, every module current with its
+source* while a web application logged, six thousand times:
+
+```
+connection to server at "<the machine>" (10.10.0.1), port 6852 failed: timeout expired
+```
+
+Every check the mesh makes passed, because every check it makes is about the relationship between the
+mesh and a machine: the declaration was applied, the digest matched, every container named was running.
+None of them asks whether a consumer can reach what it requires — though the mesh composed the grant
+and therefore knows the consumer, the machine, the address, the port and the credential.
+
+**And where the check runs decides whether it catches anything.** The rule in force admitted the
+machines' own addresses on the private network. A dial from the *machine* to its own address carries
+exactly such a source address, so a check run by the host on its own behalf would have matched that rule
+and passed — while every container on the machine was refused. This is inference from the rule that was
+loaded, not a measurement: the fault was found and fixed before anyone thought to dial from the host.
+It is enough to decide the question, because a check whose position differs from the consumer's is
+testing something nobody asked about.
+
+## Considered Options
+
+1. **The control plane dials each provision.** Rejected, and it is the tempting one because the control
+   plane holds every fact. It sits on the provider's machine for most provisions here and reaches the
+   address by a path no consumer uses; in the measured outage it would have passed throughout.
+2. **The host dials on the consumer's behalf, from the machine.** Rejected for the reason above: the
+   machine's network position is not the consumer's, and the one outage this exists to catch is exactly
+   a difference between them.
+3. **Ask the module.** Rejected: a module is arbitrary software that the mesh does not write. Some could
+   report on their provisions and most cannot, and a check that covers the modules that opted in tells
+   nobody anything about the rest.
+4. **Read the module's logs.** Rejected: the failure was in a log the whole time, and reading a module's
+   logs makes the mesh depend on the wording of software it does not control.
+5. **The consumer verifies it, from its own network position.** Adopted.
+
+## Decision
+
+**A consumer verifies each grant it is given, from its own network position.** After a reconcile has
+applied a grant, the machine opens a connection to the address and port that grant names, from inside
+the consumer's own network namespace — the same position the consumer's software dials from, which is
+the only position that answers the question the grant asks.
+
+**It is a connection, not a conversation.** Whether the port accepts a connection is what a grant
+claims; whether the credential is right, the role exists or the schema is current is the provider's to
+answer and the consumer's to discover. A check that spoke each provision's protocol would be a second
+implementation of every provision, and would fail for reasons that are not the mesh's.
+
+**One failure is not news.** A provider restarting is ordinary, and so is a consumer between containers.
+A grant is reported unreachable only after it has failed on **consecutive** reconciles, and the count is
+what the machine reports rather than the last attempt — so a reader can tell "it was briefly away" from
+"it has never worked".
+
+**A grant that cannot be checked is said to be unchecked, never assumed good.** A consumer that is not
+running has no network position to dial from; that is not a broken grant and must not read as one. It is
+also not a verified grant, and the two are different sentences.
+
+**What it costs to be wrong is the constraint on all of it.** A check that reports a working provision
+broken trains a reader to ignore the report, which is worse than having none — the fault this
+repository keeps finding, one level up. So the threshold is consecutive failures, the check is the
+cheapest thing that answers the question, and an unknown is reported as unknown.
+
+**The mesh says it where it says everything else.** A machine's report carries its unreachable grants,
+and `status` names them beside what is out of date — so "every module current with its source" stops
+being the whole of what the mesh will tell you about a machine whose modules cannot reach each other.
+
+## Consequences
+
+- **The mesh can be wrong out loud.** It has been able to assert a grant and not check it; now a grant
+  that does not work is a thing the mesh says, and the eleven hours of issue 145 become minutes.
+- **The host gains the ability to act from a container's network position**, which it has not needed
+  before. That is a real capability and the only one this needs.
+- **A machine reports something that is not about the declaration.** Everything it reports today is
+  what it applied and what it holds; this is the first thing it says about whether what it applied
+  works.
+- **A provision with no port is not checked**, because there is nothing to dial. Several are files and
+  secrets, and saying "checked" about those would be the appearance of verification that this record
+  exists to remove.
+- **What got harder:** a reconcile does more than apply. Every grant adds a connection attempt on a
+  cadence, which is cheap individually and worth naming: a machine with many consumers dials once per
+  grant per reconcile.
+
+## How it is checked
+
+- **The outage is caught.** A bed drops the path from a consumer's network position to a provider's
+  port while leaving the machine's own path to it open — the exact shape of issue 145 — and the grant
+  reads unreachable. This fails against the previous behaviour, where nothing reported anything, and
+  against a check run from the machine, which passes while the consumer cannot reach it.
+- **A restarting provider is not an outage.** One failed reconcile reports nothing; the count rises and
+  falls, and the grant reads reachable again without anybody acting.
+- **A consumer that is not running reads unchecked, not broken**, asserted separately from the
+  unreachable case because they are different sentences.
+- **A provision with no port is not claimed to be checked.**
+- **The report carries the count, not the last attempt**, so "briefly away" and "never worked" are
+  distinguishable by a reader who sees only the report.
+- **`status` names an unreachable grant**, asserted on the output, since a check nothing surfaces is
+  the same as no check.
+
+## References
+
+- [ADR 0010](0010-delivery.md) — the declaration is owned resources; a grant is one of them
+- [ADR 0009](0009-modules-and-the-graph.md) — what a provision and a consumer are
+- [issue 145](../04-ISSUES/145-a-machine-reads-healthy-while-its-modules-cannot-reach-each-other/00-report.md)
+  — the eleven hours
+- [issue 136](../04-ISSUES/136-a-module-may-name-a-program-the-machine-does-not-have/00-report.md) — the
+  same distance between a declaration and a machine, one level down
@@ -142,6 +142,7 @@ python3 00-META/checks/index.py            fail if stale
 - **0131** — [Everything on the mesh speaks to the broker seat, and AMQP is not a provision](0131-everything-on-the-mesh-speaks-to-the-broker-seat.md)
 - **0132** — [A seat carries the tools its holder must serve](0132-a-seat-carries-the-tools-its-holder-must-serve.md)
 - **0134** — [The mesh says what it applied](0134-the-mesh-says-what-it-applied.md)
+- **0142** — [The mesh delivers its own components as binaries, not as container images](0142-the-mesh-delivers-its-own-components-as-binaries.md)

 ### Its tiers, from the bottom up

@@ -217,6 +218,12 @@ python3 00-META/checks/index.py            fail if stale
 - **0133** — [A module owns its migrations, and the mesh owns when they run](0133-a-module-owns-its-migrations-and-the-mesh-owns-when-they-run.md)  *(superseded)*
 - **0135** — [A module version prepares its state before it runs](0135-a-module-version-prepares-its-state-before-it-runs.md)
 - **0136** — [A step gates its module, not the machine](0136-a-step-gates-its-module-not-the-machine.md)
+- **0137** — [A machine says which networks it routes](0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md)  *(superseded)*
+- **0138** — [An assignment binds an endpoint and says how far it reaches](0138-an-assignment-binds-an-endpoint-and-says-how-far-it-reaches.md)
+- **0139** — [A network is forwarded because a module declared it](0139-a-network-is-forwarded-because-a-module-declared-it.md)  *(superseded)*
+- **0140** — [The filter constrains what arrives from outside, and says nothing about a machine's own guests](0140-the-filter-constrains-what-arrives-from-outside.md)
+- **0141** — [The host delivers its own successor, and versions live side by side](0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor.md)
+- **0143** — [A consumer verifies the grant it is given](0143-a-consumer-verifies-the-grant-it-is-given.md)

 ### How it is built

@@ -2,8 +2,9 @@
 layer: to-be
 status: in-progress
 code: [mesh-host]
-updated: 2026-09-22
+updated: 2026-09-29
 decisions:
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0100-a-node-in-use-is-adopted-before-it-is-converged.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0102-the-mesh-writes-into-a-shared-file-never-over-it.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0103-what-an-adopted-node-holds-and-what-its-guard-refuses.md
@@ -423,3 +424,45 @@ ignored an instruction and "applied" would be a lie. Applying stays one at a tim
 is not. **Checked** by the link's unit tests on the drain, and by the genesis bed's settle wait,
 which counts on a node catching up to the newest declaration rather than the oldest.

+## The host delivers its own successor
+
+*2026-09-29, from a change to the host that could reach no machine —
+[issue 142](../../04-ISSUES/142-the-host-is-the-one-thing-the-mesh-does-not-deliver/00-report.md),
+settled by [ADR 0141](../../02-DECISIONS/0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor.md).*
+
+A merge builds every changed module and the control plane, and the result reaches the machines running
+it with nobody asking. The host was the exception: not a build target, named by no declaration, and
+identical on every machine because somebody had copied it there.
+
+The supervision needed for this was already right. A clean exit from the host means it has stood aside,
+and the launcher's next turn runs whatever is on disk. Consecutive failed starts are counted, a
+rollback happens at the limit, and a second failure halts with the machine named rather than the binary.
+What was missing was smaller than it looked: nothing told the running host a successor was waiting, and
+the rollback resolved its known-good *version* through one operating system's package manager, which no
+machine here used.
+
+Keeping a version rather than a path was the clue. That is only useful to something that can choose
+between versions present on the machine — so the versions live side by side:
+
+- **A version arrives as an archive, in a directory named for it.** The ordinary resource, fetched by
+  digest and checked before anything is unpacked. The path written is never the path being executed, so
+  replacing a running binary — which the kernel refuses — never comes up.
+- **The launcher starts the most recently delivered version**, reading no pointer and following no
+  link, because the version is in the path.
+- **The running host stands aside between reconciles and never inside one.** Standing aside mid-apply is
+  the half-configured machine this document exists to prevent.
+- **A version that completes a reconcile records itself and retires what is older than its
+  predecessor.** The predecessor stays, because that is what a rollback needs.
+- **Rollback starts that predecessor** instead of reinstalling a package: no package manager, no cache
+  somebody else may clean, and the same script on every operating system.
+- **A machine says which host version it runs**, on the report it already sends, so being behind is
+  answerable at all.
+
+One copy by hand remains, once: the first host that understands versioned directories cannot be fetched
+by a host that does not.
+
+*How it is checked* is stated with the decision — a second version delivered to a running machine is
+run and reported; the exit follows an in-flight apply rather than interrupting it; a version that will
+not start is rolled back once and the second failure halts; a completed reconcile retires what is older
+than the predecessor and never the predecessor; and the newest of two delivered versions is the one
+that runs.
@@ -11,8 +11,9 @@ code:
  - mesh-catalog modules/postgres
  - mesh-catalog modules/lavinmq
  - mesh-lab test/integration/mesh.test.ts (a bare machine becomes a mesh)
-updated: 2026-09-22
+updated: 2026-09-29
 decisions:
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0142-the-mesh-delivers-its-own-components-as-binaries.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0100-a-node-in-use-is-adopted-before-it-is-converged.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0088-the-foundation-filters-before-anything-listens.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0004-a-node-and-how-it-joins.md
@@ -314,4 +315,24 @@ of a database and pushed to over the broker. What arrived and what did not is th

 **One fault, and it was in the joining.** The token did not say what the mesh calls the machine,
 so enrolment needed a flag its own help said it did not — and failed at the broker with an empty
-username. Recorded in ADR 0004 as the fifth thing a token carries.
+username. Recorded in ADR 0004 as the fifth thing a token carries.
+
+## The mesh's own components arrive as binaries
+
+*2026-09-29 —
+[ADR 0142](../../02-DECISIONS/0142-the-mesh-delivers-its-own-components-as-binaries.md).*
+
+The bundle carries three images and one of them is the controller, *because there is nothing to fetch
+it with yet*. That reasoning holds and its conclusion changes: the controller is carried as a **binary**
+reference rather than an image reference, pinned by digest exactly as before. Nothing about the bundle's
+shape moves — it names a thing and the host fetches it — and the container runtime stops being something
+genesis must raise before the control plane can exist. It still raises one, for the store and the broker,
+which is where somebody else's software belongs.
+
+The mesh's own components — the host, the controller, the catalogue, the builder, the vault — are
+delivered as binaries into directories named for their versions, by the mechanism
+[ADR 0141](../../02-DECISIONS/0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor.md) describes. Third-party
+software stays a container. The split is not about isolation; it is about who built the thing.
+
+Measured before deciding it: the mesh's own components publish no ports at all, so this opens nothing.
+Only the store, the registry and the broker publish, and they are staying as they are.
@@ -7,8 +7,10 @@ code:
  - mesh-controller internal/identity/authority.go
  - mesh-host internal/identity/serving.go
  - mesh-host internal/apply (the service that reflects a rule set)
-updated: 2026-09-27
+updated: 2026-09-28
 decisions:
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0138-an-assignment-binds-an-endpoint-and-says-how-far-it-reaches.md
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0140-the-filter-constrains-what-arrives-from-outside.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0104-a-provision-may-be-answered-by-an-adapter-to-the-predecessor.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0106-the-bus-is-nats.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0105-the-mesh-adopts-the-predecessors-tunnel-in-place.md
@@ -625,6 +627,50 @@ the found firewall reloads and reachable from a container on the node, that a ma
 enrols through the openings before and after a reload and a reboot, and that after the flip the
 declared port is open and the undeclared one closed.

+### It filters what arrives from outside, and not what the machine's own guests send
+
+*2026-09-28, preparing the control-node's convergence —
+[issue 141](../../04-ISSUES/141-the-forward-chain-does-not-follow-the-modules/00-report.md), settled by
+[ADR 0140](../../02-DECISIONS/0140-the-filter-constrains-what-arrives-from-outside.md), which replaces
+[ADR 0137](../../02-DECISIONS/0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md) and
+[ADR 0139](../../02-DECISIONS/0139-a-network-is-forwarded-because-a-module-declared-it.md).*
+
+Traffic passing through a machine is filtered, because a container's published port is traffic passing
+through rather than traffic arriving at the machine itself. Having blocked it, the filter then had to
+let the machine's own containers reach outward again — and it did that by listing the address ranges
+they sit on. Two of those ranges were constants in this repository's code, and the rest were typed by an
+operator after the flip had already cut a workstation's containers off from everything.
+
+**The list was the mistake, not its contents.** A constant describes one machine. A typed range goes
+stale and cannot tell a network the mesh made from one a predecessor left behind — on the control-node,
+six ranges fall outside the constants and two of the six belong to services the mesh does not run. The
+attempt to generate the list from the modules put half the rule set on the machine and made the
+derivation advisory. Three records, one list.
+
+**And the mesh has no position on a container reaching outward.** §4 exists to say which port is open
+and to whom, which is about what arrives. A container of this machine's own opening a connection
+somewhere is not a port opened to anybody, and the addresses it might do that from are the machine's
+internal plumbing, which the mesh neither owns nor can know.
+
+So the filter constrains what arrives from **outside** the machine and says nothing about what did not.
+Traffic passing through is allowed unless it came in on one of the machine's outward links, and then
+only where a declared endpoint's reach admits it (§6). The machine says which of its links face
+outside — one fact it reports, like the kind of firewall it found and the tunnel it carries, not a
+setting and not a list of addresses. It does not change when a module is added or removed, which is the
+whole difference from what it replaces. A machine that has reported no outward link is sent no filter
+at all, and keeps the one it has, because a rule written around a link with no name is a rule set that
+does not load — a machine filtering nothing while its unit reports success.
+
+Ports go on following the modules exactly as before: assign a module to a machine and the port its
+assignment says it reaches on opens. Nothing about a network is said anywhere, by anybody.
+
+*How it is checked:* a bed converges a machine carrying containers on several networks, none of them
+named in any setting, and each reaches outward afterwards — which fails against the previous behaviour,
+where the same flip cut them off, and is how it was written; a network made *after* the last declaration
+needs no new filter; a declared port is reachable from off the private network and an undeclared one is
+not; no address of a machine's own networks appears in a rendered filter, asserted on the text; and a
+machine reporting no outward link is refused in the control plane with its existing filter left alone.
+
 ## 5 — Certificates

 **Two authorities, kept separate on purpose.**
@@ -710,6 +756,60 @@ that verifies against the internal root and nothing else — which cannot succee
 first reached the name to certify it*
 ([ADR 0066](../../02-DECISIONS/0066-public-routing-is-name-agnostic.md)).

+## 6 — One statement behind exposure, filtering and certificates
+
+*2026-09-28, preparing the control-node's convergence —
+[issue 140](../../04-ISSUES/140-an-endpoints-reach-is-not-declared/00-report.md), settled by
+[ADR 0138](../../02-DECISIONS/0138-an-assignment-binds-an-endpoint-and-says-how-far-it-reaches.md).*
+
+The three sections above each decide, independently, how far a service reaches. §3 composes a name
+from a label and the node's domain. §4 opens a port to the source a listen named. §5 certifies the
+names that exist, from whichever authority the proxy holds. Each is coherent on its own, and together
+they mean **reachability is never stated anywhere** — it is the sum of three derivations, and a sum is
+not something anyone can review or refuse.
+
+What that costs, measured: an identity provider holding a public certificate valid 90 days and an
+internal one valid 24 hours, neither asked for by any assignment, because both names existed and a
+proxy certifies what it serves. And an endpoint that is not routed — git over ssh — which can be
+spoken about only in the filter's vocabulary, so *this must be reachable from outside* is a setting
+exactly one mechanism reads.
+
+**An endpoint is the thing that was missing.** A module declares named endpoints: one port it serves,
+what it is for, and what it would serve that to absent any instruction. A route contribution names an
+endpoint rather than repeating a port number. An assignment — which is where a module's configuration
+lives ([ADR 0046](../../02-DECISIONS/0046-a-module-configuration-is-its-assignments-not-its-manifest.md))
+— then binds each endpoint to a machine port and says how far it reaches.
+
+One value, three readers:
+
+| reach | the filter opens | the proxy serves | the certificate comes from |
+|---|---|---|---|
+| `internal` | the machine port, to the private network | the internal name | the mesh's own authority |
+| `public` | the machine port, to anywhere | the public name | the public authority |
+| `both` | the machine port, to anywhere | both names | each name's own authority |
+
+**An endpoint that is not routed is reached and never named.** No route contribution means no name is
+composed and no certificate requested, while the filter still acts on it. That is the case the model
+could not express at all, and it is the ordinary case for anything that is not HTTP.
+
+**Nothing moves until an assignment says so.** An endpoint whose assignment is silent keeps the
+default its manifest states, so every machine already converged renders exactly as it does today —
+the same property §4 needed when a machine gained a way to say which networks it routes.
+
+This is what the certificate questions were waiting for. Which authority signs a name, whether a name
+may appear in a public issuance log, and what must be trusted where are all answerable once an
+endpoint says whether it is internal — and unanswerable while the proxy decides by composing every
+name it can. It is also the fact
+[issue 139](../../04-ISSUES/139-an-internal-route-name-resolves-to-the-consumers-node/00-report.md)
+needs: an internal name should be composed from the machine serving the endpoint, which is the
+assignment that bound it.
+
+**How it is checked** is stated with the decision: one module with two endpoints of differing reach
+asserted per chain body; the names and the certificate requests following the reach and failing
+against today's behaviour, where both are always composed; an unrouted endpoint filtered and never
+named; an assignment naming an endpoint the module does not declare refused where it is said; and a
+silent assignment rendering byte-identically to today.
+
 ## What this removes

 The list is worth having in one place, because it is most of the argument:
@@ -5,8 +5,9 @@ code:
  - mesh-controller internal/builder
  - mesh-controller cmd/mesh-controller (build, build --behind, push, status)
  - mesh-controller internal/inventory/builds.go
-updated: 2026-09-21
+updated: 2026-09-29
 decisions:
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0143-a-consumer-verifies-the-grant-it-is-given.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0090-a-failure-that-repeats-is-said-to-be-stuck.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0082-the-registry-is-reached-by-name-and-trusted-by-the-overlay.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0010-delivery.md
@@ -226,3 +227,38 @@ when the current failure began and how many reports in a row have said it — th
 id, whatever the words; three make the machine stuck, and `status` says so beside the failure. The host keeps trying — stuck is what the mesh
 knows, not what the machine is told. *How it is checked:* an inventory test counts three identical
 reports, a different one, and a clean apply; the status test asserts the word appears.
+
+## A consumer verifies the grant it is given
+
+*2026-09-29, from an outage that ran eleven hours —
+[issue 145](../../04-ISSUES/145-a-machine-reads-healthy-while-its-modules-cannot-reach-each-other/00-report.md),
+settled by [ADR 0143](../../02-DECISIONS/0143-a-consumer-verifies-the-grant-it-is-given.md).*
+
+A grant is four facts and a credential: the provision, the machine, the port, and who the consumer is
+when it connects. It is the whole mechanism by which anything in the mesh reaches anything else, and the
+mesh asserted it without ever finding out whether it was true.
+
+What that cost: a machine was converged, the path from a container to a port on its own machine closed,
+and for eleven hours the mesh answered *all heard from, every module current with its source* while a
+module logged a connection timeout to its database six thousand times. Every check the mesh makes passed,
+because every one is about the relationship between the mesh and a machine — applied, current, running.
+None asks whether a consumer can reach what it requires.
+
+**So a consumer verifies its own grants, from its own network position.** Not the control plane, which
+reaches the address by a path no consumer uses; not the machine, whose own packets carried a source
+address the filter admitted while every container's was refused. The position is the point: a check
+somewhere else is testing something nobody asked about.
+
+It opens a connection and nothing more. Whether the credential is right or the schema current is the
+provider's to answer and the consumer's to discover; a check that spoke each provision's protocol would
+be a second implementation of every provision.
+
+One failure is not news — a provider restarting is ordinary — so a grant reads unreachable only after
+consecutive reconciles, and the machine reports the count rather than the last attempt, which is what
+separates "briefly away" from "never worked". A consumer that is not running has no position to dial
+from: that grant reads unchecked, which is a different sentence from broken and must not be written as
+one.
+
+*How it is checked* is stated with the decision, and the first of them is the outage itself: a bed drops
+the path from a consumer's position while leaving the machine's own open, and the grant must read
+unreachable — which fails both against reporting nothing and against a check run from the machine.
@@ -5,8 +5,9 @@ code:
  - mesh-controller cmd/mesh-builder
  - mesh-controller internal/builder
  - mesh-catalog modules/builder
-updated: 2026-09-25
+updated: 2026-09-29
 decisions:
+  - 02-DECISIONS/0142-the-mesh-delivers-its-own-components-as-binaries.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0111-a-build-source-is-on-the-git-seat-or-external.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0097-a-vendor-image-is-a-declared-build-input.md
  - 02-DECISIONS/0096-an-upstream-image-is-copied-between-registries.md
@@ -263,3 +264,27 @@ ships one and wrong for code the mesh built, which has no unit until the mesh wr

 **Tools, hooks and consumers are not further modes**, which is the test of whether three is the
 right number: they are loaded by a tool host, and a tool host is a process that stays up.
+
+## The builder compiles the languages the mesh is written in
+
+*2026-09-29 —
+[ADR 0142](../../02-DECISIONS/0142-the-mesh-delivers-its-own-components-as-binaries.md).*
+
+The toolchain list was typescript and python, and only typescript had a base module in the catalogue.
+Meanwhile the control plane — written in the language this project is mostly written in — was built as
+an image from a hand-written Dockerfile, which is the per-repository incantation this whole mechanism
+exists to abolish.
+
+So the list gains Go, with a base module providing the compiler exactly as typescript has one. The
+obligation the list's own comment warns about — an SDK carrying the broker client, the event envelope
+and tool serving — attaches to a **module** written in a language, not to the language being
+compilable. The mesh's own components are not modules in that sense; the host is what applies modules.
+
+**And an artifact says what it targets.** A compiled binary is per operating system, pinned at link
+time, and a toolchain deliberately accepts nothing from the module — anything a module could override
+there it would be writing a Dockerfile to override. The target is therefore a property of the artifact,
+not of the recipe: one artifact declared per target, one build each.
+
+A component's version stops being stamped in at link time. It is unpacked into a directory named for
+its version, so it reads its version from its own path, and a build no longer has to know what it will
+be called.
@@ -0,0 +1,70 @@
+---
+status: resolved
+opened: 2026-09-28
+located-in: [mesh-host internal/apply]
+fixed-by: mesh-host — a container's mesh names are part of the spec digest the host compares, sorted so the digest does not move for a reordering. A container whose names moved is now recreated like a container whose image moved, and the test fails against the previous behaviour.
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 135 — A container's mesh names are not compared, so a moved address is never noticed
+
+## What was observed
+
+One container on this mesh had been restarting every thirty seconds for five days — 2286 times — and
+the mesh reported the machine as doing what it was told.
+
+Its logs said its database connected and then a query timed out. The database was reachable: the same
+query from the same network, with the same credential, answered in milliseconds. What differed was the
+name. Inside that container, `novox.internal` resolved to `10.42.0.1`; in every other container on the
+machine it resolved to `10.10.0.1`. The mesh's overlay range had moved, and this container still held
+the old one:
+
+```
+umami          created 2026-09-23   novox.internal:10.42.0.1
+mesh-catalog   created today        novox.internal:10.10.0.1
+```
+
+A container resolves other machines and public names through the entries the mesh gives it when it is
+created, and nothing re-reads them afterwards. The host compares a container against what was declared
+by a digest of its spec — image, name, environment, ports, volumes, arguments, resolver, address, and
+what it reads — and **the mesh's names were not in it**. So this container matched what was declared,
+was left alone, and kept an address that had not existed for five days.
+
+Forty-eight other containers had current names. Not because anything corrected them: each had been
+recreated for some other reason — a new image, a changed file — and picked up the current roster on the
+way. This one's image is an upstream release that had not moved, and nothing else about it changed, so
+nothing ever recreated it.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**It is the exact fault [issue 045](../045-a-container-keeps-the-values-it-started-with/00-report.md)
+named, in the one field that was left out.** That issue is why the digest carries what a container
+reads: "a container whose configuration had since been rewritten compared equal and was left alone —
+running values the machine no longer holds, while every check reported success." The same sentence
+describes this, with *names* in place of *files*.
+
+**The failure is invisible in exactly the way that matters.** The container runs, so the machine
+reports it applied. It restarts, but a restarting container is a normal sight during an upgrade. The
+only account of the fault is inside the container's own log, in the words of the application rather
+than of the mesh — and what it says is that a query timed out, which points at the database.
+
+**And it is most likely to bite what changes least.** Every container that is rebuilt often repairs
+itself by accident. The victim is the module whose image is stable — which is to say, the module that
+was working fine.
+
+## What was done
+
+The mesh's names are part of the digest, sorted so the digest does not move for a reordering nobody
+made. A container whose names moved is now recreated exactly as one whose image moved.
+
+The first apply after this recreates every container that carries mesh names — one restart each,
+already the price the mesh pays for any image update — because their recorded digests predate the
+field.
+
+## What is still true
+
+The mesh gives a container its names at creation and has no way to change them in place. That is the
+container runtime's shape, not a choice; the answer is to recreate, which is what this does. A module
+that would rather re-read a roster from a file can already ask for one as a fact
+([ADR 0120](../../02-DECISIONS/0120-a-roster-fact-carries-its-format-as-a-template.md)) and restart on
+it.
@@ -0,0 +1,92 @@
+---
+status: resolved
+opened: 2026-09-28
+located-in: [mesh-catalog modules/fail2ban]
+fixed-by: mesh-catalog — the intrusion-prevention module bans through an action it ships itself, already in use on every machine, instead of naming a firewall front-end two of them do not have. The instance is closed; the class in "What is still true" is not.
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 136 — A module may name a program the machine does not have, and everything reports success
+
+## What was observed
+
+Two machines were given the intrusion-prevention module on 2026-09-28. Both refused to start it:
+
+```
+ERROR Failed during configuration: Have not found any log file for 'recidive' jail.
+ERROR Async configuration of server failed
+fail2ban.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=255/EXCEPTION
+```
+
+The jail that bans whoever keeps coming back reads the service's *own* log, and the service checks
+every jail's log file while it configures itself — before it has created that log. The module
+declared the jail and shipped the rotation for that log, and never declared the log. On the two
+machines where it had run for years the file was simply there, so nothing had ever noticed.
+
+That failure was loud. Fixing it uncovered a second one in the same module that is not.
+
+The module's defaults named `ufw` as the way to ban an address. Two of these four machines have no
+`ufw` — they filter with nftables — and nothing checks that until an address is banned. Asked to ban
+a documentation address on such a machine, the service accepted the instruction, counted it, ran the
+command, and wrote this to a log nobody reads:
+
+```
+ERROR   ... -- stderr: '/bin/sh: line 5: ufw: command not found'
+ERROR   ... -- returned 127
+ERROR   Failed to execute ban jail 'sshd' action 'ufw' ... Error banning 192.0.2.99
+```
+
+No rule existed afterwards. Throughout, the unit was `active`, the module was applied, and the
+machine's report said so. **A machine had been added to the mesh's intrusion prevention, reported as
+protected, and was banning nobody.**
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**The two faults are the same mistake with opposite symptoms.** Both are the module assuming
+something about the machine — a file that happens to exist, a program that happens to be installed.
+One stopped the service, which anybody notices. The other left it running and empty, which nobody
+does. A mesh that only catches the loud one is a mesh whose coverage is unknown.
+
+**"The unit is running" was taken for "the module is doing its job".** That is the only health a
+service resource has. It is the right answer for most modules and it is silent for any module whose
+work happens later, on an event — a ban, a renewal, a backup, a notification. The report cannot
+distinguish "protecting this machine" from "installed and inert".
+
+**And it is exactly the naming rule, one level down.**
+[ADR 0112](../../02-DECISIONS/0112-a-module-definition-names-no-node-mesh-or-path.md) says a
+definition names no node, no mesh and no host path, because the same definition has to raise a
+different mesh. `ufw` is not a node name, but it is the same class of assumption: a value the module
+cannot know, true on some machines and false on others, written as though it were a constant. The
+module already knew how to do better a few lines away — the mesh's own address range is named there
+as something the machine fills in.
+
+## What was done
+
+The module declares the log its own jail reads, created once and never touched again, since what
+grows in it is the service's and the rotation the module already ships is what keeps it small. And
+it bans through the action it ships itself, which every machine here can run, which was already in
+use by the other jail on all four, and which covers a container's published port as well as the
+host's own.
+
+All four machines now run it, with both jails, and a ban lands on each — verified by banning and
+unbanning a documentation address on every one.
+
+## What is still true
+
+**Nothing would have caught either fault before it shipped.** The control plane reads a manifest, not
+a machine; `ufw` and `/var/log/…` are strings in a file it has no way to evaluate. The host could in
+principle be asked whether a declared program exists, but no resource says "this file names a command
+that must be there", so there is nothing to check.
+
+**Two machines' bans from before this are stale rules in the old front-end**, which the service no
+longer knows about and will never lift. They reject two addresses for ever. Harmless, and a reminder
+that changing how a module enforces something leaves what it already enforced behind.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- What does a service resource's health mean for a module whose work is event-driven? A unit being
+  active is the weakest claim available, and four of this mesh's modules are of that kind.
+- Should a declaration be able to say that a resource depends on a program, so the machine can refuse
+  what it cannot carry out rather than reporting success?
+- Where should the packet filter a module bans through come from — the module's own choice, as now,
+  or the seat that owns the machine's filtering?
@@ -0,0 +1,74 @@
+---
+status: resolved
+opened: 2026-09-28
+located-in: [mesh-controller internal/catalogue]
+fixed-by: mesh-controller — a machine says which networks it routes and the derived filter forwards them, their guests keeping address and name service ([ADR 0137](../../02-DECISIONS/0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md)).
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 137 — Converging a machine cut off its own guests, and nothing said so
+
+## What was observed
+
+A workstation was flipped from adopted to converged, so the mesh's derived filter replaced what was
+there. The flip reported success, the machine reported that it had applied its declaration, and every
+surface of the mesh read green.
+
+A container on one of that machine's networks could no longer reach anything:
+
+```
+192.168.64.2/20
+OUTBOUND BLOCKED
+```
+
+Five of the machine's container networks were affected, and every network its test beds create. The
+reason is in the filter's forward chain, which denies by default and then allows two ranges:
+
+```
+ip saddr 172.16.0.0/12 accept   # the container runtime's bridge networks
+ip saddr 192.168.128.0/17 accept # the networks its compose files are given
+```
+
+Those two are constants in the controller. The machine's guests were allocated from neither: its
+compose networks from other parts of `192.168/16`, and each test bed a fresh `10.x/24`. So the rules
+were correct for a machine whose runtime was left at its defaults, and a guess on this one.
+
+Two further things were closed by the same flip, and for the same reason nobody saw them: a guest asks
+its host for an address over DHCP and for names over DNS, both of which arrive at the input chain,
+where no module had declared them.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**The preview could not have warned.** It lists what the machine reported as *listening*, and says so
+honestly: it ends with a line that traffic the machine routes is "not previewed". What it did not say
+is that routing was about to be denied by default, or which ranges would survive. An operator reading
+a 350-line preview approves what it shows.
+
+**It is the second time today that a constant stood in for something the mesh cannot know.** The
+intrusion-prevention module named a firewall front-end two machines do not have
+([issue 136](../136-a-module-may-name-a-program-the-machine-does-not-have/00-report.md)), and the
+filter names the address ranges one runtime happens to use. Both were true where they were written and
+silently false elsewhere.
+
+**And the code already knew.** The comment above those two lines says a machine configured otherwise
+"needs this to say so — which is a thing the mesh cannot derive and a reason this list is named here
+rather than computed". The gap was documented at the point where it was introduced, and the way to say
+it was never built. A comment naming a missing mechanism is a rule that is not enforced.
+
+## What was done
+
+A machine says which networks it routes; the filter forwards them and admits their guests' address and
+name service. Added to the runtime's defaults rather than replacing them, so a machine that names one
+range keeps the others. Node-level, because the machine routes them and the module that loads the
+filter may be replaced. The converge preview now says what a machine routes, and what it will keep
+forwarding if it says nothing.
+
+## What is still true
+
+**The flip is still the moment a machine's unmanaged services close.** That is what converging means
+and the preview names each one. This issue is not about the ports that were meant to close; it is about
+the ones nothing could name.
+
+**Egress is still not previewed per network.** The preview says which ranges will be forwarded, not
+which of the machine's guests sit inside them. Deriving that would need the machine to report its
+bridges, and a bed's bridge does not exist until the bed runs.
@@ -0,0 +1,56 @@
+---
+status: open
+opened: 2026-09-28
+located-in: [mesh-controller internal/catalogue, mesh-catalog]
+fixed-by:
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 138 — Two modules claim one seat and are not interchangeable, and nothing says so
+
+## What was observed
+
+Three modules claim the node-scoped uplink seat: one for each network manager a machine here might
+run. [ADR 0117](../../02-DECISIONS/0117-a-machines-uplink-is-a-seat.md) gives each of them the same
+job — ask the manager the machine already runs to leave the resolver file alone and to leave the mesh's
+interface alone — and deliberately keeps the machine's own links out of the mesh's hands.
+
+A seat means one holder and an interchangeable holder. These are interchangeable in what they *ask*
+and not in what they *do*:
+
+- None installs, enables, starts or stops the manager. That is on purpose: stopping it takes every
+  link down, including the mesh's own way in.
+- None carries an address, a route or a wireless credential, for the same reason.
+- **Nothing checks that the module holding the seat names the manager the machine is actually
+  running.** Assigning the systemd-networkd holder to a machine running NetworkManager writes a file
+  for a daemon that is inactive and disabled, the seat reports held, and the two things the seat
+  exists to arrange are arranged for nobody. NetworkManager goes back to rewriting the resolver file
+  on every lease, which is the failure the module's own comment describes.
+
+The machine reports which service manager and which units are active, so the fact needed to catch this
+is already in the report the mesh holds.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**A seat is the mesh's promise that a role is filled.** If the holder can be a module for software
+that is not running, the seat says a role is filled while nothing fills it — and the surface that
+would tell an operator says "held".
+
+**It is the same shape as two faults found the same day.** A module named a firewall front-end the
+machine does not have ([issue 136](../136-a-module-may-name-a-program-the-machine-does-not-have/00-report.md)),
+and the filter named address ranges one runtime happens to use
+([issue 137](../137-converging-a-machine-cut-off-its-own-guests/00-report.md)). Each is a claim about
+the machine that nothing on the machine checks.
+
+**And it decides whether the seat is worth having.** Either the holder must match what the machine
+runs, which is a condition the mesh can check from the report it already has, or the holders must be
+able to switch the manager, which ADR 0117 refuses for a reason that has not changed.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- Should a seat's conditions of holding include a capability the machine reports, so a holder naming
+  absent or inactive software is refused rather than recorded?
+- Is "the uplink" one seat at all, if its holders are three dialects of the same two requests? The
+  alternative is one module that speaks whichever dialect the machine needs, chosen from the report.
+- What should happen on a machine that switches manager afterwards? The seat would then be held by the
+  wrong module, and the machine is the only place that knows.
@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
+---
+status: open
+opened: 2026-09-28
+located-in: [mesh-controller internal/catalogue]
+fixed-by:
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 139 — An internal route name resolves to the consumer's node, not the one that serves it
+
+## What was observed
+
+A module that requires a route is given two names: a public one composed under the serving node's
+domain, and an internal one composed under the consumer's own machine — `<label>.<node>.internal`.
+
+The two are published differently:
+
+- The **public** name is written into every machine's hosts file at the address of the node whose
+  proxy answers it. The mesh computes that deliberately, so any container resolving a routed name
+  reaches the proxy.
+- The **internal** name is resolved by the machine's own resolver, which answers every name under
+  `<node>.internal` with that node's address — the consumer's, because the name was composed from it.
+
+Where the proxy runs beside the consumer these are the same machine, which is every case on this mesh
+today, and both names work. Measured on 2026-09-28: the internal name of a service on the control node
+answers with a certificate from the mesh's internal authority, and the public name with one from the
+public authority.
+
+Where the proxy is on another machine they disagree. The internal name sends the client to a machine
+that runs no proxy and has nothing listening on the port, while the public name sends it to the one
+that does.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**It is latent exactly where the mesh is heading.** `route` is provided mesh-wide precisely so a
+module can be routed by a proxy on another machine. The first module assigned that way gets an
+internal name that does not work, and the public one that does — with no error anywhere, because both
+names resolve.
+
+**A per-machine name is what an operator will reach for.** `<service>.<machine>.internal` reads like a
+promise that the service on that machine is reachable there, and the wildcard makes every such name
+resolve whether or not anything answers.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- Should the internal name be composed under the serving node, like the public one, or should it stay
+  the consumer's and be published at the serving node's address like the public name is?
+- Is a per-node route holder the real answer — a proxy on every machine that serves its own names —
+  and if so, is `route` still one mesh-wide provision or a node-scoped seat with a mesh-wide fallback?
+- What certifies the name in either case? The certificate is obtained by whoever terminates TLS, and
+  that is the question above in another form.
@@ -0,0 +1,79 @@
+---
+status: located
+opened: 2026-09-28
+located-in:
+  - mesh-controller internal/catalogue/manifest.go
+  - mesh-controller internal/catalogue/filtering.go
+  - mesh-controller internal/catalogue/declaration.go
+  - mesh-controller examples/route-proxy
+  - mesh-catalog (every routed module manifest)
+fixed-by:
+amended-design: 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/08-connectivity.md
+---
+
+# 140 — An endpoint's reach is not declared, so three mechanisms each decide it separately
+
+## What was observed
+
+Preparing to converge the mesh's control-node — the last machine still running the firewall it
+had before the mesh — the question came up for one module: the forge serves git over ssh, and that
+port must stay reachable from outside the private network. Where is that said?
+
+The manifest declares the port with a source of `mesh`, so the derived filter would close it to
+everything but the private network. Looking for the place an assignment says otherwise, there are
+two per-node settings keys: one that gives a module's declared port a machine port, and one that
+overrides a declared port's source. The second has exactly one caller — the function that builds
+the node's filter rules. Nothing else in the control plane reads it.
+
+A module's routed endpoint is declared somewhere else entirely: a route contribution naming a label
+and a port. It says nothing about reach. The proxy composes a **public** name and an **internal**
+name for every route it is given, and obtains a certificate for each from a different authority.
+Measured on that machine the same day: an identity provider's public name signed by the public
+authority for 90 days, its internal name signed by the mesh's own intermediate for 24 hours and
+renewed daily. Both names exist, and both certificates, because the proxy makes every name it can.
+No assignment asked for either.
+
+So the forge's ssh endpoint has a firewall source and nothing else — no name, no certificate, and no
+way to say it should be public other than a key the filter alone reads. And the forge's web endpoint
+has two names and two certificates that nobody requested.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**Reach is stated twice, in two vocabularies, in two places that cannot disagree out loud.** A port
+may be exposed to anywhere while the module contributes no public route; a public route may be served
+for a module whose own listen is private. Nothing reconciles the pair or refuses it. Each mechanism
+is separately defensible and the combination is unstated.
+
+**The vocabulary belongs to the filter, not to reachability.** *Public, internal, or both* cannot be
+expressed. A source of `anywhere` is one rule on one chain; it says nothing about which names should
+exist or which authority should sign them. So "this endpoint must not be public" has no way to be
+written, and is therefore enforced by nothing — while a public certificate for that very name is
+obtained automatically.
+
+**An endpoint is not a thing in the model.** A module has ports, and separately it has routes.
+Nothing binds a port to a name to a certificate, which is why three mechanisms each decide reach on
+their own and none of them is wrong. This is
+[ADR 0045](../../02-DECISIONS/0045-a-machine-firewall-is-the-sum-of-what-it-listens-on.md)'s fault
+one level up: that record closed "a declaration that reads as a restriction and restricts nothing"
+for the packet filter. Here the declaration is absent altogether and the mechanisms guess.
+
+**It blocks the certificate work.** The open question recorded for certificates — a name that must
+not be public needs either DNS-01 or the internal authority only — cannot be answered while no
+assignment states whether a name should be public. Neither can expiry reporting, revocation, or what
+happens to a name when a machine leaves: all of them need to know which names were *meant*.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- Should an assignment name each of a module's endpoints, bind it to a node-level port, and state
+  whether it is reachable publicly, internally or both — with the filter, the proxy's names and the
+  certificate authority all derived from that one statement?
+- What is an endpoint that is neither routed nor certified? Git over ssh is public reach with no name
+  and no certificate; the model has to hold that without inventing one.
+- Are the two existing settings keys the same statement, half-built? If so, is this a new declaration
+  or the completion of theirs?
+- Does an internal-only endpoint get a certificate at all, and from which authority — and does that
+  settle [issue 129](../129-nothing-makes-a-machine-trust-the-meshs-authority/00-report.md), where nothing
+  installs the mesh's own root?
+- Does declaring reach per assignment also settle
+  [issue 139](../139-an-internal-route-name-resolves-to-the-consumers-node/00-report.md), where an
+  internal name resolves to the consumer's machine instead of the one serving the endpoint?
@@ -0,0 +1,88 @@
+---
+status: located
+opened: 2026-09-28
+located-in:
+  - mesh-controller internal/catalogue/filtering.go
+  - mesh-host internal/apply
+fixed-by:
+amended-design: 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/08-connectivity.md
+---
+
+# 141 — The forward chain does not follow the modules, though the modules declare their networks
+
+## What was observed
+
+[ADR 0137](../../02-DECISIONS/0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes.md), decided the same
+week, gave a machine a way to say which networks it routes for its guests, because the derived
+filter's forward chain had until then allowed two ranges named as constants in the control plane's
+own source — the container runtime's default bridge pool, and half of the pool its compose files
+are given.
+
+Checking the last machine still to be converged, the same fault was found to be live there, and the
+declaration needed to work around it turned out to be wrong in kind.
+
+That machine hosts twenty-one container networks. Nine fall inside the runtime's bridge pool and
+are forwarded. Twelve sit in the other private range, and **six of those fall below the lower bound
+of the constant**, so the flip would have cut their guests off exactly as it did on the workstation
+that produced 0137.
+
+Naming a range to cover the six was the obvious move, and is what 0137 provides for. But of those
+six networks, **four are networks the mesh's own modules declare** — they appear as network
+resources in the node's plan, created by the host because a module asked for them — and **two are
+leftovers of the predecessor**, compose networks of services the mesh does not run. A range wide
+enough to keep the four would have forwarded the two as well: a firewall widened by hand to protect
+networks that should not exist.
+
+The mesh already knows which of the twenty-one are its own. It made them.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**The node's configuration is supposed to follow the modules assigned to it.** That is the mesh's
+founding shape — the machine runs modules, and its files, its filter and its accounts are composed
+from what runs there. The forward chain is the one derived thing that does not: it consults two
+constants and, since 0137, a list a person types. A module added tomorrow brings a network the filter
+will not forward; a module deprecated leaves a range in the list that outlives it.
+
+**A typed range cannot distinguish the mesh's networks from what was left behind.** It is stated in
+addresses, and addresses are what the runtime allocates, so the only honest declaration is one wide
+enough to include whatever else the runtime has handed out. The derivation is narrower than anything
+a person can safely write, because it names networks rather than ranges.
+
+**0137 rejected deriving this, and was right about what it rejected.** It considered deriving the
+list from *what the machine reports* and refused, on two grounds: a test bed creates its bridge
+between one declaration and the next, and a filter that follows whatever appeared on the machine is a
+firewall that widens itself. Deriving from the **declaration** is neither. The set is known before
+the network exists, because a module declared it; and it cannot widen itself, because only a network
+some module asked for is ever forwarded. What remains genuinely for a machine to say is guests no
+module declares — a test bed's pool — which is a much smaller residue than the list as it stands.
+
+**The gap is invisible in the one place that should show it.** The converge preview lists what
+*listens*, and routing is not a listener. It says in one line what the machine routes, and a reader
+has to know the runtime's allocations to tell whether that line is sufficient. On the machine
+measured here it read as though nothing needed saying.
+
+## What was decided
+
+*2026-09-28, later the same day.* The answer is not a better list. The question in the first open
+item below — should the chain be derived from the networks the modules declare — was answered *no*,
+after a converged machine's rendered rules were read: the chain blocks everything passing through the
+machine and then allows its own guests back by listing their addresses. Every route to a correct list
+fails, because the mesh has no position on a container reaching outward in the first place. The filter
+now constrains what arrives from **outside** the machine and says nothing about what did not, and a
+machine says which of its links face outside — one reported fact instead of a list. See
+[ADR 0140](../../02-DECISIONS/0140-the-filter-constrains-what-arrives-from-outside.md), which
+supersedes both 0137 and the first attempt at answering this.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- Should the forward chain be derived from the network resources the node's modules declare, with the
+  host resolving each declared network to its address the way it already resolves a container by name?
+  The controller cannot render the address itself: a module's network resource carries a name, and the
+  runtime allocates the subnet at creation.
+- What remains of `node networks` once that exists — only guests no module declares, such as a test
+  bed's pool? And should it then be named for that, rather than for all routing?
+- The runtime's own default bridge, which containers attach to when no module network is named, is
+  not a module's network. Is it derived from the machine, declared by the module that owns the
+  runtime, or left as the one constant?
+- Should the preview say which of a machine's networks are the mesh's and which are not, so a range
+  that exists to protect a leftover is visible as such?
@@ -0,0 +1,76 @@
+---
+status: located
+opened: 2026-09-29
+located-in:
+  - mesh-host internal/upgrade
+  - mesh-host cmd/mesh-host
+  - mesh-controller (no build source for the host; no resource delivers it)
+fixed-by:
+amended-design: 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/05-the-node-host.md
+---
+
+# 142 — The host is the one thing the mesh does not deliver
+
+## What was observed
+
+A change to the host was merged and could not reach any machine without a person copying a file.
+
+Checked on the mesh of four machines, 2026-09-29:
+
+- **The host is not a build target.** Asked what had been built for it, the control plane answered
+  `nothing has been built for mesh-host`. A merge on the forge builds every changed module and the
+  control plane itself, because the control plane is a module. The host is not one, and nothing
+  builds it.
+- **No declaration delivers it.** No resource kind names an executable to place on a machine, and
+  nothing on a machine fetches one.
+- **The half that recovers from a bad host exists and is unused.** `internal/upgrade` can report that
+  the executable this process started from has been replaced on disk, and records which version last
+  completed a reconcile so a shell script can roll back a host that will not start. The launcher reads
+  that record and rolls back. But `Replaced()` is called by nothing except its own tests — the
+  recovery is wired and the delivery was never built.
+- **Every machine runs a byte-identical binary, stamped by hand.** All four carry the same size and
+  the same timestamp, from the last time somebody built it on a workstation and copied it out. No
+  package owns the file.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**The component that implements updating is the one thing not updated.** The mesh's stated shape is
+that a push produces the right builds and they reach the machines running them with nobody asking. It
+is true of every module and of the control plane. It is false for the host, which is what applies all
+of them.
+
+**It is a bootstrap problem being answered by a person.** The host cannot be an ordinary module
+because the host is what applies modules; a module that replaces the thing applying it has to survive
+its own replacement. That is a real difficulty, and the work already done — noticing that the
+executable changed, recording a known-good version, a launcher that rolls back — is the hard half of
+solving it. What is missing is the easy half, and its absence makes the hard half dead code.
+
+**A hand-copied binary has no record anywhere.** Nothing says which version a machine runs, so
+nothing can say a machine is behind, and the mesh's own account of itself — every machine current with
+its source — cannot include the host. Four machines agreeing today is luck, not a property.
+
+**And it silently gates any change that starts in the host.** A change that needs the host to report
+something new cannot be rolled out by merging it: the control plane must wait for a person, and until
+then it either refuses what depends on the new report or renders something wrong. That cost is paid by
+every future change of this shape, and it was paid today.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- How is the host delivered without being applied by itself? A candidate shape: the host is built like
+  anything else, published as an artifact, and the *running* host fetches and stages the next one, then
+  stands aside — which is what `Replaced()` was written for and what the launcher's rollback already
+  covers.
+- **Should this ride the bus, rather than becoming a mechanism of its own?** Everything else that
+  reaches a machine already does: a declaration is sent over it, a report comes back over it, and a
+  build announces what it produced on it, which is how a module's new version reaches the machines
+  running it. A host build announcing itself the same way, consumed by the host already running,
+  would make this the existing mechanism pointed at one more artifact rather than a second way of
+  delivering things. It would also give the machine somewhere to say which host it is running, on the
+  report it already sends.
+- What records which version of the host a machine runs, so "behind" is answerable? Nothing does now.
+- Does the host's version belong in its report, beside the other facts a machine states about itself?
+- Who decides when a machine takes a new host — the mesh, on a build, or an operator per machine as
+  with converging? The rollback path means a bad host costs a reconcile rather than a machine, which
+  argues for the former.
+- Does the same gap apply to the launcher and the units beside the binary, which are also files no
+  declaration names?
@@ -0,0 +1,102 @@
+---
+status: located
+opened: 2026-09-29
+located-in:
+  - mesh-host internal/apply/opening.go (retireFirewall)
+  - mesh-host internal/apply/apply.go (the condition it is called under)
+fixed-by:
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 143 — Converging a machine does not retire the firewall it found, and says it does
+
+## What was observed
+
+The control-node was converged on 2026-09-29, the first machine with a found firewall to be flipped —
+the two converged before it had none.
+
+The preview said, and the flip repeated:
+
+```
+the found firewall (ufw) is disabled, never flushed: its configuration stays on disk
+...
+sent: the host loads the mesh's filter and disables the firewall it found
+```
+
+The mesh then reported the node `converged`, 372 resources applied, nothing failed. Afterwards, on the
+machine:
+
+```
+systemctl is-enabled ufw   -> enabled
+systemctl is-active  ufw   -> active
+```
+
+*Corrected 2026-09-29, an hour later, from reading the host rather than the declaration.* **The first
+account of this was wrong.** It said the declaration carries no resource that would disable the found
+firewall, and that the sentence was printed by the command with nothing implementing it. The
+declaration indeed carries no such resource — but the mechanism was never meant to be one. It is a
+step in the host's own apply, `retireFirewall`, and it exists, is careful, and is strict: it refuses to
+retire anything until it has read back from the machine that the mesh's own table is loaded, it records
+the forward policies first so a half-done retirement can be retried, and it verifies ufw reports
+inactive afterwards.
+
+What is established is narrower and stranger than "nothing implements it":
+
+- ufw was **active and enabled two minutes after the flip**, and the flip had reported the node
+  converged with 372 resources applied and nothing failed.
+- The machine's own record now reads `disabled_by_mesh: true` — but it was written by a reconcile
+  *after* an operator disabled ufw by hand, roughly fifty minutes later. A reconcile found ufw already
+  inactive, asked it to be inactive, read that back, and recorded that the mesh had done it.
+- So the step did not take effect at the flip, and the machine's record now says it did.
+
+The candidates are named rather than chosen, because the evidence does not separate them: the step is
+called only when the apply had no failures, and a skipped step is silent; the mesh's table is loaded by
+a service in the same apply, so whether it was loaded *at the moment the step asked* is an ordering
+question; and the host's own detail lines do not reach the journal, so what it decided is not
+recoverable after the fact.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**It is a stated behaviour that does not happen, reported as success** — the fault this repository
+exists to catch, and
+[ADR 0100](../../02-DECISIONS/0100-a-node-in-use-is-adopted-before-it-is-converged.md) states it as
+part of what the flip *is*: "loads the mesh's derived filter in place of its refusal-only table, and
+retires the found firewall by disabling it, never by flushing".
+
+**It could only be found on the first machine that had one.** The two machines converged before this
+had no firewall to retire, so the step had never run, and nothing reported that it had not. That is
+the same shape as [issue 136](../136-a-module-may-name-a-program-the-machine-does-not-have/00-report.md):
+a step that is silent when it does nothing.
+
+**The machine is left doubly filtered, which is not what either firewall describes.** Every base chain
+at a hook runs and a drop in any is final, so the machine now enforces the *intersection* of the mesh's
+derived filter and a rule set left by the system being replaced. Nothing is broken by that today —
+measured from outside, mail, the proxy and git-over-ssh answer and the databases and admin interfaces
+are refused — but the machine's behaviour is described by neither of the two things claiming to
+describe it, and the stale set includes a rule for a broker that no longer exists.
+
+**And returning the node to adopted would be wrong in the other direction.** ADR 0100 says that
+restores the found firewall by enabling it again; enabling something that was never disabled is
+harmless, but the mesh's belief about which firewall is in force has been wrong in both modes.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- Which side owns retiring it — a resource in the declaration, so it is applied and reported like
+  everything else, or the flip as an act? A resource seems right: the flip is otherwise entirely
+  expressed as one, and an act that only the command performs cannot be re-checked on a later
+  reconcile.
+- What should a reconcile do if the found firewall is enabled again by hand, or by a package update?
+  Convergence is a state, so presumably re-disable it and say so.
+- Should the preview say what it *will* do rather than what it does, until a step exists that does it?
+  The wording was read as evidence twice in one session.
+- Is there a check that a sentence the mesh prints corresponds to something that happened? This is the
+  second time in one session that a printed claim and the machine disagreed.
+- **Why did the step not take effect?** It is called only when the apply had no failures, and being
+  skipped is silent. The mesh's table is loaded by a service in the same apply, so whether it was
+  loaded when the step asked is an ordering question — and ADR 0100 makes loading it first a
+  precondition rather than an expectation.
+- **A step that records the mesh as having done what an operator did is worse than the omission.** The
+  record now says the mesh disabled ufw. Nothing distinguishes "we did this" from "we found it already
+  so". Should it?
+- Why do the host's own detail lines not reach the journal? Everything it decided during the flip is
+  unrecoverable, which is why this account has candidates instead of a cause.
@@ -0,0 +1,84 @@
+---
+status: located
+opened: 2026-09-29
+located-in:
+  - mesh-host internal/apply/opening.go
+  - mesh-controller cmd/mesh-controller (the converge preview)
+fixed-by:
+amended-design:
+---
+
+# 144 — A predecessor's rules outlive the firewall the mesh found, and the mesh cannot see them
+
+## What was observed
+
+The mesh reports one thing about a machine's existing filtering: `firewall found: ufw`. On the
+control-node, ufw was never what filtered the traffic that mattered.
+
+Measured on 2026-09-29, before the machine was converged:
+
+- ufw filters connections *to the machine*. It does not filter connections to a container's published
+  port, which arrive on the forwarded path where the container runtime accepts them before ufw's
+  forward chains are reached. Around thirty ports were published that way.
+- Every one of the mesh's own forwarded openings, converged through ufw, had matched **zero packets** —
+  fifty rules in that chain, none ever matched, while the chain itself had passed 1.6 million
+  established packets. The restrictions read as applied and were inert.
+- What actually kept those ports off the internet was a chain the predecessor installed in the
+  container runtime's own pre-accept hook, allowing the deliberately public ports and the private
+  ranges and dropping the rest on the outward link. Confirmed from outside: the proxy answered, the
+  container manager did not.
+- That chain exists only in the running kernel. The persisted rule file is the distribution's empty
+  default, and nothing on disk recreates the chain.
+
+After the flip, the mesh's own filter is loaded and does cover the forwarded path, so the machine no
+longer depends on that chain. But **the chain is still there**, and it is now the only thing refusing
+two ports the mesh believes are open: the bus and the registry, which
+[ADR 0100](../../02-DECISIONS/0100-a-node-in-use-is-adopted-before-it-is-converged.md) requires be
+reachable from anywhere so a machine can enrol and pull before it has a private-network address. The
+mesh's rendered filter accepts both from anywhere. From outside, both are refused.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**"The firewall found" is a kind, and filtering is not all in one place.** The host identifies one
+front-end and reports it. A machine can carry rules from several sources — the front-end's own, the
+container runtime's, an intrusion-prevention chain, and whatever a predecessor installed directly —
+and the mesh's account of what filters the machine names exactly one of them.
+
+**So adoption's central promise was half-true in both directions.** What the mesh converged through
+the found firewall on the forwarded path did nothing at all, and what did the work was invisible to it.
+A machine was reported as filtered by a mechanism that was not filtering.
+
+**And convergence cannot retire what it cannot see.** Even once
+[issue 143](../143-converging-does-not-retire-the-firewall-it-found/00-report.md) is fixed and the found
+firewall is disabled, this chain remains, silently narrowing the machine below what the mesh's own
+filter says. A rule the mesh did not write, cannot list, and will not remove — which today breaks the
+enrolment path the design guarantees.
+
+**The safe direction is not the same as the correct one.** Being more closed than intended broke nothing
+visible, which is exactly why it went unnoticed for as long as the mesh has been on this machine.
+
+## What it cost, measured later the same day
+
+*2026-09-29.* The predecessor's chain was removed, and something it had been carrying went with it. It
+admitted the private ranges wholesale, which is how a container on the machine reached a port declared
+for the private network — the mesh's own filter admits the machines' overlay addresses, and a container
+comes from a bridge. Every module that reached another by the machine's own name had been relying on the
+predecessor's rule without anybody knowing.
+
+That is [issue 145](../145-a-machine-reads-healthy-while-its-modules-cannot-reach-each-other/00-report.md),
+and it ran for eleven hours while the mesh reported the machine healthy. The filter is fixed. What this
+adds to the account here is that "the machine is more closed than the mesh believes" was not the
+harmless direction after all — it was harmless for everything reached from outside, and an outage for
+everything reached from within.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- Should the host report every place the machine filters from, rather than one kind — the front-end,
+  the runtime's hooks, and any chain it does not recognise, named so a person can look?
+- What should the mesh do about rules it did not write and does not understand? Reporting them seems
+  right; removing them cannot be, and leaving them silent is what produced this.
+- Does an opening converged through a found firewall need a check that it can actually take effect?
+  Fifty rules matching nothing would have been visible from the counters at any point.
+- Is the bus and the registry being reachable from anywhere still what the mesh wants on a machine that
+  faces the internet? The design says yes, for enrolment. It deserves asking on its own rather than
+  being answered by a leftover.
@@ -0,0 +1,101 @@
+---
+status: located
+opened: 2026-09-29
+located-in:
+  - mesh-controller internal/catalogue/filtering.go (fixed for this instance)
+  - mesh-controller (what status reports, and what it does not ask)
+fixed-by:
+amended-design: 03-DESIGN/01-to-be/10-delivery.md
+---
+
+# 145 — A machine reads healthy while its modules cannot reach each other
+
+## What was observed
+
+Converging the control-node closed every path by which a module on that machine reached another module
+by the machine's own name. It ran for **eleven hours**. Throughout, the mesh answered:
+
+```
+4 machine(s), all doing what they were told, all heard from,
+running what the mesh would send them, and every module current with its source
+```
+
+What was actually happening, from one affected module's own log:
+
+```
+Doctrine\DBAL\Exception: Failed to connect to the database:
+SQLSTATE[08006] connection to server at "novox.internal" (10.10.0.1), port 6852 failed: timeout expired
+```
+
+6,154 of them, beginning at the minute of the flip. The web application accepted TCP connections and
+never answered an HTTP request; a client waited 35 seconds and gave up. Confirmed from a throwaway
+container on the machine: neither the store nor the forge was reachable on the machine's own address.
+
+The cause is [issue 144](../144-the-predecessors-rules-outlive-the-firewall-it-was-found-as/00-report.md)'s
+sibling and is fixed: a port declared reachable from the private network admitted the machines' own
+overlay addresses, and a container on the machine comes from a bridge address, matching none of them.
+What this issue is about is the eleven hours.
+
+**Nothing the mesh reports would have shown it.** Every check the mesh makes passed, because every
+check the mesh makes is about the relationship between the mesh and a machine:
+
+- the machine applied what it was sent, and said so;
+- its declaration digest matches what the mesh would send;
+- every module's source commit matches what the mesh holds;
+- every container the declaration names is running.
+
+None of those asks whether a module can reach what it requires. The mesh knows precisely who requires
+what — it composes the grants — and never checks that the grant works.
+
+**Nor would an operator's usual look.** The ports were probed from outside and behaved correctly; the
+routed services answered; a container's egress to the internet worked. Those are the paths a person
+checks after changing a firewall, and all three were fine. The broken path was module-to-module over
+the machine's own name, which nothing routine exercises.
+
+## Why it matters beyond this instance
+
+**A mesh that composes a dependency and never tests it can only report on itself.** Every provision the
+mesh grants is a claim that a consumer can reach a provider. The mesh asserts that claim, delivers
+credentials for it, and has no mechanism that ever finds out. "Every module current with its source"
+is a statement about bytes, not about whether anything works.
+
+**The failure was silent in the direction that hides longest.** A service that will not start is
+noticed. A service that starts, accepts connections and then cannot reach its database serves errors
+under a healthy-looking process, and the machine's own report says the container is running — which it
+is.
+
+**It is the same shape as [issue 136](../136-a-module-may-name-a-program-the-machine-does-not-have/00-report.md),
+one level up.** There, a module named a program the machine lacked and everything reported success.
+Here, the mesh granted a provision the filter refused and everything reported success. Both are the
+distance between a declaration and the machine, and in both cases the report was about the declaration.
+
+**And the eleven hours are the measurement, not the bug.** The filter fault was one line and is fixed.
+What is not fixed is that nothing in the mesh would have told anybody.
+
+## What was decided
+
+*2026-09-29, the same day.* The first open question below — should a grant be checked, and from where —
+is answered by [ADR 0143](../../02-DECISIONS/0143-a-consumer-verifies-the-grant-it-is-given.md): the
+consumer verifies it, from its own network position, because that is the only position that answers what
+a grant claims. A check run by the control plane or by the machine would have passed throughout this
+outage, since the rule in force admitted the machines' own addresses and it was the containers that were
+refused.
+
+The remaining questions below stand, and the record answers two of them: one failure is not news, only
+consecutive ones, and a grant that cannot be checked is reported unchecked rather than assumed good.
+
+## Open questions
+
+- Should a grant be checked? The mesh knows the consumer, the provider, the address and the port, so a
+  reachability check is expressible — but from where: the consumer's machine, as part of a reconcile,
+  or the provider's?
+- What would it cost to be wrong in the other direction? A check that reports a provision broken while
+  it works is worse than none, because it trains a reader to ignore the report. A provider restarting is
+  ordinary; a consumer between containers is ordinary.
+- What should `status` say about a machine whose modules cannot reach each other? It currently has one
+  vocabulary for "heard from and current", and that sentence was true the whole time.
+- Is there a cheaper signal than a probe? The affected module was logging the failure 6,154 times. The
+  mesh reads no module's logs and arguably should not — but something a module could *say* about its
+  own provisions would have surfaced this in minutes.
+- Does the same blindness apply to the other direction — a provider that lost a consumer's grant and
+  is refusing it? Nothing checks that either.
Author	SHA1	Message	Date
jschoubben	ddfd62edf6	ADR 0143: a consumer verifies the grant it is given A grant is four facts and a credential — the provision, the machine, the port, and who the consumer is when it connects — and it is the whole mechanism by which anything in the mesh reaches anything else. The mesh asserted it and never found out whether it was true. Issue 145 is what that cost: eleven hours of 'every module current with its source' while a module could not reach its database. The consumer verifies it, from its own network position. Not the control plane, which reaches the address by a path no consumer uses. Not the machine, whose own packets carried a source address the filter admitted while every container's was refused — so a host-side check would have passed throughout the outage it exists to catch. That is inference from the rule that was loaded, stated as such. A connection and nothing more; speaking each provision's protocol would be a second implementation of every provision. One failure is not news, only consecutive ones, and the count is reported rather than the last attempt. A consumer that is not running reads unchecked, which is a different sentence from broken. What it costs to be wrong is the constraint on all of it: a check that calls a working provision broken trains a reader to ignore the report.	2026-09-29 13:07:18 +02:00
mesh-admin	f65664640a	Merge pull request 'Issue 145: a machine reads healthy while its modules cannot reach each other' (#179 ) from issue/145-healthy-while-broken into main	2026-09-29 10:37:10 +00:00
jschoubben	492ac7be18	Issue 145: a machine reads healthy while its modules cannot reach each other Converging the control node closed every path by which a module reached another by the machine's own name, and it ran for eleven hours while the mesh answered 'all doing what they were told, all heard from, running what the mesh would send them, and every module current with its source'. 6,154 database failures in one module's log, beginning at the minute of the flip. The service accepted TCP and never answered HTTP. Every check the mesh makes passed, because every check the mesh makes is about the relationship between the mesh and a machine — applied, current, containers running. None asks whether a module can reach what it requires, though the mesh composes every grant and so knows exactly who requires what. The filter fault is fixed. The eleven hours are the measurement, not the bug. Also records on 144 that 'more closed than the mesh believes' was harmless only for what is reached from outside, and an outage for what is reached from within.	2026-09-29 12:37:08 +02:00
mesh-admin	5ac77e3cef	Merge pull request 'ADR 0138: reach asks for names on a routed endpoint' (#178 ) from decision/0138-insight-reach-and-the-proxy into main	2026-09-29 00:50:28 +00:00
jschoubben	a619022c35	ADR 0138: a progressive insight — reach asks for names on a routed endpoint The record says internal and public each mean something to the filter. For an endpoint the proxy serves, the second half is wrong, and ADR 0045 said so first: a public service is exposed through the proxy, listening from the mesh, not by opening its own port. Found by trying to express one real module, not by review — routed name public because browsers post to it, machine port private because it serves a dashboard in cleartext. Under one value for both, saying public would have reopened a port an operator had just closed. Measured the same evening: the routed name answered from the internet over TLS while the port was refused from the same place. Corrects a fact. One statement per endpoint with three things derived from it stands; the filter column applies to an unrouted endpoint.	2026-09-29 02:50:25 +02:00
mesh-admin	49c065c204	Merge pull request 'Issue 143: correct the diagnosis' (#177 ) from issue/143-corrected-diagnosis into main	2026-09-29 00:33:13 +00:00
jschoubben	ddb3980f09	Issue 143: correct the diagnosis — the step exists and did not fire The first account said the declaration carries no resource that would disable the found firewall and that nothing implemented the sentence the flip prints. Wrong: the mechanism is a step in the host's own apply, retireFirewall, and it is careful — it reads back that the mesh's table is loaded before retiring anything, records the forward policies first, and verifies ufw reports inactive afterwards. What is established: ufw was active and enabled two minutes after a flip that reported the node converged with nothing failed; and the machine's record now reads disabled_by_mesh: true, written by a reconcile fifty minutes later that found ufw already inactive because an operator had disabled it by hand. So the step did not take effect and the record says it did. The candidates are named rather than chosen — the step is skipped silently when the apply has any failure, the mesh's table is loaded by a service in the same apply so ordering is open, and the host's detail lines do not reach the journal, which is why this has candidates instead of a cause.	2026-09-29 02:33:10 +02:00
mesh-admin	75a8f6abc7	Merge pull request 'Issues 143 and 144: the found firewall is neither retired nor all of it' (#176 ) from issue/143-and-144-the-found-firewall into main	2026-09-28 23:36:10 +00:00
jschoubben	862253518f	Issues 143 and 144: the found firewall is neither retired nor all of it Both found by converging the control node — the first machine with a firewall to flip, since the two before it had none. 143: the preview and the flip both say the found firewall is disabled. The node reported converged, 372 resources applied, nothing failed, and ufw is still enabled and active. A converged node's declaration carries no resource that would disable it; the sentence is printed by the command and nothing implements it. 144: ufw was never what filtered the traffic that mattered there. Fifty forwarded openings converged through it had matched zero packets, while a chain the predecessor installed in the container runtime's pre-accept hook did the work — in memory only, recreated by nothing. The mesh's filter now covers that path, so the machine no longer depends on it, but the chain remains and is the only thing refusing the bus and the registry, which the design requires reachable from anywhere so a machine can enrol before it has a private address.	2026-09-29 01:36:08 +02:00
mesh-admin	51ef3eb7e2	Merge pull request 'ADR 0142: the mesh delivers its own components as binaries' (#175 ) from decision/0142-mesh-delivers-its-own-components into main	2026-09-28 22:51:44 +00:00
jschoubben	346e613995	ADR 0142: the mesh delivers its own components as binaries, not container images Measured: the host is a binary somebody copied to four machines, owned by no package and built by nothing, while the controller, catalogue, builder and vault are container images publishing no ports at all. Same language, same project, same kind of work, delivered two ways — and the difference is not a judgement about either, it is that images are the only delivery that works. What it costs: genesis must raise a container runtime before the control plane can exist; updating the control plane goes through a registry the control plane runs; a host change cannot be rolled out at all; and compiling the language the mesh is written in is not a capability of the builder, so the controller is built from a hand-written Dockerfile — the incantation the bundle toolchain exists to abolish. Third-party software stays a container: the store, the registry, the broker are somebody else's build. The container runtime stays on the machine for modules. What changes is that the control plane no longer needs it to exist. The receiving half is already built and tested (ADR 0141). Staged: compile Go, an artifact names its target, deliver a binary, the host first, then the rest, genesis last.	2026-09-29 00:51:42 +02:00
mesh-admin	25ca9898d5	Merge pull request 'ADR 0141: a progressive insight on what delivery costs' (#174 ) from decision/0141-progressive-insight-on-delivery into main	2026-09-28 22:32:17 +00:00
jschoubben	709c095387	ADR 0141: a progressive insight — the delivery is not 'nothing new' The record claimed a version reaches a machine as an ordinary archive with nothing new needed. Two things it needs do not exist: no toolchain can compile the host (the list is typescript and python, and the control plane, also Go, is built as an image from a Dockerfile instead), and nothing interpolates a built version into a resource path, so nothing can ask for .../versions/<version>/. The decision, the options weighed and every consequence stand — the host half is merged and tested. What was understated was the cost, so it is corrected in place and dated rather than superseded.	2026-09-29 00:32:14 +02:00
mesh-admin	c262de3833	Merge pull request 'ADR 0141: the host delivers its own successor' (#173 ) from decision/0141-the-host-delivers-its-own-successor into main	2026-09-28 22:22:28 +00:00
jschoubben	a815433214	ADR 0141: the host delivers its own successor, and versions live side by side The supervision was already right — a clean exit means the host stood aside and the launcher runs what is on disk, failures are counted, and a rollback happens at the limit. Two things made it dead code: nothing told the running host a successor was waiting, and the rollback resolved its known-good version through pacman, which no machine here uses and which two of three operating systems do not have. Keeping a version rather than a path was the clue. Versions live side by side in directories named for them; the newest runs; the running one stands aside between reconciles; a reconcile that completes records itself and retires what is older than its predecessor; rollback starts that predecessor. No new resource kind and nothing new on the bus — an archive already fetches by digest, and the path written is never the path executing. Answers issue 142.	2026-09-29 00:22:04 +02:00
mesh-admin	61dc90e508	Merge pull request 'Issue 142: the host is the one thing the mesh does not deliver' (#172 ) from issue/142-the-host-is-not-delivered into main	2026-09-28 22:03:58 +00:00
jschoubben	a7cf5c0c1b	Issue 142: the host is the one thing the mesh does not deliver A host change merged yesterday reached no machine without a person copying a file. The host is not a build target, no declaration delivers it, and the half that recovers from a bad host — noticing the executable changed, a known-good record, a launcher that rolls back — is written, tested and called by nothing. All four machines run a byte-identical hand-copied binary that no package owns and no record names, so nothing can say a machine is behind. Found because ADR 0140 needs the machine to report a new fact, and merging that could not roll it out.	2026-09-29 00:03:41 +02:00
mesh-admin	c6f86ae935	Merge pull request 'ADR 0140: the filter constrains what arrives from outside' (#171 ) from decision/0140-filter-constrains-what-arrives-from-outside into main	2026-09-28 21:32:10 +00:00
jschoubben	1aeb4fe8d8	ADR 0140: the filter constrains what arrives from outside, and says nothing about a machine's own guests Reading a converged machine's rendered rules showed the cause: the chain blocks everything passing through and then allows the machine's own containers back by listing their address ranges. 0137 made that list typeable and 0139 tried to generate it; both refined a list that should not exist, because the mesh has no position on a container reaching outward. Constrain what arrives from outside, allow what did not, and let the machine report which links face outside — one fact instead of a list. Ports keep following the modules unchanged. The records check now allows one record to supersede several, and stops requiring a withdrawn record's own citations to be live.	2026-09-28 23:31:50 +02:00
mesh-admin	08108b569d	Merge pull request 'ADRs 0138 and 0139: an endpoint's reach, and networks forwarded because a module declared them' (#170 ) from decision/0138-endpoint-reach-and-0139-declared-networks into main	2026-09-28 21:03:49 +00:00
jschoubben	14ff89fa40	ADRs 0138 and 0139: an assignment binds an endpoint and says how far it reaches, and a network is forwarded because a module declared it Both follow from the same rule the mesh is built on — a node's configuration is composed from the modules assigned to it. Reach was settled separately by the filter, the proxy's names and the certificate authority, so "this must not be public" could not be written; it becomes one value on the assignment that all three read. And the forward chain consulted two constants plus a typed list although modules already declare their networks; it now forwards what they declared, with the host rendering the addresses it allocated.	2026-09-28 23:03:32 +02:00
mesh-admin	2126e7b2cb	Merge pull request 'Issues 140 and 141: an endpoint's reach, and a forward chain that does not follow the modules' (#169 ) from issue/140-endpoint-reach-and-141-forward-chain into main	2026-09-28 20:58:03 +00:00
jschoubben	dcdfcf104e	Issues 140 and 141: an endpoint's reach is declared nowhere, and the forward chain follows constants instead of the modules Found preparing the control-node's convergence. Reach is settled independently by the filter, the proxy's names and the certificate authority, so "this must not be public" cannot be written and a public certificate is obtained regardless. And the forward chain allows two hardcoded ranges plus a typed list, though the mesh already knows which networks exist because its own modules declared them — a range wide enough to keep four of them would have forwarded two predecessor leftovers too.	2026-09-28 22:57:38 +02:00
mesh-admin	d23ace1646	Merge pull request 'Issues 138 and 139' (#168 ) from issue/138-the-uplink-seat-and-139-an-internal-route-name into main	2026-09-28 19:46:22 +00:00
jschoubben	5dbde0b13a	Issues 138 and 139: a seat with interchangeable holders that are not, and an internal route name that resolves to the wrong machine	2026-09-28 21:46:20 +02:00
mesh-admin	db3868e2b0	Merge pull request 'ADR 0137: a machine says which networks it routes' (#167 ) from decision/0137-a-machine-says-which-networks-it-routes into main	2026-09-28 19:31:03 +00:00
jschoubben	05039c4f10	ADR 0137: a machine says which networks it routes, and issue 137 is how that was found	2026-09-28 21:31:01 +02:00
mesh-admin	b7bf601ca4	Merge pull request 'Issue 136: a module may name a program the machine does not have' (#166 ) from issue/136-a-module-may-name-a-program-the-machine-lacks into main	2026-09-28 18:50:37 +00:00
jschoubben	bff32e3370	Issue 136: a module may name a program the machine does not have, and everything reports success	2026-09-28 20:50:35 +02:00
mesh-admin	d6b62387f2	Merge pull request 'Issue 135: a container's mesh names are not compared' (#165 ) from issue/135-a-containers-mesh-names into main	2026-09-28 15:19:37 +00:00
jschoubben	4789624857	Issue 135: a container's mesh names are not compared, so a moved address is never noticed One container restarted 2286 times over five days while the mesh reported the machine as doing what it was told. Its overlay address was five days out of date: the host compares a container by a digest of its spec, and the mesh's names were not in it, so a container whose image and files never changed was left alone holding a name that no longer resolved. Forty-eight others were current only because something else had recreated them. The same fault as issue 045, in the field that was left out. Resolved by putting the names in the digest.	2026-09-28 17:19:35 +02:00
mesh-admin	e00862e317	Merge pull request 'ADR 0112 is accepted, and issue 134 records what it is not yet' (#164 ) from decision/0112-accepted-and-issue-134 into main	2026-09-28 15:12:15 +00:00