04-ISSUES/152-a-nodes-plan-failure-silently-drops-its-routed-names/00-report.md

@@ -11,9 +11,9 @@ amended-design:
 
 ## What was observed
 
-For at least seventeen minutes after the last operator action, the control-node's host applied all
-327 of its resources every ~6.5 minutes without pause, replacing every container on the machine each
-time — the control plane's own store and registry, the edge proxy, the forge, the directory, mail,
+For twenty-five minutes, and for seventeen of them after the last operator action, the control-node's
+host applied all 327 of its resources every ~6.5 minutes without pause, replacing every container on
+the machine each time — the control plane's own store and registry, the edge proxy, the forge, the directory, mail,
 and the bus the mesh runs on. The forge's web surface answered `502` throughout; load on the machine
 sat near 8. Nothing was converging: each pass ended and the next began four seconds later.
 
@@ -50,7 +50,7 @@ if err != nil {
 A node whose plan cannot be composed *right now* therefore contributes no names — not "the mesh does
 not know", but "the mesh states these names do not exist", to every machine at once.
 
-## Why it cannot recover on its own
+## Why it sustains itself
 
 The loop closes through the control plane's own database:
 
@@ -66,9 +66,19 @@ The loop closes through the control plane's own database:
    mesh: reporting: nats: connection closed`.
 5. Back to 1.
 
-It is stable in its instability: every pass destroys the evidence the next pass needs to decide it
-has nothing to do. Nothing outside the machine has to be wrong for this to continue, and nothing
-about it stops.
+Every pass destroys the evidence the next pass needs to decide it has nothing to do, and nothing
+outside the machine has to be wrong for it to continue.
+
+**It is metastable, not permanent.** It ran from 22:46 to 23:11 — five full replacements of every
+container on the machine — and then stopped on its own, when one pass happened to read the store
+during a window it was up, composed the same roster twice running, and found nothing to do. Load fell
+from 7.8 to 1.7 and the machine returned to its five-minute idle tick.
+
+That it ends by luck is the point, not a mitigation. The exit condition is a race the mesh does not
+control, the operator cannot see, and nothing reports; the same four actions on a slower machine, or
+a larger store, would not have found it. An outage that clears itself after twenty-five minutes and
+five restarts of the forge, the directory and mail is not a smaller fault than one that does not — it
+is the same fault, harder to catch.
 
 ## What it is not