Let agents discover and message channels on peer hosts #57

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1. iamnbutler

   added a parent issue on Oct 5, 2026

   • [Meta] Extend work across hosts and devices #58
2. iamnbutler commented on Oct 6, 2026

   

   iamnbutler

   on Oct 6, 2026

   ContributorAuthor

   More actions

   Implemented in draft #160 (branch codex/peer-channel-messaging, commit 14c6923). It stays a draft until the change is checked on two real hosts.

   What changed

   • Workers reach their host through an owner-only, token-authenticated host.sock in the host's data directory. They find it by home, not port, so ace serve --port and desktop profiles work. It accepts only channels and deliver. Requests share the gateway's closing/updating admission and drain.
   • channels lists local channels, reachable peers' channels, and offline channels from the directory, with id, host, owner, state and project. A name shared by several channels is refused with the candidate ids.
   • message delivers to a channel this host runs, or is relayed once through a new peer-only deliver request. Peers never forward further.
   • The destination host stamps agent.<source id>@<login>: its own owner's login, or the peer login that tailscale whois verified. Caller-supplied authors are ignored, and agents are never treated as the channel owner, so sharing off still refuses agent invocation. The source id is the reply address and survives renames.
   • Relayed request ids are scoped to the verified login (peer/<login>/…) because pi dedupes per chat regardless of author. Local ids are unchanged.
   • With no host running (CLI-only), workers fall back to local delivery only on ENOENT/ECONNREFUSED, and say so.

   Verified locally, with real Anthropic models on a disposable ace serve --port 4357 profile and only disposable ace57-* channels:

   • say and invoke, plus a reply by source id after the sender was renamed;
   • name ambiguity, and sharing off (say allowed, invoke refused);
   • request id replay and peer/local id isolation, confirmed in SQLite;
   • token, home, from and request id refusals, and that a forged author is ignored;
   • peer deliver over the real self-tailnet listener, which ran real whois with the owner's own login;
   • socket lifecycle: clean stop, conflicting host, stale-socket recovery, and draining a delivery admitted at SIGTERM;
   • CLI-only fallback.

   Still open for acceptance

   • The only online peer Mac (nate16-1, a different login) refuses 4140/4141/4142, so no Ace gateway is running there.
   • Unverified: two-host discovery and delivery, collision isolation between distinct logins, duplicate delivery and reconnect across machines, and offline peers listed by the directory.
   • Next step: run Ace on a second host and repeat these checks with disposable channels on both machines (Verify Ace with two machines on the tailnet #10).

   Dogfooding: #5.