jschoubben
4279e4914b
One green fresh run of the no-fake two-node bed is the proof: node2's consumers open the store and broker the mesh built and adopted, over the overlay. Fixed by mesh-controller PR 29, mesh-catalog PR 26, gated by mesh-lab PR 34.
65 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
65 lines
3.5 KiB
Markdown
---
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status: resolved
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opened: 2026-09-11
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located-in: [mesh-controller, mesh-catalog]
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fixed-by: mesh-controller PR 29 (98aea8b); mesh-catalog PR 26 (1891b09); gated by mesh-lab PR 34
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amended-design: 02-DECISIONS/0082-the-registry-is-reached-by-name-and-trusted-by-the-overlay.md
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---
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# 042 — Nothing gives a node an account for a registry
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## Symptom
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A module names an image in a registry that requires authentication. The machine cannot fetch it:
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```
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pull access denied … authorization failed: no basic auth credentials
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```
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Nothing in the mesh delivers a registry credential to a node. There is no provision for it, no
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field in a manifest for it, and no step in enrolment that establishes one.
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Observed when the lab's own image registry was deleted and machines were given a real path to the
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internet for the first time. Public images fetched normally; the operator's own — in their own
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registry — could not be fetched at all.
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## Why this matters
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**Delivery ends at a node pulling an image, and this is the last step of it.** The whole design
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from source to artifact to machine assumes the final fetch succeeds. It succeeded until now for
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one reason: everything was either public, or came from a registry the harness ran with no
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authentication at all.
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**And it applies to the mesh's own store, not only to somebody else's.** The registry the mesh runs
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is reached over the private network and today asks for nothing. That is a decision — *anything that
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can reach it can read every artifact the mesh holds, and push to it if pushing is open* — but it
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has never been written down as one. It reads as an absence, which is the kind of thing that stays
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true by accident until it is exploited.
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**The mesh already knows how to do this.** A provision grants a consumer a credential, minted by
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the mesh, sealed to the machine, with the plaintext discarded. An account on a registry is exactly
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that shape: the artifact store is already a provision, and a node that must pull from it is already
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a consumer of it. What is missing is not a mechanism but the recognition that pulling is a use of
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the store, not a thing that happens beneath it.
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**It is also a bootstrap question**, which is where it will bite first: the machine that installs a
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mesh pulls the control plane's image before the mesh exists to grant anything
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([ADR 0067](../../02-DECISIONS/0067-genesis-is-a-pivot.md)). Whatever the answer is, it has to
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survive a moment when there is nobody to ask.
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## Open questions
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- **Should the ability to pull be granted like anything else** — the store mints a per-node account,
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seals it to the machine, and the host writes whatever the runtime reads? That would make a node's
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reach into the artifact store follow the same rules as its reach into a database.
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- **What should the mesh's own registry require?** If the answer is "nothing, inside the private
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network", that is defensible and must be *recorded* as the decision it is, with what it assumes
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about who is on that network.
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- **What authenticates a push?** Reading and writing are not the same grant, and a builder that may
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publish is a much stronger thing than a node that may fetch.
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- **What does an operator's own external registry do here?** It is not the mesh's to grant accounts
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on. Is the credential operator-supplied, like any other secret the mesh cannot invent — and if so,
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which module owns it, given that every module pulling from there needs it?
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- **How does any of this work before the mesh exists?** The bootstrap fetches images with no mesh to
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grant a credential, so the first pull is either public, anonymous, or carried.
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