Mesh

A box can lend spare disk and CPU to other LosOS boxes. Joining is off by default. The Mesh pane has two switches: join the mesh, and share compute. The third switch, sharing this box's disk, sits on the Market pane, because lending disk and being paid for it are one decision. While the market is planned, that switch is out of reach with it.

Two clusters

Each box runs two Kubernetes instances:

	Local (k3s)	Mesh (rke2 agent)
Runs	this box's Nextcloud, Forgejo	Longhorn storage, shared compute
Server	this box	the edge VPS
Needs the network	no	yes

A Kubernetes agent cannot start while its server is unreachable, and the box reboots every night. If your own services ran in the mesh cluster, an edge outage over midnight would take them offline. Keep them separate.

Sharing compute

The box takes mesh work only when both are true:

1. The current time is inside the window you set (losos.cluster.computeWindow).
2. The box is idle (losos.cluster.idleLoadThreshold).

Idleness can close the window early. It cannot open it outside the window.

Anything unknown counts as busy: no idleness report, a stale report, or an edge that just restarted. The edge evaluates the window in the appliance's time zone.

Finding the edge

The mesh is other boxes behind an edge. A box with no edge in reach cannot share anything, whatever its switches say, so lososd looks for one every 20 seconds, in two places:

• on the local network, by DNS-SD. An edge configured with losos.edge.lan.advertise = true publishes _losos-edge._tcp over mDNS with a url= record naming its registrar API, and the box's Avahi finds it.
• at the configured address, losos.proxy.registrarUrl, which on a box with internet is the public edge. The box probes it whether or not the master proxy is switched on.

A candidate counts only once its /health answers. Several can be in reach at once, say a company's edge on the LAN and the public one over the internet. GET /api/edge lists them all, LAN first, and the Mesh pane shows one row per edge, or "No edge proxy found" with what it tried. Sharing is allowed while any of them answers. Growing a box's own disk needs no edge at all. Pooling across boxes does, because the mesh's control plane runs on the edge. On a LAN with no internet, that edge is one always-on PC running the edge module, see Master proxy, Edge on the same LAN.

While nothing answers, the box refuses to turn network-dependent sharing on. Switching to mesh mode, and any apply that turns losos.sharingMyStorage or losos.cluster.enable on, is answered 409 with the reason, and the switches are greyed with the same sentence. Settings that are already on are left alone, so a box whose edge went away keeps its configuration and can still change anything else. Turning sharing off is always allowed. Your own files and apps never depend on the edge.

Finding an edge and trusting it with money are two different questions. Any edge that answers opens sharing. Trading on the market is allowed only through an official edge, one that presents a certificate signed by the LosOS root key and answers the box's fresh nonce with it. The box checks this on every scan. Each edge's row carries a sign beside its name, a check for an official edge and a warning for any other. The warning's tooltip lists what that edge cannot do for this box: buying on the market, and selling this box's spare storage and compute. A company's own edge wears the warning, and that is not a fault. See Master proxy, Official edges.

demo/edge-lan/run.sh boots two boxes and an edge on one virtual network and walks through exactly this in the order of the verification checklist (demo/edge-lan/CHECKLIST.md). First with no edge anywhere: nothing found, sharing refused, local use intact, a reboot changes nothing. Then with the edge on: found on both boxes within a scan, allowed, edge gone, refused, back. demo/edge-lan/record.sh records the same walk from the boxes' admin UI.

Sharing storage

Contributed storage lives in the shared user's home under an fscrypt policy. The key is sealed to the TPM. When sharing is off, the key is not loaded and the directory is unreadable, even to root on the running box. LUKS protects the box while it is off; fscrypt protects this directory while it is on.

Contributed files are namespaced per machine.

Selling

Storage and compute will also be sellable to other boxes through the optional Stripe Connect market. It is built but not open yet, and the admin UI shows its tab greyed out as "soon(TM)". See Market.

Persistence

The mesh agent writes /etc/rancher/node/password on first join. That path must stay in the persistence list, or the server rejects the box after the next reboot.