The bundle raised the bus as mesh-broker on docker volumes; the catalogue's nats module keeps it as
mesh-broker-nats on directories of the machine, so the broker step refused rather than raise a second
bus, and genesis stopped at step 18 of 24.
The bundle now raises mesh-broker-nats with its configuration and user list in /var/lib/nats-module/conf,
its streams in /var/lib/mesh-broker-nats and its certificate in /var/lib/mesh-broker-tls, published on the
node's bus port. The broker step holds that layout to the module's manifest field by field before
registering anything, says the one restart onto the module's image, and waits until the bus runs that image
and its monitor answers. The installer's bridge writes the composed users at the module's bus-users path and
signals mesh-broker-nats. The bundle's bus configuration and user list are seeds, so a re-run after the
adoption does not put the bundle's one user back over the module's.
A re-run's apply writes the bundle's one-entry user list over the list placed at
enrolment, and an enrolled machine skipped placing it: enrolled was taken for adopted,
against ADR 0331 §5. Until the controller knows the nats module, the installer places
the composed list again. Also drop the previous broker's AMQP and management ports,
which nothing raises any more, and say why the bus always carries a ports setting.
The installer could not raise a first node: the old bundle's control plane had no
MESH_BUS_NATS and crash-looped, and the NATS bundle was refused because rootsecrets
only knew the previous broker's guest:guest@ template.
One bundle now, the NATS one. rootsecrets makes the controller's bus account and puts
it in both placeholders (the address and the bcrypt hash in the carried user list),
kept with its hash so a re-run writes the same bundle. Preflight refuses a template
naming no bus connection it knows, naming the placeholder, instead of waiting out the
verify step. The broker step adopts the bus as the nats module and refuses, by name,
a catalogue without it or a server that is not the foundation's container.
At genesis the bus's users reach it in no declaration, because the
machine running it has not enrolled. The installer, which raised the
bus from its bundle, places the control plane's composed list beside it
and makes it re-read it: before the machine enrols, for the token's
account, and after, for the node's own (novox/hq issue 146).
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
Enrolling IS the machine speaking to the mesh, so straight after it the mesh has
always heard from this node — and the step took that as proof an agent was
running and skipped starting one.
The cost is silent and total. Everything after is the control plane being told
things, and nothing it is told reaches a machine with no agent to collect it: the
registry push at step 7 was accepted, the module recorded, and no container ever
created. It surfaced three minutes later as 'the registry is not there at all',
one step from its cause and looking nothing like it.
Both halves are asked now. A process may be wedged and collect nothing, which is
why the mesh is asked at all; and the mesh may have heard once from a machine
running nothing, which is why the machine is asked too.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
Steps 6 to 10, which turn a substrate into a mesh that can maintain itself
(novox/hq ADR 0067).
6 enrol a node record, a token, `mesh-host enrol`, and the host agent
running. Proved by the mesh having HEARD from the node, not by a
process existing: a host that cannot reach the broker looks exactly
like a successful install until the first push applies nothing.
7 registry the module that gives this mesh an image store, registered from a
--catalog checkout, assigned and pushed. Its image is upstream and
never built (04-ISSUES/029) — a placeholder digest there is refused.
Verified by asking `/v2/`, because a container that is up is not a
registry that serves.
8 publish the carried image pushed into that registry, which assigns it the
first manifest digest it has ever had. This is the hinge: without
it the mesh works and can never upgrade itself.
9 control the control plane registered as an ordinary module pinned to that
digest, with the substrate's own store connections delivered
through `secret accept` — read out of the bundle that made them,
because the mesh cannot invent a credential that predates it.
10 retire the temporary control plane dropped from the bundle and removed by
the host's ordinary removal pass.
Every step asks before it acts and reports "already done". No step leaves the
machine without a control plane: steps 9 and 10 overlap deliberately, and two
stateless control planes are untidy rather than broken.
mesh-control's `internal/builder`.PublishImage is mirrored rather than imported —
tier 0 depends on nothing that must be installed first — with one correction: the
digest is chosen from RepoDigests by repository instead of taken as element zero,
so an image pushed to two registries cannot silently pin this mesh to the wrong
one.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LrgweAeERJYBg88c5cKDzF
jochen
jschoubben