The host now reports, for every held thing, the facts a take compares; the controller keeps them, and
take puts them beside what the module declares — the found image and its age against the declared one,
the found networks and who else is on them, ports and mounts, a found file's difference from the
declared content — and refuses a downgrade without --downgrade and a differing file without --replace
<path>. Without --yes the comparison is printed and nothing is taken. node show lists the facts and
the strays the machine reports. build and the daemon's take-in say when a module's policy rolls the
result out at once. The own-secret refusal points at the provider form for a required secret.
The first live plan took seventy-five modules along for a controller change: the builder packages the
controller's source, everything is built by the builder, so everything was reachable. A module built by
the build machine is not changed by a new build machine. Reachability now follows the code and build
edges only; built-by still orders a tier after the build machine and gates it on the machine's roll-out.
plans stop <id> ends a plan by hand: what was asked still builds and registers, nothing further is asked.
The mesh's seat answers plans — the recent plans with their tier, what each waits for and since when,
or one plan whole given its id — so the console reads a merge's progress where it reads everything
else, instead of a person reading the daemon's log.
A module's dependencies are one relation in the catalogue — stands-on, packages, built-by, declared —
answered by one call. A merge takes what moved and everything reachable from it, sorts the set into
tiers (a code dependency in the same tier, a build dependency after its base is built, a runtime
dependency after the build machine is built and running; the build machine's own base comes first,
built by the one that runs), writes the plan to the store, asks the first tier and returns. Every
outcome advances the plan; a ticker advances what outcomes cannot; a controller replaced mid-plan
resumes it. status lists open plans and names one that has waited too long.
#195 refused two modules beside a consumer that both answer a bound
provision — in every pass. The first pass exists only to answer what a node
offers, and a refusal there makes the machine vanish from every other node's
world (resolve.go says so for its sibling case): with novox refused for its
own acme-ca, ace's plan lost the vault and the identity provider and read
"nothing in this mesh provides secret". Seen live within minutes of the
rollout. The second pass refuses it, where it is asked, as before.
A provider is a (node, module) pair (design 23), and the pin — the one way a
consumer names its provider — named only the node. Two modules on one node
can both answer a provision (public-acme and step-ca both offer acme-ca on
novox), and then the resolver, given a pin naming that node, took the last
provider listed: a coin flip. The same ambiguity beside the consumer was
settled by a map walk — random per plan — which is how novox's own
route-proxy got its issuer (novox/hq #258).
- `pin <node> <provision> <from-node> <module>`: both halves, always. The
console gains `pin` and `unpin`. The provider may be on the consumer's own
node, since two modules beside it can both answer.
- The resolver refuses ambiguity instead of picking, across machines and
beside the consumer alike, naming every candidate as node/module and the
form of the pin that settles it. A plain capability that grants nothing
and serves nothing (three shells beside an editor) is not a choice to put
to anybody and stays as it was.
- provision_pin gains a nullable module (0050); records made before are
completed where the node they name answers once, and left for a person
where it answers twice (0051).
- The provider of something already satisfied is looked for among what was
assigned, not only what the walk has reached — a consumer reached before
the provider beside it no longer loses its binding.
- The start-time check that every declared verb is runnable samples each
verb's required arguments from its schema instead of three guessed keys.
Live consequence: a node that has two providers of one bound provision
assigned (novox: acme-ca) resolves only once pinned —
`pin novox acme-ca novox public-acme`.
With the worker consumer's default of many deliveries in flight, every ask behind the one being
built was delivered at once, left unacknowledged for the length of the build, redelivered after the
ack wait and dropped after the fifth time: on 2026-10-01 twenty-six of forty-three builds asked in two
minutes were never built and the queue read as empty (hq issue 186). The holder's worker now has one
in flight, and a running build tells the bus it is still working, as the controller's long handlers
do, so a build longer than the ack wait is neither redelivered nor counted out.
mesh-vault joins the mesh's own set — mesh-scoped, delivering secret — because the controller seals
every minted credential with it, which is the test for a seat of the mesh's own; a second provider is
a second claimant, refused by name (issue 106). A report may carry the machine's profile, detected
again by the apply that reports, and the latest replaces the enrolled one: a machine that switched
its network manager is a machine whose uplink holder lacks a capability at its next push (issue 138).
A stream publish waits for its acknowledgement as long as its context lives, and the server never
acknowledges a publish it refuses. Issuing memberships after a push used the daemon's own context, so
the one refused membership of 2026-10-01 (hq issue 183) held the controller's receive loop for good:
no report, no build outcome, no merge was heard until a restart (hq issue 185). Issuing one
membership is now bounded to ten seconds, and a push says how many could not be issued and stands —
the machines keep the shape they derive until the next push.
The server refused every membership the controller published after a push (2026-10-01, Permissions
Violation for Publish to mesh.assignment.<node>.<module>): the controller's own grant named the
control, node and JetStream subjects and not the assignments it alone issues (hq ADR 0160). Broker
golden regenerated; one line differs.
The store's databases is not postgres's postgres_list_databases, and a holder may serve both. A
claim's serves names the seat's verbs the module implements for the role; absent, the module's own
tools must list every verb the seat promises, which is how a module named like its seat says they
are one and the same. Registration refuses a claim naming a verb the seat never promised, and the
credential's claims carry the claim's own verbs to the runtime.
For every module on every machine the controller composes what that instance serves — its machine's
address always, the module's plain address in a queue when it is alone or its definition says its
instances are interchangeable — the verbs of the seats it holds at the seats' subjects, where its
events land, and what it may reach, resolved the same way for the modules it invokes. Published
beside the node's declaration on `mesh.assignment.<node>.<module>`, last per subject in a stream
that allows direct reads, and the account may read exactly its own. Composed from the same records
the bus's accounts are, so what a runtime serves and what its account may are one composition.
`instances: interchangeable` is the one fact a definition states for it.
The shape issued is the shape the mesh already had, so nothing moves when the membership arrives;
the runtime that reads it instead of deriving it is the next piece.
Seeded additively into the seat's row at the controller's next start; a holder must list tools of
these names (design 33 §3), so this merges after the database engine's definition does.
`invokes: [<module>.<tool>]` now grants `mesh.mod.<module>.tool.<tool>` and the same with the
machine as its last token, which is how a call reaches one machine's instance. The broker
credential the mesh writes carries `claims`: each seat the module claims, its scope, and the verbs
the seat promises, so the runtime serves them on the seat's subjects; the holder's grant, composed
from the holding, is what admits the subscription.
An offer may say `"credential": {"own": "<secret>"}`: the provider's own secret is the credential
every consumer of that provision receives, in the shape of a pair credential. The vault keeps one
value, sealed to the provider, to every consumer that holds the provision and to the operator, all
under one generation stamp; a consumer binding later, or `secret rotate` on the provider's secret,
makes a fresh value and seals it to every holder in one act, and the rotate command sends every
holding machine together. An accepted value is sealed to the consumers of the moment and never
remade: a consumer binding after it is refused with the way out (ADR 0113). The named own secret
must say how it is taken (issue 180), so the provider's start applies the file.
A need carries the shared secret's name from either side of the machine boundary; the plan mints a
consumer's copy from the provider's value. Registered manifests keep their bytes.
`secret rotate <node> <module> <name>` makes the secret anew the way the first mint did, seals it
to the machine and the operator, and sends the machine, so the module starts again on the new value
— said in the log with who asked and when, never the value. Only for a secret whose definition says
`"taken": "at-start"`: an own secret is now a path, or {path, taken}, and a definition that says
nothing of how a secret is taken is refused with the word to write, because a credential rotated
under software that never reads it again is worse than one left alone (issue 179). `applied` is
refused by name until the staged form ADR 0114 decided is built; a value given to the mesh is
refused as ADR 0113 says. `rotate` is a verb on the controller's seat with two shapes — a pair
credential by provision, an own secret by machine, module and name — so the console can ask.
Registered manifests keep their bytes: a path alone is written back as a path.
The names region attributed a composed name to whichever labelled contribution a map yielded last.
A dashboard contributes its label to its route and to the identity provider, which must know the
public name for a redirect; so on one plan grafana.<domain> pointed at the proxy's machine and on
the next at the identity provider's, and the whole region flipped with it (forge issue 227). And a
module routed several times contributed no name at all, because the single-value reading of its
contributions is empty for the many shape.
Now every node's resolution is read first and the names are attributed across them at once: the
terminus serves the name — the provider that is not itself published under a labelled name through
another — walked in order, so one mesh yields one region. Name-agnostic, structural, deterministic.
The console's `build` tool answered "no build machine answered within 0s", handed a forge path to
git as written, and a build heard afterwards was recorded and never registered: recording and
registration lived only in the waiting caller, and the tool did not wait.
Now one function takes a build's outcome in — records it, parses the manifest, refuses a definition
naming an installation, registers the module with its source as the seat and path the request
carried — and both the waiting command and the daemon that follows the role's `built` event call
it. `build --wait 0` asks and returns with the id; `builds --log <id>` follows it. The seat verb
says `--self` for a repository given without a scheme.
The build-machine seat emits `started` and `log.<build id>` beside `built`. Every line the builder
speaks — each step, each command with its duration, and on failure the command's own output — goes
to stderr as before and onto the bus under the build's id, one subject per build, kept a week in
EVENTS with every other event. `builds --log <id>` reads it back from the stream with a consumer
that is gone when the reading is done, on the command line and as the controller's seat verb;
`builds` lists each build's id and `build` says the id it asked with.
Lines are core publishes with a sequence number, so a build is not slowed by an ack per line and a
gap is visible; `started` and `built` are awaited into the stream. The seat protocol widens
additively at the controller's next start; the holder's grant follows on the broker node's next
composition.
An access named by id (issue 153) resolves to the path the definition still carries when the
assignment says nothing, and the proof compares that — the same rule as a placed directory.
A definition names no host path (ADR 0112); an adopted machine keeps its
data where the predecessor put it. Two settings, validated like endpoints:
places: {<directory id>: <path> | {path, owner}}
accesses: {<access id>: <path>}
An access may now be declared by id (`{"id": "series", "mode": "read-write"}`)
and named in mounts, env and content as ${access:<id>}; the assignment
says where it is on this node, and an access nobody placed is refused by
name. A definition still carrying a path keeps it as the default the
assignment replaces. A placed directory takes the assignment's owner
where it says one. Resolved in composition, so the host receives paths
and owners exactly as before.
Issue 173's rule needs it: a mail provider serves its domain and an identity provider its issuer,
and neither is the definition's to state. Declared as ${setting:<key>}, filled from the layers after
the overrides; a key so asked for is not stray.
Three of novox/hq's group-4 leftovers, one branch.
Issue 173: a module's settings reached every route it contributed, every database it asked for and
every served fact its consumers read — a mail server's site name arrived at the proxy as a route
fact. A setting now overrides a key a contribution or served fact declares and adds none; a file
still merges any key, and a key nothing takes is named as stray instead of dropped silently.
Issue 174: the mesh's own files for a module — its bus credential, its merged config, its bindings —
were placed by the definition under /var/lib/mesh/<module>, 232 host paths in 50 definitions. A
directory may now say `place: "mesh"` and resolves to <root>/mesh/<module>; a directory beneath a
placed one may state its path as `${dir:<id>}/<rest>` and moves with it. The proof test resolves
both catalogues and compares: 48 definitions, no path moved. The controller's own manifest is
converted here; the catalogue in mesh-catalog.
ADR 0155: the installation check moves to registration. `module add` and a build's result both
refuse a definition that names an installation, in the check's words, with the way out; the build
stays recorded.
A check that only ran when somebody remembered a variable was a check nobody ran (novox/hq issue
134). MESH_CATALOGUE still overrides; the checks skip only when no catalogue can be found.
A merge's handler builds for minutes and keeps its own delivery alive; the announcements handed over
behind it timed out on the client and came back, and a merge that came back rebuilt what it had just
built, five times over (novox/hq issue 175). MaxAckPending 1 on the events consumer: the server holds
the rest.
A controller whose defaults carry the new name seeds it before the migration runs, and the first
form renamed into a duplicate key; the control node's prepare failed on every attempt (2026-09-30).
If the new row exists, the old row's holding moves to it and the old row goes; otherwise it is
renamed. The old name becomes an alias either way.
ADR 0121 decided it and deferred it as a delivering-seat migration; ADR 0122's aliases made it one
update and one alias (migration 0048). The former name resolves to it forever (novox/hq ADR 0156,
issue 123).
The check novox/hq issue 119 asks for before a definition stops naming where its data lives: two
catalogue checkouts, every module in both resolved with the controller's own rule and compared whole.
InstallationProblems judges every value the mesh acts on for a name under a public top-level domain
or a public address, with prose, the world's registries, resolvers and certificate authorities
exempt, and a name a resource means on purpose declared with its reason (names-on-purpose). Run by
module check and a catalogue-wide test, not yet at registration, while the declared list shrinks.
${setting:<key>} fills a file from the assignment's settings and is refused when nothing set it.
A build context may live on the git seat; the request carries the seat's clone base (novox/hq ADR
0112, ADR 0155, issues 122 and 134).
The grant is a line in the bus's user list the controller itself composes and a push delivers, so
the first controller to serve its seat started before the list named it and every subscription was
refused for good (2026-09-30). A refused subscription is retried until it holds.
A seat's protocol lives in the store (migration 0047; seeded additively), a served verb carries its
description and schema, holding a mesh seat requires serving its verbs, a node-scoped seat's tool
carries the node, and the control plane serves status, nodes, node, modules, seats, builds, plan,
assign, unassign, push, build and tools on its seat by running the same commands (novox/hq ADR 0132,
ADR 0154, design 33). A grant of * reaches a role's tools; seat:<seat>.<verb> grants one.
A module contributes a label; the mesh joins it with the node's domains and
the provider serves the result — and the module itself was never told.
Software that must know its own address (a login redirect, a canonical URL,
an issuer) had it written into the manifest as a literal: a domain in a
definition, wrong on every other machine (ADR 0112). Found converting
grafana's keycloak login for ace, where it forced GF_SERVER_ROOT_URL and
keycloak's issuer back into manifests.
The binding for a requirement a module contributes to now carries `name`
and `internal-name` (or `names` by local name for several contributions),
and `${bound:<requirement>:name}` / `:internal-name` (`:name-<local>`) fill
files from it. Both come from the one function the provider's received
file is composed by, so the proxy and the module cannot disagree about the
name. Absent when nothing was composed, so a file asking for a name on a
node with no public domain is refused, not rendered empty.
Also: `${bound:…}` could not name a requirement answered by a node-scoped
provider on the same machine — its binding file was written (from `here`)
but the placeholders only looked at the mesh's needs. Filled from the same
answer now.
"3478/udp" read as one token was not a port, so it passed through and the
runtime published it wherever it liked: on ace, unifi's STUN and discovery
landed on random machine ports while every TCP pin beside them held. The
protocol is split off, the number is assigned as for any short form, and
the suffix rides along on the outside.
invokes: a manifest word that becomes exactly the publish grant a person's account gets (ADR 0152),
derived by the same composition; refused at parse when it names no tool. module check <file|dir>...
runs what registration runs with no store, for a manifest in any repository (hq issue 148).
novox/hq ADR 0151 (issues 139, 157). <label>.<node>.internal is answered
by every resolver as 'anything under that node goes to that node', so
the node in a route's internal name must be the one whose proxy answers
it; composed under the consumer's own name it sent a client to a machine
with nothing listening whenever the proxy ran elsewhere. Composed under
the serving node now — the same machine wherever the proxy runs beside
the module, so nothing changes on a mesh with one hub.
A routed public name gets no .internal alias any more: the roster
publishes it as itself, once. The alias resolved and nothing served it.
`assign ace postgres` made the control plane's own store unresolvable:
postgres's manifest claims mesh-store, nobody was ever recorded as its
holder, and with two eligible assignments and nothing on record both
claimed and both were refused — novox's included. ADR 0110 says the
assignment holds, by a deliberate act; ADR 0131 gave the record its force
but left a seat nobody handed over held by whichever assignment happened
to be alone.
Before acting on an assignment the controller now writes the derived
answer down: every mesh-scoped seat the store knows, resolved to exactly
one holder with nothing on record, gets that holder recorded — the same
record `seat <name> --to <node>/<module>` makes by hand. The next
assignment able to hold the seat then stands beside the holder, eligible
and silent. A seat with two derived claimants is left for a person; a
seat on record is never rewritten; seats the store does not list stay
held by derivation as before. And the refusal, when it still happens,
names the handover that records the holder.
Verified: catalogue tests against the real catalogue; the cmd suite
against a store (the only failure, TestConvergingPreviewsThenChanges…,
fails identically on main).
novox/hq ADR 0148, step 3. Every container got the whole roster as
--add-host entries at creation and nothing re-read them (issues 109,
135); once the roster was in the digest so that could be caught, one
name moving anywhere replaced every container in the mesh (issue 151).
A container resolves through its machine's resolver, which the resolver
module tells the runtime about once per machine. A module's own hosts
entries stay exactly as declared.
Also brings the resolver tests up to the catalogue as it now is: the
runtime is reloaded (never restarted) and given live-restore, and the
resolver answers by address, not by interface (issue 110).
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/107. The controller already held a per-node lock while
it composed and recorded each send; the order existed and was thrown away
at the wire. Each send now takes the next number for its node, one
higher than the last, under that hold and before the body exists — so
the number is inside what the mesh signs, and a replayed older
declaration cannot borrow a newer one's.
Zero is not sent. A host reads absence as "no order claimed", which is
the shape of every declaration before this, so nothing that worked
before changes for a machine sent nothing since numbering existed.
One subtlety, and it is the one that would have read every machine as
behind for ever: the mesh decides a machine is behind by comparing the
digest of what it WOULD send against what it DID send, and a number
changes the bytes. The read-only comparison composes with the number the
machine was LAST sent, not a fresh one, so it is byte for byte what was
sent when nothing else changed.
Hosts went first and every machine runs one that understands the field.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/161. A repeated flag is not a merged one. The Go
command takes the last -ldflags and drops the first, so passing the
toolchain's flags and then the system stamp as a second one produced a
binary that knew its system and had lost -s -w: 12.2MB against 8.5MB,
with its debug info intact.
My own comment said the linker "accepts and merges" them. It does not,
and I found out by reading the file the build produced rather than by
reading the comment again.
Linker flags are now the toolchain's own list, composed into one flag with
the stamp. A test refuses a compile line that carries -ldflags itself,
because that is what makes two.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/161. The mesh compiled the host, published it,
delivered it, and the launcher started it — and it would have refused the
first declaration it was asked to apply, because it asks which system it
was built for before applying anything and the answer was empty.
The Makefile links that in. The mesh's toolchain deliberately takes
nothing from the module, so it linked in nothing.
The system is the stated exception, and ADR 0142 says why: the target is a
property of the artifact rather than of the recipe, because a compiled
binary is per system and a toolchain accepting it from the module would be
accepting a build instruction. So the toolchain names the variable it
fills and the artifact supplies the value.
Named in the toolchain rather than inferred, and empty for a language
whose output is not pinned to a system — which is every interpreted one,
and a manifest declaring a system for those is already refused.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/142. The name a machine runs a binary by is not always
the name of the package that built it. The host's command is cmd/mesh-host
and every machine runs it as nox-mesh-host — the path it is installed at,
the name in its unit, and the name its launcher looks for inside a
delivered version.
So the first delivered host version landed as `mesh-host`, the host
reported "created /usr/lib/nox-mesh-host/versions/2681d936b949: 1 file(s)",
everything said success, and the launcher would never have seen it. Found
by listing the directory instead of believing the line.
An artifact may now say what its executable is called. Saying nothing
keeps what the compiler would have chosen — the package's name — so
nothing that worked before changes.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/142, and the second of the two things ADR 0141's own
insight named: "a version cannot reach the path". A component is unpacked
into a directory named for its version so it can read its own version from
its path — and an archive named a fixed path in the manifest with nothing
interpolating the build into it, so nothing could ask for
.../versions/<version>/ and every machine took a hand-placed fallback.
A resource using an archive or a bundle may now say ${version} in any of
its values. No artifact name in the reference: the resource already says
which artifact it is for, and a second name is a second thing to keep in
step.
The version is the artifact's digest, short, and not the commit. Two
builds of one commit are meant to be the same bytes — every toolchain here
is -trimpath for that reason — so a content-addressed version means an
unchanged build resolves to the path it already had. A commit-named path
would move for an identical binary and recreate everything that reads it.
An image is refused one, with a reason: an image is not unpacked, so it
has no versioned place. Left alone it would reach a machine as literal
text and be created as a directory called ${version}.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/142. A bundle is refused if it names what it is built
from, because a bundle is the module's own directory compiled whole and
naming a source would be describing its own build. That reason holds for
an interpreted language and cannot hold for a compiled one.
A repository written in Go carries several commands — the host and its
bootstrap live in one — and "the module's own directory" is then not a
package at all. So a compiled bundle may say which package, and says the
module root by saying nothing. The refusal stands for every interpreted
bundle, which is what it was written for.
Found by writing the host's manifest, which is the first bundle in a
compiled language this mesh has had.
novox/hq 04-ISSUES/142, and ADR 0141's own progressive insight naming
this as the first of two things missing: "nothing can compile it". The
toolchain list was a closed set of typescript and python, whose warning —
every language is another implementation of the contracts modules share —
does not attach to Go. Go is how the host, the control plane and the
builder are written, and none of them is a module in that sense: the host
is what APPLIES modules.
The toolchain names mesh-tools-go as its base rather than pinning an
upstream release here (ADR 0142, 0044): named and not pinned means the
mesh answers with the copy it holds, and moving compiler is a build
instead of an edit to this file.
Two things beyond the list also assumed one language, and both would have
failed after the entry was added:
sourcesFor turned every entrypoint into a `.ts` file. The extension is
the toolchain's now — one language's file extension written into the
code that serves every language is a wall the next one hits.
The output directory was the compiler's to create. tsc --outDir makes
one; go build -o writes into a directory and does not make it, failing
with a message about a path rather than about a build. Made here for
every toolchain, because which compilers are forgiving is not something
a reader should have to know.
And a toolchain now says what it is pointed at: a file list from the
module's entrypoints, or the one package the artifact is built `from`.
Pointing `go build` at a file list builds a program out of exactly those
files and ignores the rest of the package — a missing symbol rather than a
legible refusal.
Static and -trimpath: what a machine holds is a file, not a container, so
a binary needing a libc it did not bring is a delivery that works until a
machine differs; and a version comes from where a component sits rather
than from its linker, so two builds of one commit are the same bytes.
jschoubben
mesh-admin