A single secret that turned any request into an operator was the only
credential several routes accepted, and it had no caller left: the device
pairing it existed for is on hold, and nothing in this tree or any client
sent it. What remained was a key that bypassed authentication entirely,
required to boot, and checked by nobody.
Every route behind it had a better answer available:
- Library and game sync move to host credentials. Both took a `userId` in
the body, which meant one secret could write into anybody's library. A
host now says which of its enrolled users a batch is for, and that claim
is checked against the Steam sign-ins it actually holds — one box carries
several people's accounts, so the pair is the unit.
- Download-state reporting narrows to hosts alone, and the body that could
name a different host is gone. Which host is reporting comes from its own
credentials, and a body that still names one is refused rather than
ignored.
- Linking a Steam account is always for the caller.
- Creating a game by hand is deleted; syncing already upserts the catalogue.
- Reading the waitlist is deleted. Every address on it belongs to someone
who has not agreed to anything, and answering it over HTTP made that list
something a leaked key could drain.
- The pairing-code routes are deleted with the flow they served. The domain
module and its table stay, so returning to it is a route file rather than
a migration.
Nothing in the API now accepts a credential that stands for more than one
caller: every request resolves to a specific user or a specific host, which
is what lets a route say "the caller's own library" and mean it.
BREAKING CHANGE: the `x-nestri-admin-token` header is no longer accepted and
`ADMIN_SHARED_SECRET` is no longer read. `POST /games`, `GET /waitlist` and
the `/pairing-code` routes are gone; `POST /games/sync` and `POST /library/sync`
now require host credentials and take `userId` in the body; `POST /steam/link`
no longer accepts `userId`; `POST /games/download-state` no longer accepts
`hostId`.
A host reporting an endpoint id another machine already holds hit the unique
index, and the raw refusal reached the global handler as a 500 -- telling a
host its beat broke the server rather than that the id is taken. It is now the
409 every other conflict here gives, and the route documents it.
Checked-then-written would be worse rather than better: two hosts reporting the
same id in the same instant both read "nobody holds it" and both write, which
is precisely what the index is for. The read would add a query and remove
nothing.
Before:
expect(res.status).toBe(409)
Received: 500
The machine table said who owns a host, which team it belongs to and when it
was last seen, and nothing about how to reach it. Anything standing in front of
a host and authenticating browsers on its behalf could therefore authorise a
request perfectly and then have nowhere to send it.
Reported, never assigned. A host holds the secret half of this identity and is
the only thing that can know the public half first, so it rides on the beat it
already sends as itself. Omitting the field leaves the stored value alone --
an agent that does not mention where it is has not moved, and an absent field
must never read as "nowhere", which would take every host shipped before this
field off the map on its next beat.
Nullable, because "has never reported one" is a real state that every host
registered before today is in. Unique, because an endpoint id belongs to one
host: two rows claiming the same one would send a request addressed to one
machine to another machine's agent, which is the one mistake here that the
authorisation in front of it cannot catch.
Ids are stored in a fixed-width column, so an overlong one is refused by
Postgres rather than simply matching nothing. That refusal is not a foreign-key
violation, so it fell through to the global error boundary and reached the
caller as a 500 — telling a host to retry something that can never succeed.
Measured: a 44-character user id returned 500, where an absent but well-formed
one correctly returned 404.
`Identifier.schema` is the natural place for the check and had no callers yet,
so it now asserts the exact width an id has as well as its prefix — including
the separator, without which `usrsomething` reads as a user id. The enrolment
schema uses it for both foreign keys, so the refusal happens where the input
arrives and names the field.
Also index `steam_enrolment.user_id`. The primary key begins with the machine,
which answers what one host holds and nothing else, so neither of the two
things that read by user alone can use it: the cascade behind deleting a user,
and asking which hosts hold a token for one person. The table's migration has
not been released, so this is folded into it rather than following it with a
correction.
A host that signs a person into Steam ends up holding a refresh token. The
control plane needs to know that happened — to show it, and so a host that
lost its disk can find out what it is expected to hold — but it must not know
the credential, because the token is bound to the address that obtained it and
a copy anywhere else is the account-theft signal Steam watches for.
So `steam_enrolment` stores the outcome and has no token column, no encrypted
token column, and no column that could hold one later. The safeguard is that
the credential is never sent here at all; a nullable column would be the first
step in undoing it, so a test asserts the column list exactly and fails if one
appears. Three machine-authenticated routes go with it: report a completed
sign-in, report that Steam refused the token, and list what this host should
have. All three take the host from its own credentials, so a box can neither
report onto nor read another box's hardware. Their bodies are strict, so a
host that sends a token is told it is wrong rather than quietly believed —
which also keeps the value out of the request log.
The Steam id is deliberately not unique. One account signed in on two hosts is
two rows and two tokens, and a unique index there would look like hygiene while
refusing somebody their second box.
There is no `pending` state: a sign-in challenge lives about two minutes inside
one process, and nothing outside it needs to know it exists. Nothing revokes
yet, and `last_ok_at` has no writer — a successful logon happens where there is
no credential to report it with — so the column exists with the shape it will
need and stays null rather than being filled with the nearest event that was
easy to observe.
A host agent already sends a full inventory snapshot on a cadence, and
nothing served the endpoint it sends it to — so every one of those calls
answered 404. It fails quietly by design, because a dropped snapshot is
meant to be corrected by the next one, which is exactly why nobody
noticed: the only symptom is a line in the agent's own log.
Kept separate from the heartbeat because the two have different loss
tolerance. A dropped beat moves a host towards offline and unplaces it;
a dropped snapshot costs nothing until the next one arrives. Folding them
together would let a malformed inventory field make a healthy host look
dead.
Three rules decide what a snapshot may do, and the last two are why this
is one core function rather than a loop in the route:
- a box we know, that the snapshot names, takes the reported state
- a box we know that was running, and that the snapshot omits, is
stopped and says so — absence inside a snapshot is information
- a box the snapshot names that is not placed on the calling host is
never created, only reported back as a divergence
The scope is in the `where` clause and not in the agent asking politely
about its own boxes: a machine credential is a long-lived secret sitting
on hardware in somebody's living room.
`pid` and `uptimeS` are accepted and deliberately dropped. A pid is a
number in another machine's namespace, and uptime is derivable from a
run's start time, which is already stored and already trustworthy.
The agent side sends a claim token on every write; this side rejected the
field outright, so every state report and every ticket publish answered
400. Both bodies now take it.
Underneath that, nothing compared a holder. A run was reachable by any
caller on the right machine, and a box names exactly one machine — so two
attempts polling the same job presented identical credentials and were
told apart only by which one's select landed first. That is timing, not a
rule, and no caller could be told which case it was in.
The row now remembers which attempt holds it. Taking a claim requires
there to be no holder; every write after it requires the caller to be the
holder. The same state reported by a different attempt is a lost race and
not a retry, and is refused whatever the state is - which is the only
thing that separates the two 200s from the 409s.
The ticket is held to the claim too, for a worse reason than a double
start: the client re-reads the address rather than keeping the first, so
a ticket written by a losing attempt produces a client that connects,
successfully, to a machine running nothing.
The holder is never cleared, including on a terminal state, so a settled
claim cannot be replayed and a finished run still records which attempt
ran it. It is not in what goes out - holding one permits writing to a
run, and the owner reading their own session is not the holder.
A library entry records the person, not the account the games were
synced from, and `POST /library/sync` is not even told which account a
list came from. So the ownership check added for session requests asks
"has somebody this person linked got this game?" and not "does the
account about to play own it?" — for the one Steam account most people
have those are the same sentence, and for two they are not.
Confirmed rather than reasoned about: a person with two Steam links, a
game synced at person level, and a request naming the second account is
accepted today.
The check stays, because it still turns a box that boots, tries to
launch and fails minutes later into an immediate refusal, and it never
refuses on account grounds that the data cannot support. What changes is
the comment, which claimed the stronger property, and a test that pins
the gap so it is found deliberately rather than by surprise.
Closing it properly means recording the linked account on a library
entry: a column, a sync contract that says which account a list belongs
to, a uniqueness rule per account rather than per person, and a backfill
with no correct answer for rows already written. That is a decision about
what a library is, and inferring it here would be the kind of modelling
taken by accident that this branch refuses elsewhere.
Four things the session endpoints did not do, or did wrongly.
The box had three states and nothing wrote them. A box read `created`
while a run on it was `live`, so every screen showing a person what their
hardware is doing was reading a column no code had ever moved. A run
reaching `live` now makes its box `running`, and a terminal run stops it:
`ended` cleanly, `failed` not, carrying the reason the agent gave. Not
every run state maps — a box has no `starting` on purpose, because that
transition is synchronous from the agent's side and a state nobody sets
is a state that lies. Both writes are one transaction, since "this run is
live" and "the box under it is running" are one fact in two tables, and a
box stuck `running` with nothing on it has nothing to correct it.
`POST /session` accepted any game in the catalog. A run launches as a
Steam account that has to own the game, so one outside the caller's
library is a box that starts, tries to launch and fails minutes later
with nothing to point at; it is now refused up front. Told apart from a
game that does not exist rather than hidden, because the catalog is
public and "you do not own this" is a sentence a person can act on. The
library is a synced copy, so this refuses a game bought since the last
sync — that is a staleness bug in the sync, not a reason to start runs
that cannot work.
Publishing a ticket only refused terminal runs, so a host could publish
an address for a run it had never claimed. A ticket is the address of
something being brought up, so only `starting` and `live` accept one, and
the state is in the write rather than only in the check above it. The two
refusals stay separate answers because they are different mistakes: one
agent skipped a step, the other has nothing left to reach.
The migration that adds the one-active-run index stopped older duplicate
runs without clearing the ticket they had published, which is the
invariant that same migration exists to establish. It clears it now,
verified against a box carrying two unstopped runs.
Nine tests, each checked against the unfixed code first.
Two invariants the session endpoint stated but did not hold.
A box runs one thing at a time. `POST /session` read `activeForBox` and
refused when something was already running, but the read and the insert
are two statements with nothing between them: two requests that both saw
"nothing is running" each got a row, and the job poll then handed the
host the same box to start twice. Demonstrated at 2 rows and 2 jobs from
one box. That is the failure the state claim exists to prevent, one step
earlier, and it takes the same answer — a partial unique index on the
predicate the read asks about, so the database refuses the second insert.
`Session.request` turns that refusal into the same 409 in the same words,
so a caller cannot tell which of the two caught it.
The migration resolves any existing duplicates before creating the index,
keeping each box's newest unstopped run because that is the one a person
is waiting on, and stopping the rest rather than deleting them.
Separately, a run that reached `ended` or `failed` kept the last ticket
it published. Publishing a new one is already refused, so the stale
address was both the only ticket a client could read for a dead run and
the one nothing was allowed to replace — and a client that polls would
dial it. Terminal transitions now clear it, in `setState` as well as in
the compare-and-set, so the invariant does not depend on which writer
stopped the run.
Seven tests, each checked against the unfixed code first. The published
descriptions for the ticket field and the read endpoint now say that a
stopped run has no address.
A run of a box had core support and no HTTP surface. This adds both halves
of it: a person asks for a run and reads it back, and the host agent the box
is placed on is handed the work and reports what happened.
The access rule is the point. An agent may only see or touch a run whose box
is placed on its own hardware, and that is a `where` clause on every one of
the three agent endpoints rather than a check next to them — host credentials
are long-lived secrets sitting on hardware in somebody's home, so what one
leaking can reach has to be decided by the query. "No such run" and "not your
run" are the same refusal, so ids cannot be discovered by reporting states
at them.
`Session.setState` updated on the id alone, which means two agents polling
the same work both succeed and both start the same box. There is one host
today, which is exactly why that would have been built wrong and stayed
wrong. The state a run is moving out of is now part of the `where` clause,
so the database picks the winner; the loser gets a conflict rather than a
silent no-op. Three cases that look alike are kept apart: re-reporting a
state you already reported changes nothing and is not an error, a transition
that does not exist is refused with the run left where it was, and another
host reporting anything is forbidden.
Asking for a run makes no decision about where it happens — a box already
names its hardware, so the run inherits it by join. Placement therefore
gets an interface at box creation, where the decision actually is, with the
single-host case as its implementation and a deliberate refusal when there
is more than one candidate and no policy to choose with.
Tests cover the wire shape from both sides, the query scoping, the claim,
and the timestamp idempotence a run's billing rests on.
Comments and served API descriptions here had grown references that only make
sense to someone with our internal notes: relative paths that escape this
tree, filenames and titles of documents nobody outside can open, quoted prose
from them, and the name of a component that has no public surface — once in an
OpenAPI description, which is published output rather than source.
None of it was load-bearing. Every case restates as what the code actually
requires, and every rewrite came out shorter: "in the words the host agent
reports" for a component name, "republished as addresses are discovered" for a
quoted phrase, "a size tier sets vCPU, RAM and the output geometry" for a
sentence that had been carrying a path.
Internal reasoning is now cited exactly one way, ref(d-NNNN) in a source
comment, with the rule that the sentence must still stand if the marker is
deleted. CLAUDE.md leads with it, because the previous version of this mistake
was made by people who knew the repo was public and it still took ten
occurrences to notice, so "be careful" is not a mechanism.
Commit messages get the stricter rule and carry no references at all: a
comment can be fixed by the next commit and a published message cannot be
fixed at all. Git hooks now enforce both halves.
The check caught a real one while being written: the CLAUDE.md table spelled
out the paths it was prohibiting, which discloses them to exactly the reader
it protects against.
138 tests, 0 fail.
`lastSeen` and `intervalSeconds` are the two field names neslet's plane.rs
reads out of the reply, and a rename on either side yields a host that beats,
parses nothing and reports success. These tests are what make that a contract
rather than a coincidence.
Also asserts the property the middleware comment claims and nothing checked:
wrong machine credentials and no credentials produce *identical* responses,
because bad credentials fall through to `public` rather than erroring so that
probing cannot reveal which machine ids exist. Comparing the two bodies is the
only way that stays true.
Two of these tests started out asserting 401 and were wrong, not the code —
`machineOnly` sees a public actor either way and forbids.
138 tests, 0 fail.
Migration 1 of 0048, and the first of the seven weeks — nothing about a live
feed works without these two tables, so it is not a cleanup during them.
box a VM someone owns: an id that is also its DNS label, an editable
label, an owning user, the machine it sits on, a tier and a state.
Owned by a person and placed on a team's hardware, which are two
different relationships, hence both userId and machineId.
session one run of one box by one linked Steam account, and what costs
money. Separate from box because the ticket changes after bind as
addresses are discovered — the vsock contract calls it "a stream,
not one value" — so it is a column a client polls, not a value it
is handed once.
Box states are neslet's own three and no more. `starting` and `stopping` are
the obvious additions and both are omitted because nothing would ever write
them; a failed box is `stopped` with stopClean false, which is how neslet
models it too.
The generated migration would have failed on live rows in three ways, so it
is hand-written and tested against a database seeded at the old schema:
- machine.team_id becomes notNull, and *every existing row is null* because
the old registration path passed null. Personal teams are backfilled for
machine owners first, reusing a team they already own rather than minting
a second, with the owner membership row repaired where missing.
- game_download.host_id becomes a foreign key. It held free-form strings,
so unattributable rows are deleted before the cast — the only destructive
statement here, and a considered loss: it is a progress report neslet
re-derives from disk.
- Team.createPersonal was written and documented in packages/core/CLAUDE.md
as part of the login flow and never actually called, so no user has a
team. ensurePersonal is idempotent and now runs on every login, which is
what backfills accounts the migration does not reach.
Verified on a seeded legacy database: three null-team machines backfilled, an
existing team reused rather than duplicated, a blank display name handled, and
both unattributable download rows dropped while the attributable one survived.
Also fixes two things this work ran into rather than caused:
- Database.client() built a new postgres pool on every call, and use()
called it twice per invocation — pools of ten connections held for a 30s
idle timeout. Invisible in a Worker where requests are short; the suite
crossed 100 connections and Postgres said "sorry, too many clients
already" in whichever file ran last, which reads as a flaky test rather
than a leak. Now one pool per connection string.
- download.test.ts asserted against `hst_…` host ids, which is exactly the
unattributable row the new foreign key exists to refuse.
There is no "no team" any more: PATCH /machine/:id took teamId null to mean
"mine alone" and now requires a team, because the personal team is the one to
name. Its test is updated to the new contract rather than deleted.
113 → 128 tests, 0 fail.
Squashes the current state of the internal working tree onto this history.
The two trees had grown apart with no common ancestor, so this is a content
sync rather than a merge, and the published history is preserved rather than
rewritten — a force-push here would break every existing fork and clone to no
benefit.
What lands:
- Waitlist: API route, core module, and migration 0006 alongside game aliases.
- User verification.
- CI, oxfmt config, editor settings.
- Assorted fixes across the API routes and core modules.
The repository's own README, the wordmark and the per-package READMEs are kept
from this side; the internal tree had dropped them and they are what a stranger
arriving here reads first.
The marketing site in the internal tree is deliberately not here. It is a
separate product with its own repo and its own licence, and this repo is the
open one — a closed component does not belong in it regardless of how convenient
the directory looked.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
