PREVIEW18.md

Preview.18 Provider lifecycle and Buyer SSH handoff

Status: PUBLISHED_PRERELEASE. Preview.18 is installable only from the matching non-draft v0.1.0-preview.18 after the exact Linux/x64 archive verifies against its same-release SHA256SUMS; this source commit alone is not install authority.

Preview.18 preserves the Preview.17 guided Provider and Buyer onboarding contracts and adds the bounded lifecycle and SSH handoff repairs below. Direct role commands remain available for reviewed automation and recovery; the normal human path remains punch.

Append-only Provider onboarding

Supervised approval of a new Provider appends one distinct Provider actor, machine, invitation, offer authority, and narrow route. It does not replace or delete an existing Provider or Buyer authority. Every request and invitation remains bound to the same public machine identity, and all prior durable Provider, Buyer, offer, order, and contract state is preserved.

This is not self-service approval. The public onboarding request still stops at WAITING_FOR_INVITE; INVITE_READY still contains no invitation secret; and the owner-delivered mode-0600 invitation remains a separate custody boundary.

Explicit Provider offer lifecycle

The guided Provider home reads the authenticated offer list and shows each offer's ID, state, CPU, RAM, disk, GPU count, window, price, and targeted status. Status, unlist, and retire actions require selection of one exact eligible offer.

Unlisting removes the selected offer from discovery and prevents new orders. It does not cancel accepted contracts and leaves the supervised Provider service installed and runnable. Retirement remains terminal for that offer and requires an already-unlisted offer, terminal obligations, released capacity, and fenced access.

After retirement, the Provider may create one sequential replacement. The retired predecessor remains preserved; the successor receives a distinct offer ID, clones the predecessor's exact capacity, target, window, and price, and reuses the same environment ID, setup reference, and supervised service before it must reach LISTED. Preview.18 permits only one nonterminal offer per Provider machine; it does not claim concurrent multi-offer, multi-profile, or multi-machine orchestration.

The advanced public command surface adds offer-list and offer-replace without changing the existing offer-status, offer-unlist, or offer-retire semantics.

Strict guided zero-price order gate

The guided Buyer accepts only an authenticated offer that is all of:

• explicitly eligible for the current Buyer;
• targeted to that Buyer; and
• priced as canonical numeric +0, not a string, missing value, nested-only value, nonzero value, or negative zero.

A mismatch stops before SSH-key selection, local order creation, or a Control order request. No payment setup or transaction is attempted. The direct Control boundary remains authoritative and owner-targeted $0 only.

Scoped Buyer SSH preparation

For an ACTIVE contract with effective access, the guided Buyer action is Prepare SSH command, not an embedded shell. It verifies the selected owner-private key, fixed OpenSSH client, exact authenticated gateway descriptor, one NetBird route/source binding, and the persistent/live Buyer firewall order.

If the existing Buyer-local private-range policy blocks the one contract gateway, Punch displays one exact TCP egress exception and requires explicit consent. The repair is limited to that destination, port, and NetBird interface; persistent and live rules must agree. Failed apply restores the prior policy or reports rollback as unproven and stops.

After the gate passes, Punch prints one shell-quoted command bound to the existing Buyer config, selected key path, active contract ID, per-contract known-hosts file, forced TTY, batch mode, fixed ProxyCommand, and punch@punch-job. Punch does not spawn SSH or the proxy. Gateway reachability and SSH key exchange start only when the owner runs the visible command.

The optional OSC 52 step is default-no and copies only that just-generated command after explicit consent. SENT means the terminal request was emitted, not acknowledged. Unsupported terminals, multiplexers, decline, or failure leave the visible command as the safe fallback. No key, invitation, session, credential, config contents, or arbitrary output is copied.

Exiting the remote shell with exit or Ctrl-D returns to the Buyer VM and does not stop the active contract. Contract revocation and cleanup remain the separate Stop action.

Unchanged security and product boundary

Preview.18 remains invitation-only, Linux/x64, owner-targeted $0, and contract-scoped over NetBird. It does not enable payment, settlement, payout, refunds, public Provider addresses, host SSH, Docker exposure, NetBird management credentials, Control administrator credentials, or self-approved Provider onboarding.

Exact release binding

The published artifact binds private source commit 4e4aae1bb335092d69dc467a74651ad9527c4c17, tree a0fbb1491130d179b602c64e9b7fe170c7011de6, and deterministic Control archive sha256:fcaa8d0c28d48f68bf940811457cfcd2ff594c9d14139dae33301749d6c0ae5a.

Its 43,811,105-byte public archive is sha256:d144fd266328c022ef2601feb871ff62396a293d5e35e7130a3880cc0cdaf423; the same-release SHA256SUMS is sha256:094b1acb686b7daec071af97370be749b003579343e432c8c026dc80980d4da7. The immutable packaged RELEASE-BINDING.json is sha256:1f5c009a84f15262da8c1075140fcf463229a5d4bf6aa3ad0f2e5844ef5a028a, the packaged BUILD-MANIFEST.txt is sha256:b86cb81697183e31b8fa53529a617be07266e3ad892d50c312bcad09d0de6625, and the embedded RELEASE-CONTRACT.json is sha256:1d7b13e6ce39526cf99b8795291dcb3d0f5e85a76df346d0f60f1066d2d2ebd1.

The static command-contract template preserves its four PENDING_DETERMINISTIC_BUILD sentinels. The separate bound command contract, runtime contract, and generated command reference bind the archive, SHA256SUMS, runtime contract, and canonical packaged CLI surface. The exact packaged help and clean-host acceptance remain authoritative.

Release acceptance

Promotion requires byte-identical deterministic builds and independent clean Provider and Buyer archive-installed journeys. In addition to the Preview.17 proof, acceptance must cover append-only authority preservation; offer list/select/unlist/service/retire/replacement; strict targeted canonical-zero rejection; scoped SSH egress consent; visible no-spawn command handoff; optional OSC 52 fallback; real OpenSSH; Stop/replay; access rejection; cleanup; and capacity release.

Publication or local tests alone are not OWNER-READY.