jschoubben 784a5a6514 A network-checker module: dial what the mesh claims, from where the callers are
The mesh asserts three things are callable (ADR 0144) — what runs on the same
machine, another machine's service exposed to the private network, and another
machine's service exposed publicly — and has never checked any of them. The first
was broken for eleven hours while the mesh reported every machine healthy.

This runs on every machine, on the cadence the mesh already has, in its own
container: the same position every other module calls from. Not the host and not
the control plane, both of which reach these addresses by paths no ordinary caller
uses and would have passed throughout that outage.

**Its probe is its own endpoint, and that is the point.** Declared reachable over
the private network like any other service, so it is admitted by exactly the rule
that governs every internally-exposed service and fails when that rule is wrong.
The tempting target is a service every machine has, and those are the ones never
closed — ssh above all — which would have passed while the thing that actually
broke was a service exposed to the private network.

It resolves before it dials and says which failed, because a name that does not
resolve and a port that does not answer have different owners. One failure is not
a fault: a machine rebooting is ordinary, so a path is broken after consecutive
runs and the count travels with the result. It reports and repairs nothing.

novox/hq ADR 0145. Eight tests; the consecutive-failure logic proved by reverting
it once. Not yet registered or assigned.
2026-09-29 13:44:16 +02:00

mesh-catalog

The Novox Mesh catalogue. The modules the mesh builds, provisions and runs — as manifests, one per module under modules/.

This is data, not a control-plane concern. The manifests describe what a module is: what it provides, what it requires, the seats it claims, the resources the host applies for it. The engine that reads them — parsing, eligibility resolution, sealing, declaration emission — lives in the control plane (novox/mesh-controller, internal/catalogue), which consumes this repository as a build source. The host (novox/mesh-host) applies the declarations the control plane emits. Neither is here.

What a module is, and is not

A module is one thing the mesh can run, named once, described completely by its manifest. A manifest names its image (pinned by digest), the resources the host owns for it (directories, files, the container, the private network it joins), what it requires from a provider and what it provides to consumers, and the sealed secrets it needs filled on the machine.

  • Core mesh components are not modules. The node host, the foundation, the control-plane contexts and the surfaces are the mesh itself; they ship as their own repositories (mesh-host, mesh-foundation, mesh-controller, mesh-surfaces, mesh-sdk), not from here.
  • Standalone applications are not here either. A larger application lives in its own repository with its manifest at the root, registered with the mesh as a build source (novox/hq ADR 0010). This repository holds the modules the mesh maintains as its shared catalogue; an application the mesh merely hosts keeps its manifest beside its own code.

So there is one home for the catalogue the mesh owns, and every application that runs on the mesh rather than being of it carries its own — both reach the pipeline the same way, as a registered source.

Layout

modules/<name>.json      one manifest per module

Flat, because the catalogue's shape carries no meaning: a module is found by its name and described by its manifest, and what relates two modules — a shared seat, a claim, a provider/consumer edge — is data inside the manifests, not a directory the tree encodes (novox/hq, the domain-grouping question closed in favour of seats, claims and tags).

The manifest contract

The shape a manifest must satisfy is owned by the control plane's catalogue engine and is what validates a manifest before a machine ever sees it — a stray key, a consumer contributing the wrong provision field, an image that nothing builds. That validation belongs with this repository and is being re-homed here from mesh-controller; until it is, the pipeline is the gate — it builds each module and refuses a manifest it cannot resolve.

Where the reasoning lives

Design and decisions are in novox/hq:

  • 02-DECISIONS/0002-everything-is-a-module.md — one unit, no second mechanism
  • 02-DECISIONS/0010-applications-live-in-their-own-repository.md — why applications are not here
  • 02-DECISIONS/0030-the-repository-structure.md — the repositories, and the open tier-4 question this repository answers
  • 03-DESIGN/00-as-is/10-module-catalogue.md — the catalogue's shape, and what it records
S
Description
Novox Mesh — the catalogue. Module manifests the mesh builds, provisions and runs. Data, not a control-plane concern.
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