Give a container the names, rather than a resolver to ask

The commit before this said "told where to resolve names" and passed --dns,
which is not what it ended up doing. This is that correction: a container is
given the names themselves, written into its own hosts file by the runtime.

The reason for the change is the decision the mesh already made about names — a
file rather than a resolver, because it works on every runtime, needs no
package and has no failure mode of its own. Passing a resolver address would
have required a resolver to exist, which at that point none did.

A resolver is coming, for the case a file genuinely cannot express: a service
named under a machine, postgres.novox.internal, where the wildcard cannot be
enumerated in advance. When it arrives it will need this field back under its
own name. It is not being kept in the meantime — a field nothing fills is a
field nobody can trust, and the vocabulary is asserted by a count for exactly
that reason.
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-31 12:05:52 +02:00
parent 0e2b288bb6
commit c3d6f240fe
3 changed files with 27 additions and 25 deletions
+13 -9
View File
@@ -328,18 +328,22 @@ type Container struct {
Ports []string `json:"ports,omitempty"`
Volumes []string `json:"volumes,omitempty"`
Args []string `json:"args,omitempty"`
// Nameservers this container resolves through.
// Names this container can reach, as `name:address`.
//
// **Because a container does not inherit the machine's names.** It gets its own `/etc/hosts`
// holding its own hostname, and a runtime rewrites `resolv.conf` — so every internal name the
// mesh wrote for this machine is invisible to the thing the machine is running. That was hit
// for real: a database client on one node could not resolve another node, on a mesh where
// both names were correct and present.
// holding only its own hostname, so every internal name the mesh wrote for this machine is
// invisible to the thing the machine is running. That was hit for real: a database client on
// one node could not resolve another node, on a mesh where both names were correct and
// present on both machines.
//
// Set by the mesh rather than by a module: which resolver a machine has is a fact about the
// machine, and a module that named one would be a module that only runs where somebody put
// that resolver.
Nameservers []string `json:"nameservers,omitempty"`
// **A file rather than a resolver, which is the decision the mesh already made about names**
// and this extends rather than overturns: it works on every runtime, needs no package, and
// has no failure mode of its own. A resolver becomes necessary when names are wanted that are
// not one-per-node — service names, wildcards — and that is still not true.
//
// Set by the mesh, not by a module: which machines exist is a fact about the mesh, and a
// module that listed them would be a module that goes stale when one joins.
Hosts []string `json:"hosts,omitempty"`
// Network is the container's network, passed to the runtime unchanged.
//