Three faults in one path. A merge rebuilt every module built from the repository, so one change in
a repository holding twenty-six of them meant twenty-six builds. A merge into a repository a module
only *packages* source from rebuilt nothing — two modules are built from the control plane's own
repository and neither had ever been rebuilt when it moved — because the manifest the mesh keeps
carries no build section, so a build now says which repositories it read and the mesh keeps that
beside what it stood on. And a module handed over by hand could record a repository with no
directory inside it, which is a module nothing can ever rebuild (novox/hq 04-ISSUES/131, /132).
A change inside no module's own directory is a change to what they share, and everything built from
that repository is rebuilt: rebuilding too much is the safe direction, because the fault this whole
path exists for is a mesh that believes it is current and is not.
The forge announces what it finds merged, and an old merge surfacing late moved the recorded head
backwards and rebuilt everything built from that repository, once per old merge. A merge made
before the source was last seen is history; one that says nothing about when is taken as news.
The catalogue now carries when each source was last seen. The bus-records test follows #116:
a module's tools are every one under its own name.
The mesh runs on the seat's bus alone (novox/hq ADR 0131, design 28 task 5.5). The old
transport's consume loop, build request, tool ask, management API and account scoping are
deleted, and the bus switch with them; the controller connects to the broker seat and to
nothing else. The store-window tests keep their assertions on a bus-less fake, and the tests
that only made sense for the old transport's in-memory holding go with it.
The decoder named the forge's merge subject as the fourth thing followed and the
list was three long: every message that fell through to that switch panicked the
control plane (2026-09-28). The entry was written and lost between two attempts
at the same edit. A test now walks the list; the composed grants and the genesis
template carry the subject.
The controller follows the forge's merges (novox/hq 04-ISSUES/131). For each
module recorded as built from that repository and branch it records the move to
the merge commit and builds it — bases first, because a module built before the
module it stands on is built against the old one and reports success, and a base
that fails stops what stands on it. Nothing is pushed here: what a finished build
does to the machines running the module stays the upgrade's decision.
Two more things the same ordering gives: `build --behind` builds bases first, and
`build --on <module>` rebuilds everything that stands on a module — the rebuild a
changed base needs, which "behind" does not see because their sources did not
move.
The seams were there and nothing chose a side: serve, push, ask and build all
opened the old bus's connection and declared over its channel, whatever
MESH_BUS_NATS said. So the switch moved every host and left the control plane
unable to follow — "this control plane has no MESH_BROKER_AMQP" with the new bus
named and standing (2026-09-28). That was task 4.3 of design 28, still open.
One place now decides: connectLink reads the switch, refuses both buses named at
once, raises the new bus's streams and this controller's consumers when it is
handed the inventory, and opens the link over whichever bus it is on. Every
caller that sent a declaration or asked a tool through the old channel goes
through the server's bus instead, which the new transport has and the channel is
not. OverNats is that outbound: a declaration is a JetStream publish into the
node's own subject, an event is announced on the subject its name derives to, a
tool is request and reply on the module's tool subject.
Both branches changed the seat set from the same starting point, so every number
collided and every `mesh-*` name existed twice. The trunk's numbers and names win:
this branch's records became 0129/0130 and its migrations 0037/0038, and the
hardcoded rename map gave way to the trunk's `seat_alias` table — a rename is a
row now (ADR 0122), not a recompile.
Three of my checks were wrong and the merge is what showed it:
A seat with an empty protocol is a marker, not an incomplete declaration. Most
node-scoped seats are markers — which module is this machine's packet filter —
and refusing one refused most of the set, the showcase module included. A
mistyped field name is already refused by the parser, so an empty protocol was
written as one deliberately.
A claim on a seat this manifest does not declare is not the parser's to judge. A
module may hold a seat another module declared; that is the whole reason ADR 0126
has callers name the seat and not its provider. Whether the seat exists is a fact
about the catalogue, so the refusal is at registration, where every declaration
is in view.
And a seat may share a name with the provision it delivers. `git`, the npm
registry and the artifact store still do, because renaming a delivering seat
cascades to every consumer requiring it, with a window where a holder stops
resolving mid-flight. The trunk deferred exactly those three on purpose.
Full suite green against a real NATS and store.
Found by asking what merging this would do to the mesh that is actually running — the
only place the question could have been asked, because the tests were green and both
buses were self-consistent.
Moving the build outcome to the role means a catalogue built from the current manifests
listens for the role's name. The catalogue *already running* listens for the module's,
because that is what it was told when it was installed. The two do not meet, so merging
as it stood would have stopped the live mesh's module graph being updated — silently,
since a binding that matches nothing is not an error.
A rename on a live bus needs the publisher and the subscriber to change together, and a
deployment cannot promise which arrives first. So the old bus announces under both names
and the order stops mattering. The module's own name retires with the bus, in step 5's
list; nothing has ever run on the bus being built, so there is no legacy name there and
this doubling has no counterpart.
ADR 0121 carried through to working code. `Builders` is the asking side and
`BuildMachine` the taking side, each with an implementation per bus, and the builder
binary and the `build` command now go through them.
On the bus being built, one publish does what two did. The old bus answered the asker
through a reply queue and announced to an events exchange, because two audiences meant
two topologies. Here the outcome is the role's own event: the asker matches it by the
id its request carried, the controller records it, the catalogue places it in the graph.
So a build machine publishes once, needs a reply queue for nothing, and needs a grant
over nobody's inbox — which is what ruled out the alternatives.
The outcome carries the module name now. Only the manifest says what was built, and on
the old bus the separate announcement carried it; with one message for three readers it
belongs in the result. A failed build names none, because it produced no module version
and the catalogue would otherwise place something that was never made.
Checked against a real server: the whole round trip; a third party on the role's event
hearing the same outcome the asker did, which is the claim the decision rests on; work
leaving the queue once settled, so no second machine repeats it; work submitted with no
machine holding the role waiting instead of failing, and being done when one arrives;
and work a machine handed back coming round again.
One thing I got wrong twice now and have written down where it bit: binding to a
consumer must name that consumer's own filter subject, not the narrower subject the
caller cares about. The client compares the two and refuses anything that is not equal,
with "subject does not match consumer".
**First, a correction: the previous commit went in on a false check.** Its message
says the suite passed; it did not. The check piped `go test` through a filter that
swallowed the failures and then printed "green" regardless. Two tests were failing
when 4de10e3 landed.
What was failing was my own doing. Purging the streams instead of deleting them
(4de10e3) left the *consumers* behind, because deleting a stream takes its
consumers with it and purging does not. A durable push consumer surviving between
tests keeps pushing to a delivery subject the previous test's subscription has gone
from: the messages count as delivered, go nowhere, and the next test waits out its
timeout for an announcement the server believes it already sent. Consumers are now
removed with the purge. Five consecutive clean runs.
`-p 1` stays, because two packages asserting and deleting the same fixed-name
objects on one bus is a real race — but its comment said the cause I had guessed
and not the one I found, so it now says the right thing.
**And delivery was not finished when I said it was.** Nothing filled
`Rendering.BusUsers`, so the composed file would never have reached a node.
`composeBusUsers` closes it: composed per push for the machine holding
`mesh-broker`, never kept, because the list is a function of the mesh's records and
a stored copy could disagree with them while both looked consistent. A user with no
credential is left out and named rather than written as a user without a password —
an ordinary situation with an obvious remedy — but a file with no users at all is
refused, because that bus would refuse every connection in the mesh.
**Minting, on both halves.** A node at enrolment and a module at `module issue`.
Three things differ from a management call and each is the point of the move: the
credential is minted into the mesh's records and becomes usable at the next
composition, so no server need be reachable; the password travels beside the address
rather than inside it, because a credential embedded in a URL leaks into every log
line that prints a connection; and a module's durable consumer is derived from what
it declared rather than named, so it cannot ask for delivery of something it did not
say it consumes.
A node reconnecting may be refused until that composition reaches the machine
running the bus. That is what the host's reconnect backoff is for and it is
survivable by design; waiting for the push would hold an enrolment open for as long
as a declaration takes to apply.
Tested that the switch is a switch: a node enrolling on one bus comes away with a
credential for that bus and none for the other, because one that held both could be
half-moved and nothing would say which half.
The other implementation behind the seam, so the store-window guarantee now has
both: one loop, one message at a time, the same window deciding. What differs is
where a held message lives, and that is the whole point of the move — the AMQP
side keeps an unacknowledged delivery in this process, bounded by the prefetch
and lost if the controller stops; this keeps eight bytes saying when the window
opened, and the message stays the server's.
Checked against a running server, seven claims that reasoning cannot answer: a
report is heard and leaves the work queue; one the store cannot take is naked
with a delay, stays in the stream, and is recorded when the store returns; one
about a superseded declaration is settled without being acted on; one the store
never takes is let go once the bound passes; a heartbeat is heard and nothing is
persisted; and the enrolment answer reaches the address the request carried in
its payload — the test design 25 §2 asks for, so the reason for that field
cannot quietly become folklore.
Three things the wiring forced into the open:
**The controller could not have consumed a module event.** Its permissions
granted no event subject to subscribe and no ack subject on the events stream,
so every announcement would have been redelivered for ever, refused by the list
it already had. Both narrow: each followed subject named, not `mesh.mod.*.>`.
**The controller's consumers are not derived.** It files no manifest, so its
authority cannot come from a declaration that does not exist; they sit beside the
mesh's own streams and are asserted the same way. No max-deliver on CONTROL —
the window's bound is the controller's, and a server that dead-lettered first
would discard the push the stream exists to protect.
**Channels, not callbacks.** The library would run a handler on its own
goroutine, and the window's bookkeeping is unlocked because the AMQP loop never
had two.
The outbound half went behind `Bus` and the transport stopped reaching its
callers; this is the other half, and the larger one. Every handler took
`amqp.Delivery`, so the serving loop could not move to another bus without
moving enrolment, reports, builds, upgrades and catch-up with it in one breath.
`Control` states one message in the mesh's words — took it, dropped it, or held
it for the store — and `Inbound` is where messages come from. The AMQP
implementation is today's loop moved rather than changed: same queues, same
prefetch, same holding, because the mesh is running on it and a bus nothing
speaks yet is no reason to alter the one every node is on.
The window (window.go) is now what decides, instead of the conditions that were
inlined in the loop. Two things that surfaced in the wiring:
**Supersession is asked before the store, not after.** A report about a
declaration the mesh has moved past would otherwise wait out a restarting store
to be written and then overwrite what the node is doing now.
**Half of a report is not about a declaration, and that half is never stale.**
What the machine *is* — the tunnel it took over, the ports its own bundle
holds, what an adopted node found, a node moving its overlay key — reaches the
mesh on a report and nowhere else. A rekey set aside as stale is a node whose
overlay key never moves, and no retry is coming, because the node said it once.
So staleness is asked only of a report that is purely an apply's account.
The one thing holding-in-memory can do that holding-in-the-server cannot is
named rather than hidden: `About` sets aside a held message when a newer one
about the same thing arrives, and the bus being built ignores it because the
digest answers the same question.
Design 25 §2 builds enrolment around carrying the reply subject in the
payload, because a JetStream consumer claims the transport Reply field for
its own ack address. The whole handshake rests on it, so it is checked:
the caller asked for _INBOX.LCr3M83q... and the consumer saw
$JS.ACK.PROBE.probe_consumer... The design was right, and the workaround
is necessary rather than defensive.
Worth having as a test rather than a note: if a future server version
stopped doing this, enrolment would keep working and the reason for the
payload field would quietly become folklore.
Step 3.4. On the new bus there is no reply queue to declare and no
correlation to check: each account is granted one inbox prefix and no
other, so an answer cannot reach the wrong asker. That settles a cost
build.go records having paid — on a shared reply exchange every asker saw
every result, which is why the correlation was checked rather than assumed.
And a tool nobody serves says so at once rather than after the whole wait.
The difference between "that module is down" and "that tool is slow" is the
first thing a person asking wants, and both tests are against a real server
because both are claims about what the server does, not about this code.
RequestBuild stays as it is, and is a different shape on the new bus rather
than the same one: a build takes minutes, so it is work submitted to a
queue with the outcome returning to a reply subject the request carries —
the pattern design 25 §2 already sets for anything crossing a stream. It
touches the builder too, so it goes with that conversion.
introduces
Step 3.4, the consume side's hard part. The guarantee (ADR 0083) is that a
push the controller cannot record because its store is restarting is held
and retried — never dropped, never falsely acknowledged. Keeping the
delivery unacknowledged in memory becomes a nak with a delay: the server
holds it, the controller keeps no list of parked messages, and a controller
that restarts mid-window loses nothing it was holding.
That is a plain win and it introduces one problem. Holding in memory let
the controller drop an older report when a newer one for the same node
arrived, "because acting on it after the newer would undo the newer". A
naked message is the server's and comes back whatever happened meanwhile,
so the older report is redelivered after the newer was applied.
The answer was already in the message. A report carries `Declared`, the
digest of the declaration it is about, which exists because an earlier
attempt to order reports by time lost the race it invited. So supersession
stops being something the controller remembers and becomes something it
checks — the same shape as a node refusing a superseded declaration by
sequence (issue 107): ordering settled by what a message says, not by when
it arrived.
Pure, so the guarantee is testable without a bus, a store or a clock. Nine
tests, including that staleness is decided before the store is waited on —
a redelivery that lost its race must not hold a slot a current message
needs.
Comments framed the new bus by what it replaces — a comparison in almost
every explanation, which reads as though NATS were a variant of the old
thing rather than the mesh's nervous system. Removed throughout, and
OverAMQP becomes OverCurrent: the seam's two sides are the bus the mesh
runs on today and the one being built, not two protocols.
What remains is the client library's own package name, which is its name.
Step 3.4, first half. Every one of these took an *amqp.Channel, so the
transport reached every caller and swapping it meant touching all of them.
The seam turned out to be small — the controller sends exactly two kinds of
message that expect no answer — which is the same measurement that said
this bus could be replaced at all.
Bus is stated in the mesh's words, not a transport's: PublishEvent and
PublishDeclaration. Two implementations, both shipping, because steps 1 to
4 leave every node on AMQP and the NATS one is selected at the rollout.
Both ship is also what makes them comparable: one conformance fixture holds
both to the same envelope, and the NATS one is checked against a real
server reading back from the stream rather than from the code that wrote it.
Still on *amqp.Channel: RequestBuild and Ask, which carry reply-queue
machinery, and the whole consume side — the control loop, enrolment, serve.
Every required header set, each value in the pinned shape, and the subject
derived the same way. Read from the sdk's conformance directory by sibling
path, never copied.
Carries MTU from the reported tunnel (mesh-host#28) through inventory,
the overlay graph's TakeOver, into the generated config's [Interface].
A tuned path keeps its MTU across the takeover instead of regressing to
1420 and hanging transfers no ping would reveal. Two emit tests; a
tunnel with no MTU writes no line.
Review of the ADR 0105 build (hq ADR 0105). Four things it got wrong and one
path it lacked:
- A predecessor spoke's tunnel names one peer, the hub, routed the whole
range; recording refused it and the whole enrolment failed. Range-routed
peers are skipped now — only the hub's peers are ever carried.
- The range and the carried peers were conditions on the node being adopted,
so converging the hub would have renumbered the mesh and dropped the peers
still reaching it. They are facts of the tunnel record now, mode aside; the
takeover alone is declared to an adopted node. Converging the hub is refused
while a carried peer has not enrolled, naming it.
- A push composed a takeover for a hub whose address or endpoint disagreed
with the tunnel, which would have the host stop the found interface and
raise the mesh's where no peer listens. The graph refuses to compose it,
naming both and the placement that fixes it.
- The host's account said taken or not; "found down and the mesh's not up"
read as not taken. Three states now, and an account on every takeover.
- A hub that enrolled before this feature holds a key of its own, and
re-enrolling would rotate every key the mesh sealed credentials to. A node
now rekeys in a report, signed with its identity key over the key it
leaves, the key it takes and the tunnel; the mesh verifies against the live
key, refuses a stale or foreign proof, records key and tunnel, and moves a
hub to the tunnel's address. `overlay show` names the path for a hub that
found no tunnel.
Also: a carried IPv6 peer is routed /128, and identity.ForTest exists so the
link can be tested against a real identity store.
Three readers did not follow a moved foundation port (novox/hq 04-ISSUES/102),
and each took the control-node down in its own way: the control plane's own
store and broker connections, sealed at genesis with the port inside; and every
build the mesh ever recorded, kept as `<registry>:<port>/<module>/<artifact>@…`.
The control plane cannot open its own sealed connections to move a port, and it
cannot bind the store as a consumer would — a binding mints a credential. So its
settings get a third twin, `NAME_PORT`, read on top of the sealed value by the
store, the broker, the management API and the bus connection, and filled into
its container by a placeholder that names a seat, `${seat:mesh-store:5432}`,
from the node's given or mesh-assigned ports — never the manifest's number, and
empty when the mesh has nothing to add, so what genesis wrote stands. A value
that is still a placeholder is nothing said, aloud: the manifest naming it lands
in the next commit, once every control plane that composes it knows it.
A build is now recorded by digest and path — `artifact-store://<module>/<artifact>@…`
— and the store's address is composed in where a reference is used: the
declaration, the trust file, the bases a build is handed, a replay to the
catalogue. Over the network as `<node>.internal:<port>`; on the store's own node
before any network exists — every genesis push before its "network" step — by
loopback. A reference recorded before this, with an address, is re-routed the
same way when the mesh built it. The trust file and every provider's address
come from one derivation: the node's given port, over the mesh's assignment,
over the manifest's number.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/102
On an adopted hub the private network takes over the tunnel it finds rather
than running beside it (hq ADR 0105): two tunnels leave the mesh's unreachable
through the provider's filter, so no machine can ever join.
The node presents the found tunnel when it enrols, under the key it took as
its own; the inventory records it (node.tunnel, tunnel_peer — migration 0031)
and the mesh composes from it: the overlay's range is the adopted tunnel's,
the hub is placed at the tunnel's address on the tunnel's port, and every
peer the tunnel had is carried in the hub's peer list as a peer of the
tunnel, not a node of the mesh, until a node enrols with that key — which
then keeps the address the tunnel had for it. A fresh node never gets an
address the tunnel holds. The hub's declaration tells the host which unit to
take over; the host's account of carrying it is recorded and shown.
Every reader of the range follows the setting; nothing stores it. A found
tunnel under another key is recorded and not adopted, so ADR 0100's
non-overlap rule keeps applying where a tunnel is left running beside the
mesh's. A lab bed and test skeleton for "How it is checked" are under lab/.
A secrets object with one local name delivered no file. Two requirements could share
a local name. secret recover and the export could not tell two locals apart. The
recipe check missed continued lines and read heredoc bodies as bases. repo:tag@digest
kept the tag in the repository. ask now publishes mandatory, so a tool nothing serves
is said at once rather than after the wait.
A module serves tools under an account scoped to exactly that, and nothing else in
the mesh held an account that could ask one. The control plane does: ask publishes
on the RPC exchange with a private reply queue bound under its own name, checks the
correlation, prints the answer, and exits non-zero for a tool that answered with an
error or a module that never answered (novox/hq 04-ISSUES/049, ADR 0095).
secrets: maps a requirement to several files under local names. Each local name is
its own need, its own pair credential (the pair is keyed on it: migration 0027),
its own file on the consumer, its own holder at the provider (the identity with the
local name after it) and rotates apart from the others. The plain shape is
unchanged and every existing row is the credential it was (novox/hq 04-ISSUES/069,
ADR 0094).
The broker settings take a _FILE twin like the store connections; the
catalogue engine refuses a secret placeholder in a container's env and a
secret-carrying env-file unless the container says why with
secrets-in-environment, which stays in the catalogue and never reaches the
machine.
One name per thing, per the HQ glossary: the module/container/image/binary/repo
becomes mesh-controller, the seat the-controller, and the store+broker pair the
foundation (embedded base bundles, default template and example lock renamed with
their go:embed directives). No behaviour change — a pure vocabulary rename.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
Its event queue is durable, so a running catalogue misses nothing. What it cannot
have is what was announced before it first ran — and on a fresh mesh that is never
arbitrary: the shared base, the store the catalogue runs on, and the catalogue
itself are each necessarily built BEFORE a catalogue exists to hear about them.
The graph's foundation is the part it never sees.
So it says it is catching up, and the control plane re-announces what it
recorded, oldest first, marked as a replay. Oldest first because a graph is built
in the order things happened: registering a module that stands on a base before
the base would point an edge at a version nothing has seen, and the shape of a
fresh mesh guarantees the base is both first and the one that was missed.
The replayer hands announcements back rather than publishing them, because the
wire belongs to the link package and a replay building its own events could drift
from what the builder emits — the one thing it must match exactly, since the
catalogue has a single handler for both.
Its own queue and its own consumer: two consumers on one queue split its
messages, and a catch-up request going to whichever half was not listening is a
gap that looks like a working mesh.
Toward novox/hq 04-ISSUES/050.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
A fingerprint written into a recipe names one particular copy of the base — the
copy on whichever machine the person typing it was using. On any other mesh that
copy has never existed, so the build stops on its first line with a message
about an image nobody can look up. Three modules in the catalogue were in
exactly that state, and the line each of them replaced was equally dead.
A module now names the module and artifact instead, and the mesh answers with
what it holds. The builder is still a thing that clones, builds and answers: the
answer travels with the question, because only the mesh knows what it has.
A base the mesh has not built is refused before anything is built, naming which
module has to exist first.
The builder says what it built and the catalogue decides whether that was an
upgrade. Only the control plane knows which machines run the thing, so it is
the one that acts — and what it does is a choice somebody recorded, not a
behaviour compiled in: record that they are behind, or send it, one machine at
a time or together.
Recording is the absence of an action rather than a second path: a machine not
running what the mesh would send it is already something the mesh reports.
Defaulted to recording. A mesh that rolls out everything it builds the moment
it builds it is reasonable to want and a bad thing to arrive by default — the
first module to inherit it would be the control plane, upgrading itself out
from under the push applying it.
Answering and announcing are different acts. The reply goes to whoever asked and
is correlated to their request; the announcement says to the whole mesh that a
module now exists at a commit, which is what the catalogue places in the module
graph (novox/hq ADR 0072). A build nobody asked for still has to be announced, or
the graph knows less than the registry does.
What it was built on top of is read out of the build's own inputs rather than
declared, because a declared list drifts from what the code actually uses
(ADR 0009). These are artifact references, which is what a build input names;
resolving them to module-versions is the catalogue's work, since it is what knows
which module-version published which artifact.
Events ride the topic exchange, not the direct one nodes speak over, so the
builder's account is granted both: it must be able to answer and to announce.
The envelope is the sdk's, reproduced exactly — a second shape would be a second
thing for consumers to handle, and they are written against the first.
Announcing is not allowed to fail a build. The work was done and was answered; a
build reported as failed because saying so failed is a lie about it.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
The builder cloned a repository and read the manifest at its root, which means one
repository per module. Nothing we have is shaped that way, so the builder could be
asked to build nothing that exists (novox/hq ADR 0069).
The path travels the whole way — named when asking, carried in the request, used
to read the manifest and as the context everything is produced from, echoed back
in the result, and recorded as part of where a module came from. Without that last
part the mesh could notice a module was behind its source and then be unable to
rebuild it, which is the worst of both.
A path climbing out of the clone is refused: a machine whose job is building other
people's repositories must not read whatever else is on its disk.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01D6qtiYU3P9jk3pnAXyAFyx
A node says it is there every minute and describes what it applied rarely,
and both went through Heard, which wrote every one down as a report. So a
bare alive replaced the node's last real apply with an empty one -- clearing
the declaration digest `current` is measured against, the carried ports a
push assigns around, and the clean-or-failed outcome. A node that had just
caught up read as behind within the minute, and never converged.
Whether it converged in time was a race the node's own apply set: the link's
one loop applies a declaration to completion before it can send the pending
heartbeat, so a fast apply (catalogue-small) leaves the digest standing the
~60s until the next beat -- long enough for the lab to see `current` -- while
a heavy wave whose apply outran the first beat (mongodb + unifi + marrytts)
had the alive fire milliseconds after the report and never showed `current`
at all, timing out settle even at 1200s.
Heard now returns after moving last_seen for a report that carries no account
of what the machine did -- nothing applied, nothing refused, nothing failed,
which is exactly a bare alive. A real report always carries one. This is what
the commit that began hearing alives said it did and did not: "a bare word
that a node is there moves last_seen and touches nothing else."
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
The report carries the digest of the declaration it applied (mesh-host
8211d8b), and the mesh stores it beside the outcome. `reported` rows in
the status JSON now say `current`: whether the machine's last word
names the declaration last sent.
Not derivable from the timestamps beside it, which is why they were
not enough: an apply begun under the previous declaration reports
after the next send — newer, and still about the old words. The lab
lost exactly that race between one test's closing push and the next
test's opening one.
Empty digests — every host from before reports carried one — read as
not current, which errs toward waiting rather than toward asserting on
files that are not there yet.
The other half of ADR 0038, and what 04-ISSUES/028 was actually about.
A module can now avoid colliding with another module; until this it
could not avoid colliding with the mesh itself.
The substrate is not a module. A node raises it from the bundle it
carries before any mesh exists, so the control plane had never heard of
the store, the broker, or its own container — and handed a database
module 5432, which the store already had.
So the machine says. The host records what each resource binds,
distinguishing what it carried from what the mesh sent — a distinction
that already existed so the two never remove each other — and reports
the carried ones. The node states and this context writes, which is the
shape of every message between them.
What the declaration binds, not what is open. A machine's open ports are
a moving target, and assigning around them would mean a port that was
free when it was asked for and taken when it was used.
Replaced whole each time rather than merged: a machine that gave a port
back must be believed about that too, and a set that only grows keeps a
port reserved for something no longer there.
Tested against a real database, and the tests bite — removing the check
hands the module 20000, which the machine had said it holds.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/022. A credential was keyed by provision, consumer
node and provider node, so "who is asking" was answered by naming a
host. The node this mesh exists to take over runs eight modules against
one database server.
The symptom had two halves and only one was loud. The provider refused,
naming the modules and explaining they would share one credential, which
reads as a decision rather than a limit. The consumer did not refuse: it
resolved cleanly, wrote one module's credential file and left the others
absent — a service that starts and cannot authenticate, with nothing
saying why. That is 021 again on a different axis.
Three modules wanting one database produced one need, carrying whichever
module mentioned it first, because the resolution walk is a work-list
over names. The fan-out now happens in one place, after the walk. The
record path already did this correctly and said why: a consumer here is
a module on a machine. It is the same rule.
Downstream: the secret's key gains the consuming module, the grant file
is named after both halves, needs are matched by provision and module
rather than provision alone, and the provisioners name the role and the
access key after the module. The refusal in ContributionsTo is gone
because there is nothing left to refuse.
Worth stating plainly: without that refusal, gitea's login would have
opened keycloak's database. From the provisioner's side it created
exactly what it was asked to create.
Existing secrets are discarded rather than backfilled. They cannot say
which module they were for, and a secret is remade and delivered to both
ends on the next push — so this costs one rotation and invents nothing.
Also guards the role name against PostgreSQL's 63-byte truncation, which
is a notice rather than an error and would reintroduce exactly this
collision at a length nobody tests.
Three faults injected — the fan-out removed, needs matched by name
alone, the grant file named after the machine — each caught.
Provisions were named after roles: provides "database", requires
"database". Nothing distinguished engines, so a module written against
PostgreSQL could be matched to a provider of SQL Server, resolve as
satisfied, deploy, and fail on its first query — with nothing
connecting that error back to a match made elsewhere by something that
believed it had done its job.
The failure is in the direction that hides. Refusing on ambiguity
exists precisely so this does not happen, and the generic name walked
around it: with one provider of each name nothing is ambiguous, so
nothing is asked.
How it got in: every resolver test had exactly one provider per name,
so no mismatch was expressible and none was caught. The fixtures agreed
with the design — the same fault as the imagined test output in
04-ISSUES/005, at the level of a name.
Refused rather than documented, because the old naming *was* the
documented convention. Providing database/db/sql/sql-database is now a
parse error naming what to write instead.
The rule is about coupling, not specificity everywhere: route and
resolver stay role-named, because a consumer genuinely cannot tell
which proxy answered. novox/hq ADR 0027.
08-connectivity keeps two authorities apart on purpose: a public one for
names the outside world reaches, and the mesh's own for names only the
mesh knows. Nothing implemented the second, so anything between machines
was plaintext or trust-on-first-use — which the design refuses everywhere
else.
A node now generates a fourth key at enrolment and reports the public
half. A fourth, because a key used for two purposes is one rotation away
from breaking the other: the identity key signs messages to the mesh and
would do for TLS, and reusing it would mean rotating a node's identity
every time its certificate is replaced.
**Nothing secret travels and nothing is sealed.** A certificate authority
says "this name belongs to the holder of this key", so the mesh signs a
public half it cannot use, and the certificate it issues is public. A
module asks for one and is given the certificate and, if it wants,
the mesh's own — the private key is a path to a file the machine already
has, the same arrangement the private network's key uses.
Asserted by verifying rather than inspecting, because a certificate that
parses and does not chain fails at the moment something connects:
- what the mesh issues verifies against the mesh, for the name asked for
- the name is in the subject alternative names, since a certificate
carrying it only in the common name is refused by every modern client
- it certifies the key the node generated and no other
- another mesh's certificate does not verify, which is the whole point of
two authorities being separate
- the authority cannot sign another authority — one that could is one
that can be delegated without anybody deciding to
- two control planes starting together agree on one authority, or a mesh
has certificates half its machines refuse
Certificates last ten years, which is a choice: a short life needs
something to renew it, and a renewal that fails silently is a mesh that
stops trusting itself on a date nobody wrote down. What makes one
replaceable is that the mesh reissues on demand, not that it expires.
jschoubben