mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
#64/#65 and #66 each added Applied.Declared: a directory's declared owner and
mode (string) and a service's held state (*FoundUnit), both under the JSON key
"declared". The directory's is already on nodes, written by d28ca95, so it
keeps the name and key; the service's becomes DeclaredUnit, "declared_unit".
#66 never deployed, so no node holds a record under the new key.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
Third review of mesh-catalog #147.
A unit's name can now come from a setting (a template's instance), so every systemctl call that names a
unit passes `--` before it, and a name can never be read as an option.
On removal, a unit is started or enabled again only when it is exactly the stopped and disabled the mesh
held it to. A masked unit, or one somebody started or enabled since, is left as it is, and the report
says why. A restore that fails (the start refused, or the unit not running after it) puts back what this
attempt changed and is reported as waiting, so no apply is made fatal by it and the next one tries again.
The tests' fake service managers read systemctl's arguments in the shape they were written for
(oldShape); internal/system's own test holds the `--`.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
The fourth review (hq issue 339): `trusted` is the catalogue's word and the
controller takes it out, but a controller that passes it on, an older one or
one rolled back to, must not cost a node its whole declaration. A file now
accepts it and nothing reads it; any other resource still refuses it. And a
podman that hangs no longer eats docker's ten seconds.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
A unit found running and enabled that a declaration held stopped and disabled stayed stopped and
disabled when the declaration went: ADR 0118 never starts a unit on the way out. Unassigning the zfs
module would so have left the home server's pool with no scrub schedule at all, said nowhere.
The host now records what it declared for a service (Declared, beside Found). On removal, a unit found
running and declared stopped is started again, and one found enabled and declared disabled is enabled
again, each read back; the report says restored, and the plan says it first. A record from before the
field starts nothing.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
The third review of #64 (hq issue 339): an ExecStart continued over lines, a
quoted path, a variable from Environment= or EnvironmentFile= across the unit
and its drop-ins, dockerd's --config-file and podman's TOML literal strings
each hid a data root from the guard. The running runtimes are now asked first
(docker info, podman info) on a runner of the guard's own, and the files are
read beside them in all those forms.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
mesh/delivery covered: a later merge that contains it was delivered: novox/mesh-host@7c046a8a1d84 (merged as d28ca959 into main, walk plan-17915049347305…
The review of #64 asked for containerd's tree, dockerd's --data-root from its
unit and drop-ins, and podman's graphroot to be refused like docker's own
(hq issue 339); and the controller now tells a directory a send found from
one found before it, which needs the time it was first found kept across
applies instead of the time of the last apply. A hand-over now names the
resource it was for, so it lapses if another declaration points at the path.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
A directory the engine used as found kept its owner and mode in silence, so
a module that cannot write it would just fail (hq issue 339 review). Each
one is now a WARNING in every apply's log and its module's resource of kind
directory, stated unhealthy on every look with its owner and what was
declared, which the controller raises as the module's condition; `mesh-host
hand-over <dir>` at the machine hands it to the mesh, and the next apply
gives it the declared owner and mode. The guard also refuses the spool, /opt,
the container runtimes' data (its configured data-root too), and an account's
.ssh as an access, a mount, or a directory anywhere but its own home.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
A module's places setting could point a directory anywhere, with an owner it
named, and the engine chowned and chmodded whatever it was pointed at as root,
through a link too; its accesses setting could mount any path into a container
(hq issue 339). The engine now refuses, as a failed resource with its reason,
a directory, access or mount source that is or holds one of the machine's
roots, anything placed in the kernel's, the boot loader's, root's or the
engine's own trees, a non-root directory below /etc, /usr or /run, an access
there, another account's directory below a home, and a container mounting
anything it refused, judged with every link resolved. A directory whose last
component is a link is refused, and one found here that the mesh did not make
keeps its owner and mode and is never removed.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
mesh/repo-check pass: THE CHANGE ALTERS ITS OWN CHECK (merge-check.sh): main's version judged it; the change's judges the pull requests after it merges; it…
The evidence read "asking it: asking <subject>": the words are now the link's own.
A deadline is said as the time the check gave it. A refusal is said only when the bus
refused this question, not an earlier one under a grant since widened. merge-check.sh
runs the tests that need a bus against a throwaway nats-server when the toolchain has
one, and says so when it does not (hq issue 331).
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
The queue asks a tool through a ToolBus assertion that only OverNATS satisfied; the
link the engine actually holds (natsLink) had no Ask, so every tool check failed as
"no link to the bus is open" while the link was up (hq issue 331). Give natsLink Ask,
assert at build time every optional interface the queue expects of it, and tell a link
that cannot ask apart from no link.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
An APU's integrated graphics and Intel's second (MMIO) view of a package made a machine
report a power meter the sampler would not read, so its bar could only say not
measured.
The power module is on every machine and its bar blocks apply only where the
hardware is. Two capabilities read from the kernel let the controller compose them
there and nowhere else: battery (a Battery supply not scoped to a device) and
power-meter (a system battery, a powercap package counter, or a graphics device
reporting its power).
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
A module puts the operator's account in a group by declaring the account with that group alone.
The node-engine now records each group it added, takes back only those when nothing declared still
asks for them, refuses a group the machine lacks before usermod runs, and states each such account
as its module's resource of kind account: relogin needed while the running session lacks the group.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
Liveness judged only what a module runs long-lived, so a module whose
daemon is a package's unit started by D-Bus activation failed at every
start while its machine read healthy, and a degraded service manager was
said by nothing but the profile.
The engine now reads the failed units of the machine's manager and of
every account manager the declaration names, on the two-look rule, and
says whose each is: a declared service or process, a unit file the mesh
writes, or a package the mesh installs makes it that module's, said as
an unhealthy resource of kind unit; anything else is the machine's own,
said in the statement's new units field. It reads; it never acts.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
The installer placed them between making the enrolment's deadline and
using it, so a failure returned without cancelling it, and go vet refused
the package.
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).
nox-mesh-host key makes the tunnel key, or reads the one made, and
prints its public half for the token to be issued for. enrol with a
token that carries a tunnel takes that key, refuses another, writes
mesh0 with the hub as its one peer and starts it, then reaches the bus
over it (novox/hq ADR 0169). Tokens without a tunnel enrol as before.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
The judge's tests run against files and fakes; the drill runs it against a
real resolver file and real resolvers, rewritten as the VPN client does,
and records the statements the controller's replay raises and clears from.
A VPN client rewrote the laptop's resolver file and every mesh name failed
while each module read healthy: nothing asked the machine. The engine now
looks every 30 s at the resolver file the uplink holder declared (naming
the program that rewrote it), the names through each listed resolver
(NXDOMAIN for a mesh name's IPv6 address is a finding, issue 262), the
tunnel's handshake with the hub, the bus and the default route; a part is
unhealthy on its second failing look, and the statement carries it.
Liveness alone could not see a web application whose port was open and whose
program ran while every request hung for eleven hours (issue 145). A resource
now carries the `health` its module declared: the engine makes http and tcp
looks itself from the machine to the endpoint's published port, reads a unit's
readiness from the show it already makes, hands an exec command or the image's
own check to the runtime as the container's check with the declared timing and
reads its state from the inspect it already makes, and asks a module's tool on
its own node tools. Starting until the check passed, unhealthy once its looks
after the grace fail the declared number of times; never more looks than the
measured budget; nothing restarted. The statement says contract 2, which tells
the controller this engine may be sent the field.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
At 03:30 the store's collector held the registry still while the
node-engine's reconcile on that machine was fetching bundle blobs from
it: every archive failed 'connection refused' and the machine was held
until the next pass. Other machines can meet the same window.
A scheduled step now opens its window only once no apply is in flight
here (the apply lock is taken just to write the record, so a push still
never queues behind the window). An apply whose fetch the store does
not answer waits for a window open on its own machine to close, and
elsewhere retries with backoff within one bounded budget per apply,
well past the window's length; an answer such as 404 still fails at
once.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
The witness moved a running controller's build into a 0700 directory and deleted it
on proof, while the old process could still be serving. Its directories are now
0711, and a build without a reader is retired and swept once /proc shows nothing
runs from it.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (4 of 4 compose)
A container that crash-looped after its compose applied passed every check the
gate had: nothing looked at what a module runs. The node-engine now judges every
long-running resource on every look — one read of the runtime, one per service
manager — keeps the restarts it counts across recreates and its own restarts,
and says the state in every report and as an event on change, again every minute
while not healthy. It reads only; nothing is restarted for being unhealthy.
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (0 of 4 compose)
mesh/merge-gate pass: builds mesh-host → ace, g14, novox, shanks; no bus step; every machine composes with the change as it did without (0 of 4 compose)
The toolchain the build seat runs merge-check.sh in (Go 1.26) and a newer local Go format a return of
several multi-line composite literals differently; the seat's is the one that judges, and it failed every
pull request on this file (novox/hq issue 283).
The launcher trusted a counter only a by-hand reconcile ever cleared and a
known-good nothing in the daemon wrote, so no machine could roll its host back;
the controller and the node tools were replaced in place with nothing kept.
- The launcher runs a delivered host that is not known-good on trial: one that
crashes, stops for nothing, or does not report within ten minutes goes back
to known-good, once per version, recorded in rolled-back. The host proves
itself when the mesh takes a report under its own build, says every standing
verdict on its reports, never stands aside for a rolled-back version, and
restarts its service once when its launcher was replaced on disk.
- The engine keeps the controller's and the node tools' previous build beside
the new one and judges the new one: the lease taken by the controller it
started (read-only direct get of mesh-controller_lease/holder), or this
machine's runtime answering $SRV.PING.node-tools.<node>, within sixty seconds
of time it could ask. Not healthy: the previous restored, once, said. Proved:
the previous deleted. A build declared not-reversible is never rolled back.
- Retire never removes a version newer than the running one.
The installer's first user list must match the controller's composed grant, which now reads every
machine's backup holder; and a kept directory's report pointed at the one act that loses data.
The controller's healer H1 answers a send that went unreported by asking the
machine first: a report lost on its way (issue 264) needs no second send. The
node-engine now hears mesh.node.<self>.ask.report on core NATS and enqueues a
reconcile whose account is said whether or not it is news; a delivery waiting
meanwhile is applied and reported instead. The answer is an ordinary report on
its own subject, so the node publishes nothing new and answers nobody's inbox.
The genesis lock grants the controller the healer-acted seat event, which it
now composes; the genesis test in mesh-controller holds the two equal.
A delivery and the five-minute reconcile were two paths that applied, ordered only by a lock, and
each order it allowed was met live (issues 257, 261, 267). Now both only enqueue: one worker takes
the newest declaration held when it starts, applies it once and makes one report, and reports leave
in the order they are made.
A declaration may carry the controller's lease epoch beside its sequence; one older than what this
node applied is refused before anything is touched, counted, logged and reported. A report carries
the declaration's epoch and sequence and the host's own report sequence, kept on disk so it goes on
increasing across restarts and self-updates. Without an epoch, today's behaviour stands.
The controller's watchdog of a machine's heartbeat (S1) is bound to three
of its intervals, and a bound the controller guessed would not move when
the interval does: the heartbeat now carries interval_seconds.
Its self-check (D1) must judge every composed declaration as the host
does, and a second validator written from the host's rules would drift
from them: the host's own parsing is exported, unchanged, as
github.com/novox/mesh-host/validate.
The installer's first user list grants what the controller now composes
for itself: its condition buckets, the condition and doctor-heartbeat
events, the bus's two consumer advisories and $SRV.INFO — or the first
controller would be refused them until the broker's machine is pushed.
A reconcile that held the machine to the kept declaration just before a
delivery arrived queued its report while the delivery's apply waited for
it; the link published the apply's report and then the reconcile's, so the
mesh's last word from the machine named the older declaration and the
release plan waited on a report it had already been given. The link now
sets aside an unasked report about a declaration other than the one it
has applied since.
A host that delivered its own successor stood aside before the report of
that apply was published, so it failed with 'context canceled' and the
release plan waited for a report that never came (novox/hq issue 264).
Reports are now published on a context the stand-aside does not cancel,
and the last apply's report is kept until the broker takes it and said
again on the next link, so a crash between apply and report is covered too.
The resolver file moves from resolv-conf to the uplink's holder in one apply.
Orphans go first, so the file was deleted or given back its pre-mesh original
until the new owner's turn came. Now the old record is forgotten once the new
one is recorded at the same path, and the kept original goes with it.
Removing one record of a unit gave back what that record found, even while another declared
service holds the unit: when the private network's docker.service record goes and the docker
module's stays, a record that found the runtime stopped would stop it, and every container with
it, only for the docker module to start it again in the same apply. The record is forgotten
instead, and the plan says so. A test pins the registry member moving from the network's record
to the docker module's in one apply without leaving the list.
A service was restarted where it was declared, so one declared ahead of a
file in its restart-on was restarted before that file existed (the
resolver's zones file, a fact appended after its module's resources), and
a later change to such a file was never acted on. Each service is now
applied right after the last resource it names under restart-on or
reload-on; nothing else moves.
A while-stopped step stops its module's containers, and an apply arriving
mid-window read the stopped server as broken and recreated it running under
the step - for the store's collector, a registry taking an upload the sweep
then deletes. The scheduler now records each window under the node's state
directory before its first stop and erases it after its last start, so every
apply on the machine (daemon, reconcile by hand, installer) reports a held
container held-still and leaves it for the first apply after the window.
A window whose host died, or past six hours, holds nothing; the report says
which windows are open.
The host keeps the original of a file before writing over it (ADR 0102), but
removing the file's record deleted the file and never put the original back,
although ADR 0118 and the comment on meshMadeUnits say it does. A module writing
/etc/pacman.conf, logrotate.conf, locale.conf or vconsole.conf whole would, once
unassigned, leave the machine without the file.
removeWhole now decides, in order: no kept original (the mesh made it) is
removed as before; a file gone since is not brought back; a file changed since
the mesh last wrote it is left as it stands, as a block or JSON write-into stays
the machine's; an unreadable kept copy leaves the mesh's file in place. Otherwise
the original goes back atomically with the mode and owner it was found with,
now recorded beside Kept, and the outcome is "restored". None of it is fatal.
The plan says "restore" for such a file.
A kept original is carried only for the path it was kept from, and a file whose
path moved keeps the original at its new path first, so a moved file is never
given another path's original.
An account's manager runs only while it is logged in or lingers. A user-scoped unit
whose manager is not running is now "waiting" rather than failed, its record kept as
it was; its removal is never fatal (kept recorded, retried) and an account that is
gone is forgotten. Whether the manager runs is asked of user@<uid>.service in the
machine's manager: asking the account's own, through --machine, logs it in.
The user shape gains `linger`, set with loginctl, read back from logind's record,
and given back on removal like the shell. Unit files the mesh writes under
~/.config/systemd/user or /etc/systemd/user make that unit the mesh's, and made,
holds and found units are keyed by manager and name, so an account's unit and the
machine's of one name are two units. A service moved between managers gives the old
one back through the manager it was in. OpenRC refuses both.
jochen
mesh-admin
jschoubben