---
status: located
opened: 2026-09-27
located-in: [mesh-controller cmd/mesh-controller/push.go]
---

# A declaration that shrinks to empty is skipped, so the node keeps what it should drop

## What was observed

Fixing the broker-opening leak (the foundation port scoped to the broker's host) made ace's
declaration compose to **zero resources** — ace is adopted with nothing assigned, and the
stray opening was its only resource. `push ace` then printed `ace is assigned nothing —
skipped` and sent nothing. ace goes on holding `adoption.opening-tcp-5671-incoming` in its
ufw, because it was never told the resource is gone.

`composeEach` (push.go) skips any node whose composed declaration has no resources. That is
right for a node that never had anything. It is wrong for a node that **had** resources and
now composes to none: the empty declaration is the correction, and skipping it leaves the last
non-empty one in force forever.

## Why it matters

Any adopted node whose openings (or other baseline resources) are all removed keeps the stale
ones until something else pushes a non-empty declaration to it. Converge is unaffected — it
composes the full ruleset fresh — so this is an incremental-push gap, not a firewall-safety
one. But "the mesh cannot tell a node to drop its last resource" is a real hole in reconcile.

## The fix, roughly

Send the empty declaration when the node's last-sent declaration was non-empty — i.e. skip
only when empty-and-was-already-empty. Requires push to know (or the host to be told) that the
node held something. Simplest: always send to a placed, enrolled node; let an empty declaration
mean "own nothing", which the host already applies correctly when it receives one.

## Workaround used

On ace, one command drops it permanently (the corrected controller never re-composes it):
`sudo ufw delete allow 5671`. At ace's converge it would clear on its own.