Twice now a report has read "dns not serving" and been taken for a broken
resolver. It was accurate both times: the agent had been started without
`--dns`. That is the flag's fault, not the reader's — a resolver that
disappears because one word was not retyped is worse than none, since the
names simply stop working. So the setting belongs to the device now: `--dns`
turns it on and it stays on, `tsunagi dns off` turns it off, and
`tsunagi dns on` turns it on for an agent that is already running, without
restarting it. `tsunagi dns` says what it is doing, or what it will do at
the next start when nothing is running.
One agent has one identity and as many networks as it likes, so one DNS
service serves them all: each network is a zone named after it, and joining
or leaving one changes what resolves with no restart. A question carries a
name and not the network it belongs to, so the suffix decides and nothing is
shared between zones — a member of one network is not a name in another.
`--dns-zone` is gone with that: there is no single zone to name any more, and
a network name may contain dots, so `--network lab.internal` is how you get
`music.lab.internal`.
It listens on loopback only, where it always could have. Binding the overlay
address put the zones in front of the whole mesh, and with several networks
on one agent that would have answered one network's questions about
another's names.
That made a gap plain: a second network on an agent had no addresses at all,
because the configured range belongs to whichever network took it first, so
its members had nothing to allocate from and no names to answer with. A
second network now uses the range **derived from its own network id** —
every member derives the same one from something they all already have, so
it is an agreement rather than a local invention. It is held back for a
moment first, because a network that already exists has a range of its own
and a joiner should adopt it rather than argue; that wait is what keeps
"the first member settles it" true.
And a network needs no ceremony to start. `tsunagi up --network lab` with no
secret resolves the obvious way: the one network of that name this device
already has, or — when there is none — a fresh random secret, printed in
full with the single line to send the others. That is the ad-hoc case, one
person makes a network and passes the command round, and it was previously
two steps with a flag people could not find. The secret is printed only when
the agent invented it, because then there is nowhere else to read it from;
one that was supplied is not echoed. Two networks of one name and no secret
is the one case with no answer, and it says so rather than choosing.
Releasing now also stops this agent claiming again. The periodic check would
otherwise publish a fresh claim in the moment between the goodbye and the
teardown, turning a release into a hello nobody asked for.
Exercised with the real binary: a zone per network as a second one is joined
into a running agent, the resolver switched on and off while it runs, and an
ad-hoc network printing its secret and the line to share.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
tsunagiandClaude Opus 5
0f97d60854