hq/03-DESIGN/01-to-be/09-the-node-lifecycle.md

layer, status, code, updated, decisions

layer	status	code	updated	decisions
to-be	designed		2026-08-27	02-DECISIONS/0004-a-node-and-how-it-joins.md 02-DECISIONS/0005-the-node-host.md 02-DECISIONS/0004-a-node-and-how-it-joins.md 02-DECISIONS/0004-a-node-and-how-it-joins.md 02-DECISIONS/0005-the-node-host.md 02-DECISIONS/0004-a-node-and-how-it-joins.md 02-DECISIONS/0005-the-node-host.md 02-DECISIONS/0010-delivery.md 02-DECISIONS/0005-the-node-host.md 02-DECISIONS/0005-the-node-host.md 02-DECISIONS/0005-the-node-host.md

The node lifecycle

How a Linux machine becomes a node, stays one, and stops being one.

05-the-node-host.md describes the host as a component. This describes it as something that runs for years on a machine somebody else also uses — which is where the questions that were not being asked live.

The states

   unmanaged ──install──► hosted ──enrol──► enrolled ⇄ disconnected
                            ▲                  │
                            └─────release──────┘

State	Has	Can
unmanaged	nothing of ours	— it is a Linux machine
hosted	the host, no identity	apply a local file, apply its bundle
enrolled	identity, link, store	everything; this is a node
disconnected	identity, store, no link	hold its machine in the last state it was told

Only enrolled and disconnected are nodes, and they are the same node in two situations rather than two kinds of thing (ADR 0004). hosted is not a node — it is a machine with a program on it that has not been told which mesh it belongs to.

There is no state for the first node. That is the point of ADR 0004: the first node walks the same path, in an unusual order.

---

unmanaged → hosted: installing

In the machine's own idiom, because the package manager and the init file are the system's (ADR 0005):

# Alpine — the intended first node
apk add nox-mesh-host
rc-update add nox-mesh-host && rc-service nox-mesh-host start

# Arch
pacman -S nox-mesh-host
systemctl enable --now nox-mesh-host

Two lines each, and the init file behind them is four (ADR 0005) — it says run the launcher at boot and nothing else, so a third system is transcription rather than a port.

Or, where there is no repository to install from:

curl -fsSL https://<release>/mesh-host-<system>-<version>-x86_64.tar.gz | tar -xz -C /usr/local/bin

The binary is per system as well as per architecture, because two of its appliers are.

The tarball must never acquire a dependency, because the mesh's own package repository is hosted on the mesh. Any route that needs the mesh in order to install the thing that joins the mesh is a circle — unusable on a first node, and unusable by whoever is repairing a mesh that is down, which is exactly when it is wanted.

The unit it installs

[Unit]
Description=Novox Mesh node host
After=network-online.target
Wants=network-online.target

[Service]
ExecStart=/usr/lib/nox-mesh-host/launch
Restart=always
RestartSec=5s
StateDirectory=mesh-host

[Install]
WantedBy=multi-user.target

Two lines of policy, and that is deliberate (ADR 0005). The init is asked to start this at boot and start it again if it exits, and nothing else. Both are expressible in OpenRC, runit, s6 and an Android init.rc, so porting this file is transcription rather than design.

Restart=always and not on-failure: the host restarts onto a new binary by exiting cleanly, so a supervisor that only restarts on failure would leave every upgraded node stopped, having successfully upgraded.

What the init does not do is decide when to give up. Counting failed starts and rolling back lives in the launcher, where it can be tested — OnFailure= in a unit file can only be read and hoped for, and it is the one thing that has to work on a machine where nothing else does.

The package owns this file. The host never does. It manages service resources, and its own unit is a service — the temptation is obvious and it ends with a host stopping itself half way through an apply, leaving a machine with nothing running to fix it. A declaration naming the host's own unit is refused, and that refusal is a test rather than a convention.

The line to hold: the installation owns the host; the host owns everything else.

At this point the host is running and doing nothing. It has no identity, so there is nobody to link to and nothing to apply. It answers profile, inventory and version, and waits.

---

hosted → enrolled: the ordinary case

nox-mesh-host enrol --token <one-time token>

The token carries four things and is carried by a person (ADR 0004): the broker's address, the fingerprint to expect, the control plane's signing identity, and the right to join once.

The fourth is the one this document listed three of. A node connects to the broker and takes instruction from the control plane behind it, and those are two different identities. Pinning only the broker would make the control plane's authority transitive — a compromised broker could then forge declarations, which, since the host applies whatever the link delivers, is the whole machine. So the transport is verified once at connect, and each declaration is verified by its signature, every time.

What happens, in order:

1. the host dials the broker at the address in the token, over the underlay;
2. it checks the broker's certificate against the pinned fingerprint — before sending anything;
3. it presents the one-time secret and its own public key, which the mesh records;
4. it reports its profile and inventory upward;
5. the control plane decides what this machine should be, and sends a declaration;
6. the host applies it, reads back, and reports.

Step 4 is the one that is easy to miss and is what makes step 5 possible. The control plane cannot decide what a machine should run without knowing what it can run — a graphical session, a container runtime, an architecture. The profile is not a diagnostic; it is the input.

The node computes nothing about the mesh. It needs one peer to reach; the whole overlay is derived centrally and pushed down (ADR 0004, 08-connectivity.md).

The first declaration is the overlay, and nothing else

The mesh makes a node reachable before it makes it useful. Step 5 is not one declaration carrying everything the node will ever run. It is two, in order:

first    the overlay — this node's address, its keys, its peers, its names
then     everything else — packages, containers, services, files

Three reasons, and the third is the one that matters when something goes wrong:

• It is forced. A node cannot join the overlay before contacting the mesh, because its address and peer set are assigned — it generates a keypair, publishes the public half, and receives the rest (08-connectivity.md). So the overlay is the first thing the mesh can give it, and it should be.
• It is what ADR 0004 already says: a joining node does the minimum to be reachable, and nothing else.
• It is the way back in. Once the overlay is up, the node is reachable over it — by SSH, by anything. If a later declaration breaks the machine, there is a route to it that does not depend on the mesh's control path working. Sending a large first declaration risks a node that is broken and unreachable at the same time, and those two failures are much worse together than separately.

Reachable is not the same as having a control surface

Worth stating plainly, because the two rules read as a contradiction and are not.

every node reaches every other node	over the overlay — SSH, services, ordinary traffic. This is the point of having one
every node consumes from the broker	its own queue, over its own outbound connection (ADR 0002)
nothing dials a node to control it	the host has no inbound control surface (ADR 0004)

ADR 0004 is about the control channel, not about network reachability. What it forbids is a listening thing that accepts instructions and changes the machine. A node being reachable on the overlay — the whole purpose of the overlay — is untouched by it, and so is a person opening a shell on it.

The distinction is who can tell this machine what to be: only the control plane, only over the link the node opened, only in declarations of known shape.

---

hosted → enrolled: the first node

The same path, with the mesh built in the middle of it.

# 1 — raise the substrate and the control plane from the carried bundle
nox-mesh-host reconcile

# 2 — the control plane now exists, and issues the first token
mesh-control token issue

# 3 — the machine joins the mesh it just raised
nox-mesh-host enrol --token <token>

Step 1 is the bootstrap from 07-the-substrate.md: a container runtime, then PostgreSQL, then the database, then the schema, then the control plane. It needs no identity because nothing is being asked of anyone — the host is applying a declaration it already carries, to the machine it is already on.

After step 3 the first node is not special in any way, which is the property adopt.sh and the bootstrap script never had. Its specialness lasted two commands.

And enrolment is exercised on node one. The path every other node depends on is walked immediately, against a control plane on the same machine, rather than being written and first used months later on node two.

---

Two kinds of host

Everything above assumes a machine with an init that runs the host at boot. Not every machine has one (ADR 0005).

	resident	episodic
examples	Alpine, Arch	Android
started by	an init, at boot	whatever the platform allows
supervised by	the launcher	nothing — the platform decides when it runs
the link	held open	opened while it runs
being stopped	shutdown, or a failure	ordinary
shapes	all six	file, directory, action
can be the first node	yes	no

An episodic host being killed is disconnection, not failure. That is ADR 0004 doing the work it was written for: reachability is state, not class. Everything the design already does for a laptop that closes — an authoritative local store, reconcile on start, last heard from reported without an alarm — is what an episodic host needs, at a shorter period.

It cannot be the first node, and that is not a limitation to work around. Every step of raising a substrate is a package, a container or an action against one, and a partial host refuses the first two. So mesh-host-android bundle returns a file that says so rather than an empty placeholder waiting to be filled in.

Two things this changes for anything reading the mesh. Last heard from is a much weaker signal on an episodic host — a healthy phone looks like a dead server — so a reader has to know which kind it is looking at. And a declaration may take a long time to land, which makes ADR 0010's separation of outstanding from failed load-bearing rather than tidy.

Still open: how an episodic host is started in practice — an APK with a foreground service, or Termux with its boot addon — and, first, what an Android node is for. A device that can write files and run commands is not a workload host; it is a presence, or somewhere an agent runs. Building the start mechanism before deciding that would be building it for nobody.

Adoption: what happens to what is already there

Adoption is not a state. It is what the first apply does when it is told to own something a machine already has (research 012).

A candidate machine is not empty. It has a package manager, probably a container runtime, configuration somebody chose. ADR 0005 says the host never touches what it did not create — adoption is the deliberate act of taking ownership of exactly that, so it is a companion to that rule rather than an exception:

never, unless adoption made it the host's — with adoption explicit, recorded, and visible in what the host says it owns.

Three rules, all earned:

The original is kept before anything is written. A one-way door on a working machine is not an installation. This is a never rule, and it earns that from the worst loss in this record — a tool acting on a path it did not own.

On conflict, the machine's configuration wins. Adoption always completes; the conflict is flagged and reconciled afterwards. A machine in use keeps working exactly as it did.

Adoption produces a briefing, not just a result: what it found, what it took over, and what it could not resolve — with each line marked ok, kept, unknown or failed, and the overall outcome derived from the worst line rather than stated alongside it.

---

enrolled: what running actually looks like

Changes are pushed, not polled. A declaration arrives as a message on the link and the host applies it then. The link is already open and outbound (ADR 0002, ADR 0004) — asking it repeatedly whether anything has changed would be slower to land and constant traffic to learn nothing.

Trigger	Kind
a declaration arrives	pushed	the ordinary path — this is how a change lands
start	event	the machine may have changed while nothing was running
reconnect	event	declarations may have been missed
every ten minutes	periodic	drift, and only drift

Why the timer cannot be an event. Drift is change the mesh did not make — somebody edited a managed file, a distribution upgrade replaced a config, a container was stopped by hand. Nothing will ever publish a message about it, because whatever did it is not part of the mesh. Only looking finds it.

So the two periodic things do different jobs and should not be conflated:

	direction	answers
reconcile timer	local, looks at the machine	does this machine still match what it was told?
heartbeat	upward, reports to the mesh	is this node still here, and what is it running?

The heartbeat is what makes silence mean something. A node with nothing to do sends nothing; without a heartbeat that is indistinguishable from a node that stopped. With one, last heard from is a fact beside every node — which is what how long disconnected reports and what ADR 0005 exists because a stuck node cannot send.

Rebooting mid-apply is safe by construction. The store records each resource after it worked (ADR 0018), so a host that dies half way through comes back, finds the completed ones already matching, and applies the rest. The rule that exists to stop the host lying about what it did also makes it crash-safe.

Updating what the node holds

An ordinary declaration. Someone assigns a module; the control plane recomputes what that node should be and sends it; the host applies the difference and removes what is no longer declared.

Removal is not symmetric, and the asymmetry is the design:

	on being undeclared
file, directory	removed
container	removed — the host created it
service	stopped; the unit file is not the host's to delete
package	left installed — forgotten, not removed
action	forgotten — it left nothing the host owns

The host removes what it made and leaves what it merely configured. Uninstalling a container runtime because a declaration changed would stop every container on the node.

---

enrolled ⇄ disconnected

Not a failure. Not degraded. A situation (ADR 0004).

A disconnected node keeps reconciling against its own store, so it goes on holding its machine in the last state it was told to hold. A laptop shut for a week comes back and reconciles; it does not come back and ask what it is.

What it cannot do: receive new declarations, be granted anything new, or have its certificates renewed — which is the clock on the whole arrangement (ADR 0006).

How long it has been disconnected is a fact the mesh must hold, and nothing holds it today. Without it, a node running last month's assignments looks exactly like one that is current.

---

Rescue

The host is still a command-line tool, and that is what rescue is:

nox-mesh-host owned                     # what do you think you own?
nox-mesh-host apply repair.json         # apply something by hand, locally
nox-mesh-host profile                   # what can this machine actually do?

apply FILE accepts actions, because someone who can write that file and run this binary as root can already do anything it can. The bound in ADR 0005 is on what a remote party may push, not on what a person at the machine may do.

This replaces the three hand-run scripts that exist today — first node, joining, rescue — with one binary that has always been the same binary.

---

enrolled → hosted: retiring a node

Two cases, and they are genuinely different.

Graceful. The control plane sends a final declaration that names nothing. The host removes what it owns by the table above, reports, and drops its identity. The machine keeps the host installed and is back to hosted. Nothing is left behind that anybody has to remember.

The node is gone. Stolen, dead, or simply unreachable. The mesh cannot tell it anything, and by ADR 0004 it will go on reconciling its last declaration forever.

That is the honest consequence of making disconnection ordinary, and the answer is not to make the host expire. It is that the node holds nothing that outlives revocation: its identity is its own, and every grant it holds is a per-node credential at the provider (ADR 0004, ADR 0008). Revoking is done at the database, the broker, the object store — not on the machine.

So a lost node keeps running and stops being able to reach anything. That is the best available outcome and it is worth stating plainly rather than implying the mesh can reach out and switch a machine off, which it cannot and should not be able to.

---

Losing the store

Worth its own section because the failure is quiet.

If /var/lib/mesh-host/state.json is lost — a reinstall, a replaced disk — the host loses its record of what it owns, not its ability to work. It re-enrols, receives the declaration again, and re-applies it.

Without help, what does not come back is removal. Resources applied under an older declaration, whose record is gone, become unowned: the host will not touch them, because it never touches what it did not create. They would sit there, unmanaged, indefinitely.

So the mesh keeps a copy of what each node reports it owns, refreshed on every apply report, and hands it back on a rebuild — see Protecting the store. The store remains locally authoritative for operating; the copy exists only for this.

---

Upgrading the host

The host is delivered like anything else (ADR 0010), and this is worth walking through because tier 0 looks like it should be special and is not.

push to mesh-host
   │
   ├─ build      go build → one static binary
   ├─ publish    packaged, into the mesh's own package repository
   └─ deploy     each node's declaration now names the new version
                     │
                     └─ pushed to each node; the host applies it on arrival
                        (a node that is offline gets it on reconnect)

Compared with today. The current pipeline's third silo runs once per node and sends each one a command to install and start. That is where the as-is records a package install that 404ed while the job went green. Here deploy is one write — the declaration changes — and the installing is the host's ordinary work, which reads back before it records anything.

The repository is reachable because a declaration made it so. A file resource writes the package manager's configuration pointing at the mesh's repository; a package resource names the version. Both ordinary shapes, applied by the same host. No new resource type, which is the test of whether this is really uniform.

The restart

1  pacman installs the new binary          the running process is untouched —
                                           Unix keeps the running executable's inode
2  the host verifies the new binary runs   `nox-mesh-host version`, as a subprocess
3  it finishes the apply and reports       never mid-way
4  it exits 0                              having finished, not having been stopped
5  the launcher starts it again            on the new binary — it supervises the host
                                           rather than exec'ing it (ADR 0005), so this
                                           needs nothing from the init
6  the new host reconciles on start        trigger 1, confirming the machine still matches

Step 2 is the one to insist on. A package can install a binary that does not execute here — wrong architecture, a libc that is not present. Running it once before committing to a restart turns "the node never came back" into "the apply failed and said why". It is the same read-back rule the rest of the host already follows, applied to the one resource that is the host.

The host never asks the service manager to restart it. That is the host stopping itself part-way through an apply. It stops by finishing.

A fleet upgrades over an interval, not at an instant, because each node restarts when its own apply completes. A node must therefore report the version it is running, not the one installed — otherwise the mesh believes an upgrade landed at step 1.

A version that crashes on start rolls itself back (ADR 0005).

What the init starts is not the host but a launcher, and the launcher is where the policy lives:

init ──► nox-mesh-host-launch ──► nox-mesh-host
              ├─ halted?                     say so and stop; a person has to look
              ├─ count this start attempt
              ├─ too many, not yet rolled back?   roll back, then start
              ├─ too many, already rolled back?   halt — the machine is the problem
              └─ otherwise                        start the host

It reinstalls the version recorded in known-good, which the host wrote the last time it completed a reconcile — and the host clears the attempt counter at the same moment, for the same reason.

The launcher rather than the init's own features, because this is the one thing that must work on a machine where nothing else does. A shell script with a counter can be run against a stub package manager and asserted; OnFailure= in a unit file can only be read and hoped for. It also means the init is asked for nothing but start and restart, which every init can do.

It rolls back once. If the previous version also fails, the node stops in a failed state rather than flapping between two binaries. A second failure is a different diagnosis: the machine is the problem, not the binary.

Why this matters more than it looks. A host that will not start cannot link, and a node that is not linking looks exactly like a machine somebody switched off — which is the one condition this design has deliberately decided not to alarm on. Without rollback, a bad release reaches every node, each one goes quiet, and the mesh reports a fleet of sleeping laptops.

---

Details that are easy to get wrong

Each of these has a wrong answer that looks reasonable, which is why they are written down rather than left to be worked out.

Re-enrolling as the same node

A token is issued for a node record, and that is where a re-enrolment is decided.

mesh-control token issue --node workstation   # this machine is that node again
mesh-control token issue --new                # a machine the mesh has not seen

The host does not need to know which it is. It presents a token and receives an identity; what that identity is bound to was decided when the token was made.

Issuing a re-enrolment token revokes the previous identity for that node, and that is not housekeeping. Two live identities for one node record is the stolen-laptop case with the thief's credentials still valid — the case retiring a node says is answered by revocation.

Protecting the store

The host reports what it owns, and the mesh keeps the last report.

The store stays locally authoritative — a node operates from its own copy and needs nothing to do so (ADR 0004). What changes is that the mesh holds a copy for recovery, refreshed on every apply report.

So a node that loses its state file re-enrols, receives both the declaration and the record of what it previously owned, and can then remove what is no longer declared. The orphans that used to be permanently stranded are recoverable.

This is a backup, never a source. The host never reads it to decide anything; it is handed back only on a store rebuild, and a node that disagrees with it wins, because the node is the one that can see the machine.

How long disconnected, and who is told

The mesh records last contact per node; the node records time since it last linked. Both, because they answer different questions — the mesh's is have I heard from it, the node's is how stale am I, and a node reporting the second on reconnect is how a long absence gets noticed at all.

No threshold and no alarm. A laptop switched off for three weeks is doing nothing wrong, and a mesh that alerted on it would train people to ignore the alert. It is a reported fact — last seen 4 days ago beside every node — and what counts as too long is a judgement for whoever is looking, not a constant in the design.

Whether a failed adoption line blocks

Adoption always completes. A node with a failed line is a node, and it is not eligible for assignment until the failure is resolved.

Flags inform, they do not block holds for conflicts — where the mesh chose deliberately and the machine still works. A failure is different in kind: not we chose but we could not, and it gets different treatment for that reason.

The distinction is between joining and being given work. Refusing to join makes a machine in use unadoptable, which is the outcome that rule exists to prevent. Placing work on a machine where something the mesh needed never happened produces a module that is installed and does not work — 04-ISSUES/007 arriving from the adoption side.

What a briefing is

A structured document with prose in it, held in the node's state and reported to the mesh. It is the first thing a session on a new node reads, which makes it an interface.

outcome    kept                      derived from the worst line below, never stated separately
node       workstation
adopted    2026-08-27T14:02Z

  ok       container runtime      docker 27.0, adopted; original config kept at <path>
  kept     storage driver         machine has overlay2, the mesh wanted btrfs — machine wins
  unknown  firewall ruleset       could not be parsed
  failed   package database       locked by another process

what to look at
  The storage driver disagreement is preference, not requirement, so nothing is broken.
  The package database was locked; nothing was installed. Re-run adoption when it is free.

The outcome is computed from the lines, so a briefing cannot read fine while carrying a failed line. Two independently written fields drift, and that drift is the fault this repository keeps cataloguing.

Where the enrolment token comes from

mesh-control token issue prints it once, to the person running it. Single-use, and it expires whether used or not (ADR 0004).

It is carried by hand — read off a screen, pasted into a terminal. That is the design rather than a gap in it: its authenticity comes from the channel it travelled, which is what lets a node verify a mesh it has never spoken to (ADR 0004). A token emailed, committed, or dropped in shared storage has lost the only property that makes it worth carrying.

On the first node it comes from the control plane that was raised two commands ago, which is the same command against a mesh that is one machine old.

---

Still open

• Automatic rollback of a bad host version. Resolved by ADR 0005: a launcher counts failed starts and rolls back — shipped by the package, not the host binary, because a binary that will not start cannot recover itself. It rolls back once; a second failure means the machine is the problem, not the binary.
• How a previous declaration is retained and chosen, which is what rollback of anything else would use (ADR 0010).
• A node returning after months applies a very large jump in one go. Correct, and untested.