An absent off-site object has four meanings — never configured, mid-restart, a
transient config read failure, and rebuilt-and-stranded — and the hub cannot tell
them apart. The box can, from two local facts it holds with certainty, so it says
so instead of leaving the hub to deduce it from a silence (operator ruling).
The ACK's identity_blob_present is now recorded on EVERY ACK, before the gates
that used to discard it: on a box with no off-site target the auto-confirm returns
immediately, which is exactly a rebuilt box, so the one fact distinguishing it from
a box that never had off-site backups was thrown away every cycle.
The declaration needs BOTH halves — a fresh data area AND a hub-held recovery
package. Freshness alone is a box that never had off-site backups; dropping that
condition makes the whole fleet ask for credentials, which is what the Scenario B
test exists to catch.
The object carries enabled:false and zero sizes, which is what makes it inert to
the hub's existing fill and staleness checkers and to a pre-upgrade hub. A
configured box's JSON is byte-identical to v0.198.0's.
admin
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