appbackup's path helpers take a NAMESPACE ROOT. Five call sites passed a bare DRIVE path.
On an enrolled drive the two coincide, so nothing showed; on the system-data fallback they
differ by exactly the felhom-data segment, and the app then bound a directory the off-site
capture set never looked at -- while the run reported ok. Measured live on demo-hp: the app
wrote to /mnt/sys_drive/userdata/media/books, the capture set looked for
/mnt/sys_drive/felhom-data/userdata/media/books.
THE RULE NOW HAS ONE EXPRESSION. appbackup.NamespaceRootFor / IsEnrolledDrive encode the
drive-kind comparison; backup.Manager.namespaceRoot and stacks.Manager.inGuest delegate to
it. There were already TWO copies and they differed -- the backup package's compared without
filepath.Clean, the stacks package's with it, so a trailing slash from config would have
flipped the mode in one and not the other.
Sites routed through it:
- stacks/deploy.go withPathVars -> ${USERDATA_PATH} (the live defect)
- appexport/fabplan.go + export.go (via a new provider method)
- web/handlers.go FileBrowser mounts (latent: the system drive is
deliberately never a registered StoragePath, so this is the identity today)
ComputeFabBuckets now receives the namespace root, which is what ComputeCaptureSet has always
received -- so the export's classified paths and the backup's capture set describe the same
directories by construction instead of by coincidence.
Tests are table-driven over BOTH drive kinds, because this survived by being invisible on the
kind that already worked. Red-proofs observed: restoring the bare-path call fails the
system-drive row with the two paths differing by /felhom-data; inverting the drive-kind
comparison fails every enrolled row.
--recover-offsite-install is the sibling of --recover-offsite-check: same fetch/unseal path
through the agent, same STDIN discipline for R, but it PLACES the recovered repository
password via InjectOffboxPassword so a rebuilt box reopens the history it inherited.
Doing this by hand would put the offsite DATA key through a terminal, a clipboard and shell
history. In-process the value goes agent -> this process -> the 0600 file and is rendered
nowhere.
The confirmation is a SECOND invocation: without --confirm-install it prints both hashes and
writes nothing, so the operator sees the comparison before any write is possible.
Three outcomes, named distinctly: installed (no local password -- the rebuilt-box shape),
unchanged (identical key already present, nothing written), refused (a DIFFERENT key present;
installing would clobber the key the current repository is encrypted under, and no force
option is offered). Exit 2 for the refusal, distinct from 1 for a failed step.
Red-proof: removing the confirmation gate makes the dry run write, failing the test. The
R-persistence test carries a positive control -- a planted copy is found, then removed and not
found -- because an absence check is worth only what its sensitivity is.
--recover-offsite-check is a docker exec diagnostic in the shape of --print-reset-code: it
reads the customer's recovery code from STDIN, asks the agent to fetch this host's sealed
bundle and open it, and reports whether the recovered key matches the one on disk BY SHA256.
Two hashes and a verdict; never a password, never R, never a blob.
R comes from stdin and not a flag because a flag value is visible in ps, in shell history, in
a container's command line and in any transcript of the session that ran it.
IT COMPARES; IT DOES NOT INSTALL. The recovered password is never written to
offbox/repo_password -- installing changes a live box on a path nobody has walked, and that
link is next session's, with the drill around it. A test asserts the data dir is byte-unchanged
after a check; its red-proof (adding the install call) fails it.
Exit codes: 0 match, 2 clean MISMATCH, 1 a step failed -- "it failed" and "it worked and
disagreed" must never share a status. A box with no local password reports distinctly: that is
the rebuilt-box shape, where the next step is to install rather than compare.
Nothing customer-reachable ships here: no card, no form, no preview.
MEASURED, not supposed. On 2026-08-03 nine per-app recovery_unit_capture_failed
events reached the hub and TWO operator emails went out. The hub's operator
cooldown key is customerID:eventType(+tier) and that event carries `app` but no
`tier`, so the key held no app identifier: the first refused app took the hour's
slot and every other app's failure was discarded BEFORE anything was written
down, leaving no row on any channel.
The obvious fix — put `app` in the key — was ruled against: on a full disk it
produces one email per app, the volume problem wearing the correctness problem's
clothes.
internal/backup/runsummary.go: a per-run collector with exactly admissionSet's
lifetime, fed by all three write legs, emitting backup_run_failures ONCE at the
end and only when something failed. A clean run emits nothing.
The per-app event stays and becomes the RECORD — the hub routes it record-only,
stored and logged every time, never competing for an email slot. The record and
the notification are now different things.
Deliberate skips (disconnected, decommissioned) are excluded: they have their
own alert, and a nightly email about an unplugged drive is one the operator
learns to ignore.
A manual run always reports: the digest carries a unique run_id the cooldown
cannot collapse. Someone pressing the button is actively trying to get a backup.
THE PERIODIC SWEEP GETS A DIGEST TOO. With the per-app event now record-only, a
capture failure found between runs would be recorded and never notified — a new
silence introduced while closing one. That path emits a digest with NO run_id,
so the ordinary 1-hour cooldown caps it exactly as before while the mail now
lists every failing app instead of whichever was first.
A refusal is recorded ONCE, where the verdict is taken, not at the three legs
that consult it — R-181's contract is one verdict per app per run. Noting it per
leg listed one refused app three times and produced "2 of 1 apps failed". Found
by the digest's own test, not in review.
Silence is safe because the hub's deadline check raises expected_backup_missed
from report freshness, independently of any mail this box sends
(monitor/deadline.go:396,417). Confirmed, not assumed.
7 new tests, 4 red-proofs. The main.go seam walk did NOT fail on its first
attempt — the AST test walked the backup package and not main.go; the test was
fixed and the mutation re-run rather than the pass recorded.
Found by v0.193.0's own live proof run. The estimate was printed fixed to two
decimal GiB, so every app under ~10 MB rendered as "estimated 0.00 GiB write" —
which reads as "no estimate was available" and is the opposite of what happened.
Observed live on demo-hp 08:59:46: opengist's real 178 KB estimate printed as
0.00 GiB.
Shipped in the same session because it is the same defect class R-181 is about:
a message an operator cannot rely on is worse than no message.
The arithmetic is unchanged and still in GiB — the reserve's own unit, so the
comparison against FloorFreeGiB reads directly. Only the rendering moved to
humanizeBytes. estimatedWriteGiB -> estimatedWriteBytes, with the GiB conversion
done once at the point of comparison.
B2's capture floor (v0.192.0) was consulted in exactly ONE place —
captureAllRecoveryUnits, which writes a few KB. The two legs that write the BULK
into the same backups/primary/<app> tree, the DB dump and the volume dump, ran
FIRST and unguarded. Measured live on demo-hp 2026-08-03 06:40:03: opengist's
volume dump wrote 2.0 GB with no check, free fell to 1.0 GB, and the floor then
refused the cheap write it had already lost the argument to. Its refusal message
claimed "the previous unit is untouched" — measured false: that app's tar had
gone 182,272 B -> 2,147,666,432 B under a stale manifest. Sixth entry in
CLAUDE.md's table of shipped guarantees the code did not provide.
Fix: ONE admission verdict per app per run (internal/backup/admission.go), taken
before that app's FIRST write and covering all three legs — they write under one
per-app root, which is why one verdict can honestly cover them.
- Lazy, at the app's first write, NOT once at run start: app A's dump can put app
B under the reserve, so a run-start verdict reads a disk that no longer exists.
- Remembered for the run, never re-decided between an app's own legs — that is
the split this closes. Reset per run.
- Placed ahead of DumpAppVolumesSafe, which stops the stack as its first act, so
a refused app is never bounced. After the volume-less check, which has no write.
- Exactly one operator alert per refused app per run.
- Leg order unchanged: volume dumps still precede the capture.
The floor is now SIZE-AWARE: it asks whether THIS app's write would cross the
reserve, not only whether the filesystem is already below it — which is how an
app was admitted at 96% and then allowed to write 2 GB. Estimate = the app's
previous .sql + .tar on disk. No history -> headroom-only, deliberately, and the
alert says so.
A container-based du per volume was MEASURED and rejected: 66 timed runs on
demo-hp guest 9201, median ~355 ms/volume (341-404) on volumes holding tens of
KB — container start-up, not the walk. Decisive on top: docker run needs the
writable layer, so it can fail under exactly the pressure the reserve handles.
The message was NOT weakened; the behaviour was moved so the wording became true.
It now also names which term bound. Every claim is checked against a sha256
fingerprint of the tree it describes, never against the log line.
Still refuses and never deletes: nothing here is generational.
11 new tests through the production functions. The DB leg cannot run without
Docker, so its gate is pinned by an AST walk of backup.go asserting admitApp
precedes DumpOne (strings.Contains is insufficient — a commented-out call still
contains the string). 4 red-proofs demonstrated failing then restored.
Ships BEFORE the disk-layout merge it exists for, and is harmless on a box
that never gets it. The mp1 partition was a BULKHEAD as well as a ceiling:
it kept a runaway capture from filling the space the container runtime
needs, because /var/lib/docker was a different filesystem. After the merge
it is the same one, and a full Docker data-root is a stopped box.
The floor sits in captureAllRecoveryUnits, checked BEFORE anything is
written: below the reserve, that ONE app's capture is refused, its previous
unit is left byte-identical, the R-158 alert fires with the space figures,
and the loop continues.
Two terms whichever binds first (97% used / 1 GiB free) in fillwatch's
shape, deliberately BEYOND its critical band (95% / 2 GiB) so the customer
is always warned before a refusal can happen — a floor that fires before
its own warning is a silent failure wearing a threshold.
Headroom, never unit size: a per-unit cap would be R-163 rebuilt inside one
volume. Refuses, never deletes: nothing here is generational, so pruning
could only destroy a different app's only local copy; pruneStalePrimaryDirs
is an orphan sweep, not retention, and must not be repurposed.
Tests 1184 -> 1191. One fixture strengthened mid-red-proof: the "old 20 G
ceiling is gone" test sat at exactly 20 GB and survived a literal
UsedGB > 20 cap — hollow. Now 120 GB, and the mutation fails it.
Earned during v0.191.1's own live validation. After the customer had been
warned, a restart produced ZERO fillwatch lines — equally consistent with
'ran and chose silence' and 'never ran'. Proving the checker was alive
needed a deliberate crossing into the critical band.
For an edge-triggered check the quiet run IS the healthy steady state, so
that ambiguity is permanent rather than rare. Check now logs a per-RUN
summary on every run, counting unreadable separately from healthy so a
drive that has quietly gone unreadable cannot read as 'all fine'.
Found live on 9201: neither sched.Daily nor sched.Every fires on
registration, so a box booting with a filesystem already over the line
would stay silent for up to 24h — the R-100 shape, and the same gap the
hub's own checkers avoid by leaving already-breached keys unseeded at init.
The watcher now runs once 90s after startup as well. Safe because the check
is edge-triggered against persisted state: an already-warned filesystem
stays silent. The delay lets mounts settle so a drive still returning reads
as unreadable and is skipped rather than warned about. Pinned by an AST
assertion — the schedule registration alone no longer satisfies the test.
R-167: new internal/fillwatch warns the CUSTOMER before a filesystem fills.
It emits the PRE-EXISTING disk_warning/disk_critical pair, which was
allowlisted, copy'd, default-enabled and checkbox'd with no producer in any
repo — the sixth "built but never wired" instance here. Two threshold terms
(85% or 5 GiB free; critical 95%/2 GiB) because a percentage alone lies at
both ends of this fleet's size range. Edge-triggered on escalation only,
state persisted, hysteresis dead zone at 75%/7 GiB pinned by a test. A nil
usage read is never a warning and never clears one. Per filesystem, never
per app. Daily 03:30, before the nightly app-data legs.
R-158: new unitNotify seam fires per app when a Tier-1 recovery-unit capture
fails, loop continuing, carrying the target filesystem's used/free bytes.
Operator-tier (recovery_unit_capture_failed) — deliberately NOT backup_failed,
which is customer-enabled and would email the customer about a failure they
cannot act on. D-c overrides R-158's own proposal here.
R-174: the app-stop guard no longer starts apps onto MISSING drives — a
regression in v0.189.0 code, found by review and closed the same session.
SetStarter got the raw stack manager, whose StartStack has no drive gate,
and Recover runs at startup. R-171 one path over. bootDriveGate could not be
reused whole (its holder #2 is the guard's own marker, and holders #1/#2 read
vars assigned after Recover runs), so holder #3 is extracted into a shared
driveStartGate with a test pinning the delegation. ErrStartRefused splits a
refusal from a failure: both keep the marker, only Failed alarms, because
routing a deliberate hold into NotifyBackupFailed is the same false alarm.
Tests 1157 -> 1184. All red-proofs demonstrated failing and restored.
Found by live validation on 9201, not by review. GetStacks() is the Manager's
in-memory map refreshed by the scheduler every 10s; sampling it every 5s without
refreshing means two identical samples can mean the cache did not update rather
than that the fleet settled. A container removed ~5s before the window closed was
still in the sampled fleet and the sweep logged 'no boot-orphaned apps' for an app
that had none. sampleBootFleet now refreshes first; a refresh error degrades
rather than aborting the window.
R-171 (a regression v0.189.0 introduced, CONFIRMED on hardware before any fix
was written). Replacing isBootOrphan's container-count term with recorded intent
made a drive-gate-stopped app read as a boot orphan: the gate stops apps with
`compose down` (zero containers) and never touches desired_state, because it is
not the customer. Observed on 9201 with the drive held unmounted — the sweep
found and started it, burned both attempts, and handed it to the dead-app alarm.
The write hazard did not materialise (the unbound mountpoint is host-root-owned
and the guest is unprivileged) but that protection is accidental and untested.
New consumer-side seam bootrecon.StartGate, fail-safe (cannot determine ⇒ do not
start), wired in main.go. The rule is not new: the API's startGatedByMissingDrive
already refuses this; the sweep bypassed it.
R-157 mechanism A. The sweep looked once at T+5s, deriving candidates from a
fleet docker was still restoring — three of six hard resets. Now a settle-then-
sweep window: sample every 5s, settled after 3 identical samples, sweep ONCE at
the end; ends on settled or a 50s budget, and the log says which. The budget is
50s because settle+budget+one retry must stay under the 90s dead-app grace — a
test rejected 60s at 95s. A window that overruns emits a LATE RECOVERY warn
rather than the grace being widened to hide it.
Widening the window made two more holders reachable, so the one gate covers all
three: an absent drive, a quiesce, and an in-flight app-data operation — reusing
quiesce.SuppressedStacks() and a new read-only AppStopGuard.HeldStacks().
R-170. shouldRecreateOnBoot now reads desired_state with the identical three-way
table; absent keeps the old hasContainers behaviour exactly. Its comment argued
for the container count and was rewritten. presentStable is untouched. The two
gates' agreement is pinned from both sides against one fixture table.
27/27 packages green; 6 red-proofs observed FAIL then restored.
The box stops inferring the customer's intent from a container count and reads
what they actually asked for.
Part 1 — desired state. AppConfig gains a tri-state `desired_state`
(""/running/stopped), written ONLY by the customer's own action: the API action
switch, DeployStack, UpdateOptionalConfig's redeploy branch, and the .fab
import. Intent is written BEFORE the act and a failed write REFUSES the act.
StartStack/StopStack are deliberately not writers — 14 callers, only 2 are the
customer. bootrecon.isBootOrphan now reads intent instead of len(Containers)>0,
which closes R-157 mechanism B (a power cut or interrupted deploy left an app
with zero containers, read as a deliberate stop, and stranded silently).
ABSENT MEANS UNKNOWN, NEVER "running": every pre-v0.189.0 app.yaml reads absent,
so the legacy fallback is byte-identical to the old rule. A running-only startup
backfill converges the unambiguous cases; `stopped` is never inferred.
Part 2 — backup.AppStopGuard, a persisted marker over every stop→work→start
window (volume dump, offbox reconstitute, .fab export). Its own file, never
quiesce's. Written before the stop, cleared only after a restart that succeeded,
kept when one fails. Recover() completes before the boot reconciler is launched
and returns its outcome, which main.go reports on the existing backup_failed
event once the notifier exists. A defer is not the mechanism — a SIGKILL runs
none (Campaign 8 fault 10).
Also: SaveAppConfig rebuilt AppConfig field-by-field (the R-100 shape) and would
have dropped desired_state on every save across nine call sites. Replaced with
copy-and-overlay. Measured: app.yaml does not round-trip unknown YAML keys.
No hub change, no agent coupling, no user-visible string. 27/27 packages green;
7 red-proofs observed FAIL then restored.
Reports, does not refuse — pushes go straight to main with no pull request, so there is no
merge for a status check to stand at. The refusing half is .githooks/pre-push, which is
per-clone and --no-verify-able; this half notices when that was skipped.
CI reproduces the workspace's SIBLING LAYOUT on purpose: this repo's entry point invokes
the shared reuse_refs_check that lives in the felhom.eu clone next door and is never copied
here, and this repo's REUSE.md cites wgsync/reconciler.go, which lives in the hub. Without
the sibling the gate fails closed with 'gate is MISSING' — correctly, but for the wrong
reason. No uses: step anywhere; no version bump; nothing built or deployed.
README's Enforcement block now names controller_gates.py as THE entry point rather than
listing five of the seven gates individually. CHANGELOG records the allowlist entry, the
runner, the hook, the seam test and their red-proofs, and states the no-bump explicitly so
the omission reads as a decision.
A census of all thirteen gate scripts across the four felhom repos on 2026-08-02 found that
every check a CLAUDE.md names was passing and two of the four nobody is told to run were
failing. This repo had seven gates and CLAUDE.md named two; four more were reachable only via
a line in REUSE.md, and docker_run_volume_path_gate.py — RED at census time — through one line
in REUSE.md and nothing else.
controller_gates.py runs all seven plus reuse_refs_check on the repo root, streams each gate's
own output, and exits worst-wins non-zero. The shared reuse checker stays in felhom.eu/scripts/
and is invoked across the workspace — never copied here, which would recreate the drift it
detects; an absent sibling clone FAILS the gate and prints the path tried.
.githooks/pre-push runs it with --fast and refuses the push. Per-clone and --no-verify-able,
both stated in the hook itself; a manual run WARNS when the clone is unarmed.
test_controller_gates.py is a SEAM test — it asserts each member gate's own distinctive stdout,
not the runner's summary line. Red-proofed: an inert run_gate still prints 'all controller
gates OK' and exits 0, and turns the seam test red.
Tooling only: no Go change, no image build, no deploy, no version bump.
realVolumeSize mounts the NAMED VOLUME read-only into a throwaway alpine to du it
from a container view. No host path is involved — docker resolves the volume name
daemon-side — so it is the same safe class as the internal/backup/backup.go entry.
The gate was right to demand review; this diff is that review, on its own, because
burying an allowlist widening inside a feature commit is how an allowlist stops
meaning anything.
Tooling only: no Go change, no build, no deploy, no version bump.
The recovery unit on the customer's drive now carries the PORTABLE secret
class, so Tier-1/Tier-2 restore no longer depends on the whole-guest tier.
A customer needs the drive and nothing else.
Part 0's rulings overturned the brief's recommendation, on evidence:
- the data_key flag is untrustworthy (4+ encryption keys the catalog itself
labels as such are unflagged) -> R-127
- a DB password is not resettable in practice: POSTGRES_PASSWORD is ignored
once PGDATA is non-empty, so a regenerated value leaves the app unable to
authenticate against its own restored rows while the dump replay still
reports success (proven on a throwaway postgres:16-alpine)
Ruling (operator): type:secret travels, type:password never does, minus the
nonPortableSecrets code register. Plaintext -- withholding the internet-
reachable class is what licenses that, and the two are coupled.
Precedence: the UNIT WINS over the guest -- the unit's secrets were captured
in the same run as the dumps beside them, so they match the data being
restored. The fail-closed data-key gate is unchanged.
Secret values are never logged; the manifest records NAMES only.
This is D5's precondition and it is now met.
An app's namespace root IS its backup root: namespaceRoot returns a non-system
drive path as-is, so the recovery unit lands at <HDD_PATH>/backups/primary/<stack>/.
On a NAS that sits inside the share, which FileBrowser binds WHOLE — share root,
:rslave, download:true.
The bind was NOT narrowed, and establishing why inverted the fix. The share-root
:rslave bind is load-bearing (a 2026-07-22 probe proved an in-container access
through it wakes the idle automount trigger), and scoping is undefinable anyway:
apps on a share store at <share>/<app>, there is no userdata/ layer, and creating
one would write Felhom convention onto a customer's own NAS, which R-67 forbids.
So the browsing surface cannot be narrowed and the backup tree must never be
placed under it. Operator ruling: refuse the placement, keep the browse bind.
Tier 2 already refuses network targets for this reason (F-6C-1).
Nothing stranded: zero apps on network storage across all six hub customers
including Peti. R-67's browse capability is byte-identical.
FIVE surfaces, not the four the register named — settings.RefuseAsAppNamespace is
the single predicate. The deploy POST is the real boundary (it accepts any
caller-supplied HDD_PATH; DeployStack validates only os.Stat). Surface 4,
handleStorageDecommission mode=migrate, guarded only its SOURCE, so a whole
namespace could be decommissioned ONTO a NAS — that one is not in the register.
Fails closed: /mnt/felhom-drives holds both kinds, Kind exists only on a
registered path, so an unregistered path under that root refuses.
Supersedes README's "NAS backup locality — decision A" (v0.118.0).
9 tests, all non-effect (nil stackMgr, so a guard that misses panics rather than
passing). 4 red-proofs, each mutation asserted to have landed.
Suite rc=0, 27 packages, 0 FAIL. vet rc=0. Template + emoji gates OK.
Two defects E-2d found on a real box, fixed in this order deliberately: the
message is corrected BEFORE it is put on screen, because switching on a banner
that lies is worse than a silent one.
R-114 — the third state. resolveBackupTargetState had two outcomes: a disk
claims the target (healthy), or nothing does (degraded, "the backup is on the
system disk"). The state "configured, and its drive is gone" had no branch, so
it fell into the second and inherited its message AND its offer. Observed live
with the target detached: degraded:true, target:"felhom-backup" plus the
system-disk copy (false -- the backup was on a drive that had vanished) plus
offer_path naming that same vanished drive as the remedy.
New BackupTargetState.TargetAbsent discriminates. Degraded keeps its meaning
("is there a problem") so the wire contract is unchanged for every consumer;
TargetAbsent answers "which problem", because the two have opposite remedies --
attach any second drive, versus reconnect THAT one. Copy routed through
degradedMessageFor so one place still decides what a customer reads. The offer
is suppressed on the branch itself, NOT left to firstOfferableDrive's
Disconnected skip: that flag is set by the agent-side gate in another repo
(R-113), and this state must be correct independently of it.
R-112 — the state finally has a consumer. The endpoint was byte-correct and
nothing in the product ever asked for it: templates fetch 18 distinct
/api/storage/* endpoints and backup-target[/assign] were the only two with zero
references. Server-rendered on /backups now, following the existing
SingleCopyWarning banner pattern -- not a 19th JS fetch, because a banner that
needs JavaScript to appear is one more thing that can silently not happen.
backupTargetView returns nil for healthy and unknown so those render nothing at
all. The offer control POSTs to the existing assign endpoint behind the standard
inline confirm, never auto-submits, and surfaces restart_required honestly
instead of adding a self-restart.
Scenario E (the seam test) drives backupsHandler over httptest and asserts the
RENDERED HTML -- handler -> view -> resolver -> template. It deliberately does
not call the resolver and assert a string, which would prove the resolver that
was never broken. Deleting the one line that sets data["BackupTarget"]
reproduces the R-112 state and fails every render assertion.
Tests 326 -> 338 (+12) in internal/web; suite green (27 packages); both template
gates pass. Three red-proofs run and reverted, files byte-identical after.
MinAgent unchanged at 0.113.0: R-114 reads BackupTarget/MountPath/GuestPath/Role,
none of which R-113 altered (it changed BoundUnderParent, which this code does
not read). demo-hp on agent 0.113.0 is not held.
The absent copy is verbatim the hub's customerMessages["backup_target_absent"]
so the banner and the email tell one story -- filed as a two-repo drift risk,
not solved.
NOT LIVE-VALIDATED. Scenario C cannot occur on a healthy box; Session C proves it.
Registered as /api/backup-target inside ServeStorageAPI, which main.go mounts ONLY
at /api/storage/. Live result: endpoint not found, while every unit test passed --
the tests called the handlers directly and never travelled the mount. Caught by
the first live call, which is why the live call is part of the procedure.
Moved to /api/storage/backup-target[/assign]. A new test asserts the dispatcher
source contains both paths, so a handler nothing routes to fails the suite --
the seam-wiring rule applied to a route rather than a button.
The half that makes the rest work: a degraded backup target recorded only in
config is the silent-degradation pattern this arc has spent a week removing.
Part 3 -- POST /api/backup-target/assign moves the target via the agent's
POST /backup/target. It is the ONLY writer of the role: registration does not set
it, the drive-gate does not, no scheduler does. Declining is not calling it. The
agent returns restart_required rather than restarting itself, because restarting
with a backup in flight records a spurious tier failure for a backup that
actually succeeded (E-1 did exactly that).
Part 4 -- GET /api/backup-target returns the state and, when degraded, Hungarian
copy in FACT -> CONSEQUENCE -> REMEDY order, pinned by a test: a customer told
only the fact cannot act on it.
Healthy renders NOTHING -- no badge, no reassurance, no tonal change.
degradedMessageFor is the single decision point, so exactly one place could start
decorating a working box. Red-proofed: reassuring on the healthy branch fails
Scenario E.
UNKNOWN is not degraded: an unreachable or pre-R-82 agent means we could not ask,
which is not evidence of degradation (R-88 Part 2's class).
A HOLLOW TEST caught by its own red-proof: TestUnknownStateRendersNothing used
{Known:false} with Degraded left false, so it passed even with the !Known guard
deleted -- the second condition covered for it. Now {Known:false, Degraded:true},
which fails properly. Without the red-proof the test would have been decoration.
State is derived from the AGENT, never from our intent flag: on the two boxes
migrated by hand in E-1 the intent was never recorded while the drive really is
the target.
MinAgent: 0.113.0
Green gate: build + vet + test rc=0 (27 packages), run separately from this commit.
Caught before deploy by tracing a.Path back to its source, not by a failure. The
0.184.0 image is superseded and must not be shipped.
ReconcileDriveGates resolves the target as isTarget[a.Path], and a.Path is the
REGISTERED StoragePath -- for an external drive that is the GUEST path
/mnt/felhom-drives/<name>, not the agent's host MountPath (/mnt/<name>) that
/disks reports. driveTargetByPath keyed on MountPath alone, so the lookup never
matched: every absent drive, the target included, fell through to the generic
storage_disconnected.
The alarm would have looked wired, passed its own unit tests, shipped, and been
silently wrong on exactly the drive it exists for -- the same defect class E-2b
was opened to fix, one level down.
Now keyed under BOTH paths, mirroring planDriveGates which already registers
present[] under GuestPath and MountPath for the same reason.
Red-proof: MountPath-only keying fails with "the backup target is not resolvable
by its GUEST path -- the gate passes a.Path (the registered StoragePath), so the
backup-target branch would never fire".
Green gate: build + vet + test rc=0, run separately from this commit.
NotifyStorageDisconnected and NotifyStorageReconnected were defined and called
from NOWHERE. Registered in allowedEventTypes, in DefaultEnabledEvents, and given
a Hungarian message on the hub -- and never invoked. A drive going absent produced
apps stopped, a WARN log and a UI badge, then silence on every channel. Verified
against the gitignored-cmd/ trap with a positive control. Fifth instance of this
class, found by E-2 Phase 0 rather than by a failure.
A drive that is ONLY a backup target has no apps to stop, so it was silent twice.
ReconcileDriveGates now calls both halves. When the absent drive is the whole-guest
backup target it raises the more specific backup_target_absent (error) instead --
never both, since two mails for one event trains people to ignore the channel --
and recovers as backup_target_restored (info, the existing pairing-gated pattern;
severityNotifies NOT widened). The recovery mirrors the alarm's choice or the
operator cannot match them.
Which drive is the target comes from the AGENT (/disks backup_target, >= 0.112.0),
not from our StoragePath.BackupTarget: that is customer INTENT, and on the two
boxes migrated by hand in E-1 the intent was never recorded while the drive really
is the target. An older agent omits the field -> false -> generic alarm, never a
wrong one.
Before this an absent backup target had NO prompt signal: the tier stays DUE
(targetStoragePresent checks name presence, never reachability), so the only
evidence was its own failure at the next due cycle, up to ~24h away. The R-100
shape.
Tests observe the WIRE, not a mock, because the failure class is "nothing
arrives": a real Notifier posts to an httptest hub and the test asserts the event
type and severity that actually went out.
MinAgent: 0.112.0
Green gate: build + vet + test rc=0 (27 packages), run separately from this commit.
Foundation only, no version bump -- nothing customer-visible changes yet. The
offer UI (Part 3), the degraded banner (Part 4) and the controller half of the
absent-target signal (Part 5) are NOT here; they are tracked as E-2 in
OPEN-ITEMS.md so this cannot become a sixth "seam built but never wired". The
fifth was found by E-2's own Phase 0: NotifyStorageDisconnected is defined and
called nowhere, so a drive going absent emits no event at all today.
StoragePath gains BackupTarget bool -- the sibling role to Schedulable/
IsDefault/Kind. It is INTENT, not truth: the authority is the agent's
backup.local_backup_target, and truth is read from GET /backup/tiers. This
records what the customer ASSIGNED so the controller can render the state,
notice the drive going absent, and detect drift.
Invariants, each pinned by a test asserting the CONSEQUENCE not the mechanism:
- a drive NEVER acquires the role by appearing (registration does not set it)
- exactly one carrier; assigning moves rather than duplicates
- sticky: a new bigger/faster drive does not steal an assigned target
- an absent target STAYS assigned -- clearing on disconnect would be a silent
retarget by omission ("no target configured" instead of "drive missing")
- a network share is refused (R-108 risk model; the role is about LOCAL disk
failure)
Red-proof C: adding auto-elevation to AddStoragePath fails
TestRegisteringDrivesNeverAssignsTheBackupTarget with
registering drives assigned the backup target "/mnt/hdd_1"
Attributes may suggest and refuse the absurd, never select: demo-felhom's backup
drive is an external USB HDD and BOTH demo boxes report removable=0, so a
transport rule disqualifies the reference drive and a removable rule finds no
candidate at all.
Green gate: build + vet + test rc=0, run separately from this commit.
Both are the system reporting healthy while the customer is not, and both live in the same
status-derivation code. Neither is fixed by making the system quieter.
C9-F1 (HIGH) — Tier-2 writes recovery-unit/ on EVERY run and RestoreTier2Files has never read
it (tier2_restore.go:101-104 reads hdd/ + userdata/ only). Phase 0 enumerated all 53 catalog
templates against both demo boxes: 43 apps have NO readable subtree, so the button stopped the
app, restored 0 files, restarted it and said "Nincs hiányzó fájl — minden fájl megvan a helyén."
— at the moment the customer pressed it because files were missing, with 156 MB of BookStack's
data unread in the same copy. 9 apps have file legs but never their DB or volumes, so the same
sentence was also a clean bill of health over data never opened (immich: 1.3 GB Postgres unit).
Honesty half shipped: a pre-flight coverage check refuses UP FRONT without stopping the app and
NAMES the action that works; a run that proceeds claims only what it EXAMINED and discloses that
the database and volumes are not covered. Completeness is filed as C9-F1b — routing to the
Tier-1 unit restore puts a destructive operation behind a non-destructive button, so its confirm
copy has to carry that difference. C9-F4 filed: nothing reads the Tier-2 recovery-unit/ mirror,
so the second local copy that exists for drive loss is unreachable by any customer action.
C9-F2 (HIGH) — a crash loop was counted as working. StateRestarting is deliberately NOT added to
IsDownState (that alarms on every deploy fleet-wide, the over-correction F-A1 nearly cost us); a
sustained run becomes down after crashLoopAfter = 5m, set above the 120s deploy timeout, Mealie's
60s start_period and R-97b's 180s grace. The dashboard counter uses the same predicate, so it no
longer contradicts the alarm on the same screen. README's claim that faults "still surface as
restarting" was a wish with no test — corrected in place; it is the seventh such instance.
Six red-proofs observed, including the one that matters most: adding StateRestarting to
IsDownState fails the brief-restart test with "every deploy and update would page the operator".
go test ./... rc=0, 27 packages, run and read separately from this commit.
Tier2LastRun is the attempt clock and was rendered as 'Legutóbbi másolat' in the restore
confirm dialog. New LastSuccess + SuccessTracked anchor; tier2Update makes the three
rebuild sites safe by construction. F-DIAG: six distinct causes, target-aware redaction.
LastRun records an attempt, not a result. New OffboxTarget.LastSuccess, set only on the
success branch via the pure offboxAnchorAfterRun rule, carried to the hub as last_success.
Closes two silent-wipe sites (settings save, hub re-apply).
deadapp-check had no observable at default info level: its per-cycle line goes
through Scheduler.dbg(), gated on logging.level==debug, so on a default box it is
never PRODUCED (not merely filtered) and cannot reach the always-DEBUG ring. A
30s interval also puts it on the scheduler's quiet path. 'No alarms' was
therefore indistinguishable from 'the detector never ran' — which undermines
confidence in the F-CRIT-1 fix in the field.
A periodic summary, not a line per run: at 30s a per-run line is 2880 lines/day,
which is why the original author chose silence. Every 20th scan (~10 min) emits
one INFO with the scan count, apps evaluated and apps down. A test pins the
cadence so it cannot be widened into uselessness.
Also corrects the 'unquiesce guaranteed by defer' comment — fault 10 established
the guarantee is the crash marker plus Recover().
Six red-proofs with observed failure text, the bounds chosen for contention
(15m retry / 3h alarm) justified against the agent's own 120m PBS restore-test
ceiling and the 12m01s longest observed restore-test, and the live replay of
both findings on demo-hp with the hub DB as arbiter:
- failed restart alarmed 9s after grace expiry; banner shows (stopped)
- a deliberate user stop stayed silent through 9 dead-app scans
- 409 contention produced 0 operator emails (8 -> 8)
- a real transport failure produced 1 (8 -> 9)
Same box, same event type; the only difference is 409 vs a genuine error.
F-CRIT-1 — an app that failed to restart after a quiesce never alarmed, for two
independent reasons, either of which alone kept it dead:
1. restartAll returned nothing, so the failure was logged and dropped and no
caller could learn a customer's app had not come back. It now returns the
stacks that failed; both call sites record the outcome.
2. classifyRunStates whitelists StateStopped on invariant I1 ('StateStopped
means the user stopped it'). The quiesce loop stops stacks by the same
compose-down path, so a failed restart is also StateStopped and was
whitelisted into silence. Loop.FailedRestarts() is now the only thing that
lifts the whitelist, so genuine user stops stay silent (v0.164.0 pinned).
F-A1 — HTTP 409 is the agent's single-flight gate refusing while a restore-test
holds it, not a failure. agentapi now returns a typed *StatusError on POST, the
adapter maps 409 -> quiesce.ErrTierBusy, and the loop defers: no breaker, no
event, no operator email, tier stays DUE.
Two traps avoided. Silence: contention outliving contentionAlarmAfter (3h, set
by the agent's own 120m PBS restore-test ceiling) raises its own BLOCKED signal.
App thrash: removing the failure treatment also removes the breaker's deferral,
so a contended tier is dropped BEFORE anything stops (contentionRetryAfter 15m,
against a 12m01s longest observed restore-test).
Three comments corrected; the invariant rule added to both CLAUDE.md copies.
Six red-proofs, all observed failing.
A witness in a _test.go file fires on go test and go vet but NOT on go build
alone — and a build-only step is exactly how the R-88 Part 2 near-miss would have
shipped. Moved beside the type it pins, and added one for AgentVersionReporter.
No defect found: quiesceBackend and *Client both satisfy their interfaces today.
No version bump, no deploy — compile-time only.
Records the valve-licence table, why a missing field means legacy rather than
unknown, and the near-miss: TieredBackend is runtime-asserted, so the signature
change built and vetted clean while the adapter silently stopped satisfying it.
MinAgent: 0.105.0. scheduledRunAllowed fired on any nil age; it now requires a
licence from valveLicensed, which grants it for AgeStateAbsent and for a LEGACY
agent, and refuses it for AgeStateUnknown. An unreadable storage no longer
masquerades as a first-ever backup and no longer quiesces apps outside the window.
A missing wire field means legacy, not unknown — deliberately. Treating it as
unknown would stop the valve firing on un-upgraded boxes and starve genuinely new
ones. Degrade logged once; unrecognised future values also map to legacy.
Caught in passing: TieredBackend is satisfied by a RUNTIME assertion, so the
signature change compiled and vetted clean while quiesceBackend silently stopped
satisfying it — which would have degraded every box to the single-tier path with
no error. Added a compile-time witness.
Also corrects the notifier comment that claimed operator-only came from a missing
customerMessages entry; enforcement is hub-side operatorOnlyEvents (hub 0.79.0).
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