A defensive publication (public prior art). Author: Gustavo Assuncao, PhD · Publisher: Gus IT LLC (Florida, USA) · Date: 2026-07-03 · Version 1.0.
License banner. This repository is dual-licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later + commercial. Commercial licensing available from Gus IT LLC — contact gus@gusit.de. The disclosure is published as public prior art to prevent third parties from patenting the mechanism described herein.
This repository is a technical defensive publication: a dated, enabling, public description of a mechanism, published so that the mechanism becomes prior art and cannot later be patented by others. It is not a product pitch and not a marketing document. It describes a real mechanism, in clean-room form, with a runnable reference implementation.
The mechanism is an autonomous, self-healing bare-metal deployment autopilot built on one uniform per-phase contract that verifies desired state before doing any work, does the work at most once, and on failure either remediates and retries or hard-escalates to a human.
Its defensible core — the reason this document exists — is how it heals a node that has gone silent on its normal (in-band) control channel. Instead of retrying or marking the node failed, the autopilot performs out-of-band differential diagnosis: it reads two sensors over the node's baseboard management controller — the physical NIC link status and the firmware-reported boot-progress state — and selects a physical remediation from the joint value of that sensor pair:
| Link status | Boot progress | Diagnosis | Remediation (physical actuator) |
|---|---|---|---|
| LinkUp | OSRunning | OS up, wire live, no mgmt IP → vendor driver missing / firmware mismatch | Stage vendor-driver ISO via virtual media, then install |
| any | not OSRunning | OS never came up → stuck installer | Unstick installer + cold-cycle |
| LinkDown | OSRunning | OS up, link physically down → NIC needs re-init | Cold-cycle for NIC re-init |
All three look identical from the in-band side ("node unreachable"). Only the two-dimensional out-of-band reading tells them apart — and each demands a different physical fix. Retry-based provisioners (Ironic, MAAS, Tinkerbell) mark such a node failed; single-lever remediators (Cluster API / Metal³) power-cycle or reprovision. Neither fuses two OOB sensors to choose among distinct actuators on an in-band-dead node. That selection is the narrow, novel element this publication dates.
Publishing an enabling description with a verifiable date establishes prior art. Once the mechanism is public prior art, a later patent application claiming the same mechanism can be defeated by this document. The goal is freedom to operate — for us and for everyone — over the disclosed mechanism. We assert no exclusivity; the patent-style claims in the disclosure exist only to delineate the subject matter being placed in the public domain.
| Path | Contents |
|---|---|
DEFENSIVE-PUBLICATION.md |
The full ~5000-word disclosure: problem, prior-art inadequacy, the mechanism in enabling detail, data model, worked example, prior-art delta, and defensive claims. Start here. |
docs/FIGURES.md |
The mechanism's diagrams with captions. |
docs/PRIOR-ART.md |
Real references, a delta table, and the honest novelty statement. |
docs/OPEN-SOURCE-APP.md |
How the reference maps to a deployable open-source app + a Kubernetes/AKS deployment sketch. |
src/ |
Clean-room, dependency-free, offline-runnable Node.js (ESM) reference implementation. |
The src/ directory contains a clean-room reference — no proprietary code, no real endpoints, no credentials. It runs offline with only Node.js:
cd src
node example.jsIt demonstrates, end to end: the verify-first attempt(...) contract; the selectRemediation({link, bootState}) differential-diagnosis selector picking a different actuator for each of the three faults above; idempotent crash-resume; and the firmware-inventory symmetry diff. Every provider (BMC/Redfish reads and actuators, in-band probe) is an injectable stub with simulated per-node "physics," so applying a staged fix actually changes the simulated node's state and the phase converges. Empirically-tuned constants appear as safe demo defaults annotated [WITHHELD — trade secret].
See src/README.md for the file-by-file map.
The overall shape — verify-first reconciliation, bounded retries, escalation, BMC power control, firmware inventory — is well-established prior art and is explicitly not claimed as novel here. The single defensible element is the two-dimensional OOB sensor-pair → physical-actuator selector on an in-band-dead node. See docs/PRIOR-ART.md for the full, honest delta.
Gustavo Assuncao. Verify-First Phase Autopilot with Out-of-Band Differential Diagnosis (LinkStatus × BootProgress Remediation Selector). Defensive Publication v1.0, Gus IT LLC, 2026-07-03.
Dual-licensed AGPL-3.0-or-later + commercial. See the disclosure's Appendix C. Commercial terms: gus@gusit.de (Gus IT LLC, Florida, USA).