# CAMPAIGN 8 — the backup & restore subsystem
**Adversarial, destructive, unattended. 2026-07-27 19:00 → 2026-07-28 ~06:45 CEST.**

Nodes exercised: `demo-felhom` (+ guest 9201), `demo-hp` (+ guest 9201), `ep0`
(`felhom-hetzner`, datastore `felhom-offsite`), restic subaccounts `u629488-sub1` / `u629488-sub3`.

**`peti-felhom` was never touched.** Neither its data, its namespace, nor `u629488-sub2`. Phase 0
established with five documented probes that peti has NO data in `felhom-offsite` at all (see §1),
which is what made the operator-approved datastore-fill safe. The 13 GB rollback copy at
`/srv/pbs-felhom` on ep0 was never deleted and is present at the end of the run.

Evidence: **`DooPlex:~/campaign8/evidence/`** — 103 files, 35 MB, written continuously by 11
collectors throughout. Nothing in this report is reconstructed after the fact.

---

## Headline

Nine findings, two of them HIGH severity, both in the same place: **the system's ability to tell you
that a backup did not happen.**

- **F-CRIT-1** — an app that fails to restart after a quiesce **never alarms, on any channel**.
- **F-CRIT-2** — a failed offsite backup leaves a phantom snapshot that **resets the tier's
  freshness clock**, silently suppressing the next backup for up to 7 days on production cadences.

Everything the campaign was asked to prove about the *happy* path proved out, including the
first-ever restic restore round-trip (R-87). The mechanisms designed to catch failure — R-88's
breaker, R-97a/c's routing, verify, quarantine, crash recovery — all work, and several are better
than documented. The gaps are all in the seams *between* those mechanisms.

---

## 1. Phase 0 — questions, answers, and skips

Asked in one batch inside the operator's window, before touching anything.

| # | Question | Answer received |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | How may ep0 be taken down? | **Path-blocking + stop the PBS daemon.** No power-cycle. |
| 2 | May VM 300 `drill-r50` be destroyed? | **Free to destroy.** |
| 3 | Fill the `felhom-offsite` volume? | **Fill to 100%.** |
| 4 | End-of-run bar? | **A broken test node is acceptable if precisely reported.** |

**Faults skipped for lack of an answer: none.** All four were answered in the window.

One question was NOT put to the operator because it was answerable from configuration, and was
verified live instead: the restic subaccount mapping. Confirmed from each guest's `settings.json`:
demo-felhom = `u629488-sub1`, demo-hp = `u629488-sub3`. `u629488-sub2` appears in neither box's
configuration and was never addressed.

**The peti-exposure check (done before asking, so question 3 could be answered honestly).** What
was tried, per standing rule 2:
1. `find /mnt/pbs-datastore/ns -maxdepth 3 -type d` → only `demo-felhom`, `demo-hp`
2. `ls -la /mnt/pbs-datastore/` → no depth-0 group dirs
3. `ls -d /mnt/pbs-datastore/{vm,ct,host}/*` → no such paths
4. `proxmox-backup-manager user list` → `felhom@pbs`, `root@pam` only
5. `proxmox-backup-manager prune-job list` → jobs for demo-* namespaces only

**Incidental security note, reported at the time:** reading `/etc/felhom-agent/agent.json` printed
`hub.api_key` in cleartext into the session transcript (the redactor matched `*token*`/`*secret*`/
`*password*` but not the bare `api_key`). No secret was written to disk or to any campaign file;
the operator may wish to rotate. All later captures used a stricter redactor.

---

## 2. Compression applied, and the revert

| Knob | Real | Campaign | Ratio |
|---|---|---|---|
| local (vzdump) cadence | 24 h (via the `0`⇒24h default, `config.go:517-520`) | 1800 s | 48× |
| PBS offsite cadence | 604800 s (168 h) | 7200 s | 84× |
| restore-test cadence | 302400 s (84 h) | 2700 s | 112× |
| backup window start W | `02:30` | rolled 17:30 → 21:30 → (14:00 on demo-hp for F16) | — |

Feasibility was measured before choosing, not assumed: demo-felhom's local vzdump is 5.7 GB /
`00:03:12`, demo-hp's PBS backup 1.5 GB / `00:00:55`. Both fit a 30-minute cadence with margin.

**"Widen the backup window" was not possible.** The gate is `[W+2h, W+6h)` and both offsets are
compile-time constants (`backupwindow.go:19-21`); only W is settable. The gate is permanently 4 h
wide against a ~10.5 h campaign, so the window was **moved** in contiguous steps rather than
widened — which had the side benefit of exercising the gate at three different absolute times.

**A compression the spec asked for that configuration cannot deliver:** "restic daily → 30m". The
three app-data legs are `Daily` scheduler jobs pinned to fixed offsets from the same W
(`main.go:595,632,665`). Moving W reschedules them; it cannot make them 30-minutely. Restic was
therefore driven by explicit manual triggers, and **no 30-minute restic cadence was ever in force.**

**Revert:** all four knobs restored and verified (§8). demo-hp's `backup_window_start` was restored
to genuine ABSENCE from its pre-campaign snapshot rather than written as "02:30", because absent is
what it was.

### The pre-registered artifact list
Declared BEFORE Phase A so findings could be classified honestly:
1. R-88 breaker cap 4 h — chosen against a 24 h cadence. **ARTIFACT** under compression.
2. R-88 ladder base 15 m — chosen to exceed the 5 m poll. **ARTIFACT**.
3. Window-gate valve "cadence + 24 h" — fires at 24.5 h instead of 48 h. **ARTIFACT**.
4. `quiesceAlarmGrace` 180 s — derived from a 120 s deploy budget and Mealie's 60 s start_period,
   **not** from cadence. **NOT distorted** → a failure here is a genuine DEFECT. *(This one mattered:
   F-CRIT-1 lives here.)*
5. `local_backup_retention` 3 — turnover in 90 min instead of 3 days. **ARTIFACT**.

---

## 3. Phase A — the happy path at volume

| | demo-felhom | demo-hp |
|---|---|---|
| quiesce cycles run | 16 | 28 |
| unquiesces | 16 | 26 (the 2-cycle gap is F9/F10, where crash-recovery restarted the stacks instead) |
| archives on the local tier at end | 3 (retention=3) | 3 (retention=3) |
| PBS snapshots at end | 4 | 10 |

**A1 — the window gate.** Deferrals captured on both boxes, and the bounds visibly recomputed
across a live W change with no restart (`[04:30–08:30)` → `[19:30–23:30)` between two polls
5 minutes apart). 5-minute poll cadence confirmed to the second.
*Methodology note that changed the evidence:* demo-felhom runs `level: info`, so none of its
quiesce DEBUG lines reach `docker logs`. Judging by docker logs alone would have produced a false
"demo-felhom never defers". The lines were recovered from the always-DEBUG ring via
`/api/debug/logs?level=DEBUG`, which became a continuous collector.

**A2 — R-82 one-quiesce-two-tiers.** Proven end-to-end:
```
17:30:09 backup due on 2 tier(s) — quiescing 1 stack(s): [paperless-ngx]
17:31:25 tier local: ... done — next tier may start (app still quiesced)
17:31:25 tier felhom-pbs: ... started — polling
17:31:35 tier felhom-pbs: ... snapshotted — resuming app early (8B.2)
17:31:35 unquiescing (snapshotted (early resume, last tier)): restarting 1 stack(s)
```
One window, two tiers, sequential, local first — matching the downtime argument in `tiers.go`.
**Total app downtime 86 s** even though the PBS upload continued past the resume. The stop set was
exact: during demo-felhom's cycle only the 5 protected infra containers remained, with all 10 app
containers of the 4 announced stacks gone.

**A3 — `verify-new` populates `verify_state`.** All snapshots `state: ok`; the snapshot this
campaign created carried its own per-snapshot verify UPID rather than the shared namespace-wide
one. *Near-miss worth recording:* `proxmox-backup-manager verify-job list` on ep0 is **empty**,
which reads as "nothing verifies these backups". That would have been a false finding —
verification is driven by the **agent's** `VerifyLoop` (6 h, `internal/pbs/verify.go:13`), not by a
server-side job. The verify cadence was NOT compressed, so this result applies directly to
production.

**A4 — prune actually prunes.** Named, not inferred:
```
INFO: prune older backups with retention: keep-last=3
INFO: removing backup 'local:backup/vzdump-lxc-9201-2026_07_27-10_24_37.tar.zst'
INFO: pruned 1 backup(s) not covered by keep-retention policy
```
The same logs confirm the three temporary `snap_vm-9201-disk-*_vzdump` LVM volumes are torn down
after every run — including on failure paths (verified during F7). No snapshot leaked all night.
**PBS-side prune** (`03:30`, keep-last 2) is reported in §3.1 with GC run 2.

### 3.1 GC — both runs, with the atime explanation

**Run 1 (early, 17:17:31→17:18:11Z, TASK OK):**
```
Removed garbage: 0 B
Removed chunks: 0
Pending removals: 4.669 GiB (in 3903 chunks)
On-Disk usage: 7.735 GiB (22.45%)   Deduplication factor: 4.45
```
Correct, and **not a finding** — every chunk carried a fresh atime from the 06:29 migration copy
and GC only reclaims past a 24 h+5 m cutoff. The load-bearing line is **`Pending removals`**, not
`Removed garbage: 0 B`: per standing rule 3, "0 removed" alone cannot distinguish "deferred
correctly" from "did nothing". `Pending removals` is the positive observable — GC walked the index,
positively identified 3903 unreferenced chunks, and declined to unlink them because they were too
young.

**Run 2 (04:44:06Z / 06:44 CEST, after the 04:34 UTC boundary, `TASK OK`):**
```
Removed garbage: 0 B          Removed chunks: 0
Pending removals: 6.38 GiB (in 5406 chunks)      [run 1: 4.669 GiB / 3903]
On-Disk usage: 6.697 GiB (17.11%) / 4891 chunks  [run 1: 7.735 GiB / 5910]
Deduplication factor: 5.84                       [run 1: 4.45]
```
The live set SHRANK and pending removals GREW — the 03:30 UTC prune landing between the runs, with
GC correctly re-classifying those chunks as unreferenced.

**I predicted run 2 would reclaim ≈4.669 GiB. It reclaimed nothing, and the cause is this
campaign.** The datastore is mounted `relatime` (`findmnt -no OPTIONS` → `rw,relatime,discard`), so
reading a chunk refreshes its atime — and the campaign read essentially every chunk repeatedly
overnight (three full verifies for F17, ~14 backups, two GC runs, several restores). Sampled atimes
at 04:55:38Z prove it:
```
188 chunks  atime 2026-07-28 04:xx   ← GC run 2 itself, touching referenced chunks (phase 1)
155 chunks  atime 2026-07-27 07:xx
 51 chunks  atime 2026-07-27 21:xx   ← a verify pass
oldest atime in sample: 2026-07-27 07:18:53Z  (21h37m — short of the 24h5m cutoff)
```
No chunk was ever 24h5m cold, so `Removed garbage: 0 B` is exactly correct on both runs.

**Not a defect** — GC made a deliberate, correct decision both times, and `Pending removals` is the
positive observable proving it did the work. But it IS an operational property worth knowing: **on
a `relatime` datastore, activity defers reclamation.** "GC ran, so space will come back" is unsafe
on a small offsite box that something reads regularly.

**Honest limit:** because the campaign's own reads reset the clock, the spec's intended experiment —
watching the migration chunks cross the boundary and be collected — **could not be completed inside
the campaign window.** First genuine reclamation should follow ~07:23Z on 07-28. Recorded as an
incomplete observation, not a pass.

---

## 4. Phase B — the fault matrix

| # | Fault | Outcome | Evidence |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | ep0 unreachable while PBS due | **PASS** — breaker armed, event end-to-end, **per-tier isolation proven** (local succeeded while PBS failed in the same window) | `F1-ep0-unreachable.md` |
| 2 | ep0 killed mid-vzdump | **PASS** on chunk-store integrity (0 `.bad`, datastore unchanged) — **but produced F-CRIT-2** | `F-CRIT-2-*.md` |
| 3 | wg-felhom down | **PASS** — and attempt 1 SELF-HEALED (60 s watchdog). Attempt 2 (endpoint blocked) → **same error string as fault 1** → F-DIAG | `F3-wg-down.md` |
| 4 | storage box unreachable during restic | **NOT TESTED** — 4 injection approaches all failed to interrupt the run; reasons documented | `F4-...-NOT-TESTED.md` |
| 5 | stale restic lock from a killed run | **PASS** — recovers, does not wedge; every run begins with an unconditional `restic unlock` | `F5-stale-restic-lock.md` |
| 6 | fill local disk mid-backup | **INCONCLUSIVE** — backup succeeded on ext4's 5% root reserve (2.07 GB) while `df` read 100% | `F6-fill-local-disk.md` |
| 7 | fill the PBS volume to 100% | **PASS** — clean ENOSPC, no corruption, no leaked LVM snapshot, instant recovery | `F7-fill-pbs-volume.md` |
| 8 | fill the guest disk during a quiesce | **PARTIAL** — vzdump correctly unaffected; the write-path volume was not the one filled | `F8-fill-guest-disk.md` |
| 9 | kill the agent mid-backup | **PASS** — apps restarted in 10 s; agent auto-restarted in 17 s. (One evidence line withdrawn — see the correction note) | `F9-kill-agent-mid-backup.md` |
| 10 | kill the controller mid-quiesce | **PASS** — crash recovery in **1 second**; and it corrects the premise (see below) | `F10-kill-controller-mid-quiesce.md` |
| 11 | reboot the guest mid-backup | **FINDING (F-REBOOT)** — the backup succeeded but **the guest never came back**; found `stopped` with 0 containers, no self-heal, ~9m47s outage until manual `pct start` | `F11-reboot-guest-mid-backup.md` |
| 12 | reboot the host mid-backup | **NOT TESTED** — see §9 | — |
| 13 | backup + restore-test + GC concurrently | **PASS on both tested axes** — backup vs restore-test single-flight HOLDS; backup vs GC coexist (both tiers completed during GC run 2). True three-way overlap not tested | `F13-concurrency.md` |
| 14 | two quiesce triggers at once | **PASS** — `TryLock` + skip, exactly one cycle ran | `F14-two-triggers.md` |
| 15 | clock skew (+6 h) | **PASS** — gate follows wall clock (correct); **breaker is skew-proof** via Go monotonic time | `F15-clock-skew.md` |
| 16 | `age_state=absent` (never observed live) | **PASS** — valve fired, cycle ran OUTSIDE a closed window on a genuinely never-backed-up tier | `F16-age-state-absent.md` |
| 17 | corrupt a chunk | **PASS on all four legs** — detect → quarantine `.0.bad` → `verify_state: failed` → restore fails cleanly | `F17-corrupt-chunk.md` |
| 18 | delete a snapshot mid restore-test | **PASS on detection** — restore-test failed loudly, did NOT advance the proven-restorable timestamp; **and it root-caused F-LEAK** | `F18-delete-snapshot-mid-restore-test.md` |
| 19 | R-97b both halves | **part 1 PASS** (suppression, with the detector proven alive); **part 2 FAIL → F-CRIT-1** | `F19-part1-*.md`, `F-CRIT-1-*.md` |

**Fault 10 corrects its own premise.** The spec describes the mechanism as "the guaranteed
unquiesce via `defer`". `defer` played no part — it does not run on SIGKILL. What saved the stacks
was the **crash marker + `Recover()`**, which fired 1 s after the kill and named the job id and
stopped-stack count read back from the marker. The correct statement is: *the unquiesce is
guaranteed by the marker, not by the defer.*

### The R-88 backoff ladder — fully validated
Driven by a deliberately-failing tier: **15m → 30m → 1h → 2h → 4h → 4h (cap holds)**. All six
rungs matched `backoffFor()` exactly. Rung 6 is the important one: the breaker clamps rather than
continuing to double, so it **never latches open** — the property `breaker.go:22-26` insists on.
R-97a's edge-triggering also held: exactly ONE event per failure *run* per tier, not one per retry,
and the edge is tracked per-target (a second tier breaking is not masked by a first).

---

## 5. Phase C — restore round-trips

| tier | what was restored | result |
|---|---|---|
| **restic app-data (R-87)** | `bookstack`, snapshot `b2d8936d`, 155.5 MB, 14 s, via the real `POST /backup/offbox/restore` two-step size gate | **PASS — 6/7 files byte-identical by sha256**, including the 160 MB MariaDB volume dump. The 7th (`manifest.json`) differs only in `controller_version` 0.175.0→0.178.0 and `created_at`, i.e. the restore correctly returned the SNAPSHOT's manifest, not the live one |
| local vzdump | 5.82 GB archive → fresh CT 9299 (15 GiB extracted @ 210 MiB/s) | **PASS — exact mount_parity** |
| PBS offsite | encrypted snapshot 4.36 GB → fresh CT 9297 | **PASS — exact mount_parity** |
| corrupted PBS snapshot | deliberately corrupted snapshot → CT 9298 | **PASS — failed cleanly**: exit 255, named the entry AND the chunk, rolled back all three LVs, left no debris |

**mount_parity** was exact on both whole-guest tiers: both storage-backed mountpoints returned with
identical in-guest path, `backup=1` flag and size (only volume names changed), and `unprivileged: 1`
was preserved — a restore that silently dropped that would be a privilege escalation.

**R-87 is retired.** The restic tier now has a proven round-trip. What is NOT retired: restore into
a fresh *guest* from restic; the `place`/`reconstitute` legs that turn restored bytes back into a
running app; and demo-hp's `u629488-sub3` repo. Restoring bytes is not the same as restoring
service, and only the bytes were proven.

Neither restored guest was booted — deliberately, see F-OPS below.

---

## 6. Findings, ranked

| # | Finding | Severity | DEFECT / ARTIFACT |
|---|---|---|---|
| ~~**F-CRIT-1**~~ | ~~An app that fails to restart after a quiesce **never alarms**~~ — **FIXED, controller v0.179.0 (2026-07-28), both causes, replayed live** | ~~HIGH~~ | DEFECT — closed |
| ~~**F-CRIT-2**~~ | ~~A failed offsite backup leaves a phantom snapshot that **resets tier freshness**~~ — **FIXED, agent v0.106.0 (2026-07-28), re-tested live by replaying fault 2** | ~~HIGH~~ | DEFECT — closed |
| ~~**F-A1**~~ | ~~A restore-test in progress makes a healthy backup report as FAILED~~ — **FIXED, controller v0.179.0 (2026-07-28); hub DB shows 0 spurious emails, real failures still alarm** | ~~MEDIUM~~ | DEFECT — closed |
| **F-HUB** | The hub **dropped an event** under concurrent load (`SQLITE_BUSY`), no retry, cause unnamed | MEDIUM | DEFECT (frequency compression-influenced) |
| **F-LEAK** | A **failed** restore-test cannot destroy its own scratch guest (403 `VM.Allocate`); leaks are never reclaimed and the 10-slot VMID band shrinks silently | MEDIUM | DEFECT (root-caused by fault 18) |
| **F-REBOOT** | A guest rebooted during its backup **does not come back** — shutdown completes, start never happens, no self-heal | MEDIUM | DEFECT |
| **F-DIAG** | Four distinct offsite failure causes collapse into two operator-visible strings | LOW–MED | DEFECT |
| **F-OBS** | `deadapp-check` leaves NO positive observable on a default (info-level) box | LOW | DEFECT |
| **F-OPS** | A manual `pct restore` inherits the source guest's binds (live data drive + another guest's credentials) | LOW | Operational, not code |

### F-CRIT-1 — the failure that has no alarm
A production-faithful injection (one unresolvable image tag in an otherwise intact compose) made
`paperless-ngx` fail to restart after a quiesce:
```
20:46:15 [ERROR] [quiesce] restart paperless-ngx: starting stack paperless-ngx: exit code 1
containers: 0 · controller state: 'stopped' · app_start_failed events: 0 · dashboard banner: 0
dashboard renders the dead app as:  <div class="app-row stack-state-neutral" ...>
```
The detector was demonstrably alive — **11** `deadapp-check` scans ran after the 180 s grace
expired. The chain: quiesce's `compose down` removes the containers → the failed `compose up`
creates none → deployed + zero containers aggregates to `StateStopped` → and
`main.go:1237` **explicitly excludes** `StateStopped` from the down predicate.

That exclusion rests on an invariant the code states outright at `main.go:1213-1216`:
> "I1: … a deployed stack with zero containers aggregates to StateStopped. So **StateStopped means
> 'deployed, deliberately stopped by the user'**."

**I1 is false.** "Deployed with zero containers" is *also* the state of a failed restart. R-97b
itself is correct and its grace expired on time; v0.164.0's state filter sits downstream and
swallows the case unconditionally. Neither change is wrong alone — composed, they leave a hole.
The quiesce loop already *knows* it tried and failed (`quiesce.go:654`); that outcome simply is not
carried into the classification. Third instance this project has shipped of a comment asserting a
guarantee the code stopped providing.

### F-CRIT-2 — a failed backup that looks like a fresh one
Killing the PBS daemon mid-upload left `ns/demo-felhom/ct/9201/2026-07-27T22:08:31Z` containing
only `.tmp_didx` stubs and **no `index.json.blob`** — yet it is listed as a restorable backup, size
**1 byte**, and it is the NEWEST entry. `NewestArchiveTime` (`runner.go:311-326`) filters on
`Content == "backup"` and `VMID` only, with no completeness test, and the due-check treats storage
as ground truth.

Empirically: the controller UI reported the PBS tier's last backup as *"2026-07-28 00:08 (9
perce)"* — the failed upload. After a controller restart (which clears the in-memory breaker, so
the breaker cannot explain the silence), two full poll cycles produced **no due-tier line at all**,
while the last genuinely successful PBS backup was 2.5 h old against a 2 h cadence — **overdue and
not attempted.** On the real 168 h cadence this suppresses the offsite tier for up to **seven
days**, with every surface reporting it fresh and the hub's ~8-day deadline monitor as the only
remaining net. The R-88 breaker does not help: it defers tiers that are *due*, and this tier is not.

**The signal to reject the phantom already exists one subsystem over.** A full verify flagged
exactly this snapshot:
`manifest load error: unable to load blob '.../index.json.blob' - No such file or directory`.
Two discriminators were available and unused: the missing manifest, and the snapshot's
`verification` state (which the agent's own `VerifyLoop` maintains and which A3/F17 showed
propagating to the Proxmox API).

*Narrowing that makes it more actionable, not less serious:* fault 7 showed that an **ENOSPC**
failure leaves nothing behind — the server was alive and cleaned up. The phantom is specific to the
server dying or becoming unreachable mid-write.

### F-A1 — routine contention reported as failure
A restore-test in flight made the agent correctly refuse a backup (`busy=restore-test`, the R-85
Scenario F gate). The controller treats that HTTP 409 as a tier failure: breaker armed, and
`whole_guest_backup_failed` emailed to the operator — on **both** boxes. No 409 special-casing
exists on the start path (`quiesce.go:455-460`). Two comments assert otherwise:
`inflight.go:18-20` ("A caller that cannot acquire DEFERS to its next cadence" — the backup caller
does not) and `quiesce.go:489-491` (which frames the 409 as what *prevents* "a spurious failure").
Frequency is an ARTIFACT; the behaviour is a DEFECT — at real cadences a ~12-minute restore-test
against a daily backup collides roughly once per 420 guest-days, i.e. **every ~4 days on a
100-guest fleet**, forever training R-97a's alarm into noise.

### F-CRIT-1 and F-A1 — FIXED (controller v0.179.0, 2026-07-28)
**F-CRIT-1**, both causes: `restartAll` now returns the stacks that failed, and `classifyRunStates`
lifts the `StateStopped` whitelist for exactly those (`Loop.FailedRestarts()`). I1 is restated
truthfully — `StateStopped` means "deployed with zero containers", which is EITHER a user stop OR a
failed quiesce restart, and only the loop's own knowledge separates them.

**F-A1**: HTTP 409 is contention, not failure — typed `*StatusError` on POST, mapped to
`quiesce.ErrTierBusy` at the adapter. The tier stays DUE and is dropped before anything stops
(`contentionRetryAfter` 15m), and contention outliving the agent's own 120m PBS restore-test ceiling
raises a **BLOCKED** signal at 3h so a wedged gate is never silent.

Replayed live on demo-hp with the hub DB as arbiter: the failed restart alarmed 9 s after grace
expiry with the banner naming `(stopped)`; a deliberate user stop stayed silent through 9 dead-app
scans; a 409 produced **0** operator emails (8 → 8) while a real transport failure produced **1**
(8 → 9). Six red-proofs. Detail: `felhom-controller/REPORT.md`.

**All three of Campaign 8's HIGH/MEDIUM alarm findings are now closed** (F-CRIT-1, F-CRIT-2, F-A1).

### F-CRIT-2 — FIXED (agent v0.106.0, 2026-07-28)
`NewestArchiveTime` now counts only *plausibly complete* entries, via a measured size floor
(`minPlausibleArchiveBytes` = 1 MiB; smallest real backup on the fleet is 612,397,450 B, so 584x
headroom, asserted by a test). Undecidable ⇒ not counted. Size is the only tier-agnostic
discriminator: `verification` and `encrypted` are absent on every local dir archive and on a good
PBS snapshot until verify-new catches up, so gating on either would have rejected 100% of local
backups and caused fleet-wide backup thrash.

Verified by replaying fault 2 against the fixed agent on demo-hp: the phantom was created, rejected,
and announced once; the tier was correctly reported DUE and backed up; and the inverse case showed
no re-backup thrash (with 91 scheduler ticks proving the loop was alive). Detail:
`felhom-agent/REPORT.md`.

**Also settled:** server-side prune does NOT count phantoms toward `keep-last` — a dry-run retained
two real snapshots PLUS the phantom — so the feared retention/data-loss scenario does not occur. It
never removes them either; filed as R-99.

### F-REBOOT — FIXED (agent v0.107.0, 2026-07-28)
A periodic guest-power watchdog (`internal/localapi/guestpower.go`, 60 s) starts a guest that is
`onboot:1`, stopped, unlocked, and has no vzdump in flight. It closes the two narrow gaps that let
`RecoverStaleLockedGuests` miss fault 11: that recovery acts only on a guest holding a **stale vzdump
lock** (fault 11's guest was unlocked) and runs **once at agent startup** (fault 11's guest went down
while the agent was already up).

`onboot` is the deliberate-stop discriminator, and it is not invented here — it is already what the
stale-lock path uses for this decision, it is 0 on scratch/golden guests, and it is what `pve-guests`
itself consults at host boot, so the agent agrees with the platform rather than keeping a second
private definition of "should be running". Retry is bounded (3 attempts, 1m/2m/4m) and then escalates
once; an unbounded silent retry loop would be the over-correction.

Replayed live on demo-hp: a guest stopped out from under the agent came back **unattended in 120 s**,
against the **587 s** the finding's original incident needed a human. The lock-deferral guard fired
live during the replay. Scenario B proven on the same box — an `onboot:0` guest was left stopped
across the whole window.

### F-LEAK — FIXED (agent v0.110.0 + host-install v1.21.0, 2026-07-28) — after TWO refuted attempts

**Three attempts, two refuted by live test.** Recorded in full because both wrong answers looked right
and one of them shipped.

The cause is structural rather than a missing privilege in the role: `FelhomAgentGuest` is granted at
`/pool/felhom`, and **a guest joins that pool only when its restore completes**, so a *failed*
restore-test leaves a guest that exists, is in no pool, and is out of the token's reach entirely.

**Attempt 1 — adopt the stranded guest into the pool, then retry** (agent v0.107.0, shipped). Fired
exactly as designed and PVE refused it: `PUT /pools/felhom -> HTTP 500: permission denied at /vms/990000
(missing privilege ...)`. `PUT /pools/{pool}` **also** requires `VM.Allocate` on the VM being added —
**pool membership cannot bootstrap its own authority.** Removed in v0.108.0.

**Attempt 2 — grant the role per-path at `/vms/990000..990009`** (host-install v1.21.0). It *works*, and
the live A/B proved it: grant removed → `403 (/vms/990000, VM.Allocate)`, guest still present; grant
restored → `200 UPID:...vzdestroy`, guest gone. **But it is durable for exactly one use per slot.** The
post-destroy check showed `/vms/990000` with **0 grants**, and PVE's own source says why: the destroy
path calls `AccessControl::remove_vm_access($vmid)` (`API2/LXC.pm:906`), which deletes every ACL at
`/vms/<vmid>` (`AccessControl.pm:1898`). **The grant is consumed by the operation it authorises** — after
ten teardowns the band is ungranted and the defect returns. A per-VM ACL is the wrong tool; the pool
grant is durable only because it lives on a *pool* path, which `remove_vm_access` does not touch.

**Attempt 3 — route the destroy through the authority that already performs the create** (agent
v0.110.0). `Privileged.DestroyScratchLXC` is the **fourth** root-fenced exception, and it is fenced
harder than the other three, in three places none of which is consumed by use:

| layer | enforcement |
|---|---|
| **sudoers** | `/usr/sbin/pct destroy 99000[0-9] --purge` — sudo matches the vmid **literally** |
| **`DestroyScratchLXC`** | re-checks the band; refuses an unconfigured or inverted band rather than defaulting |
| **`teardownScratch`** | acts only on this journal entry's own scratch provenance |

The API destroy is still tried **first** and stays the normal path; the v1.21.0 band ACLs stay
provisioned so the common case needs no privileged call at all. This is the fallback that makes teardown
deterministic instead of once-per-slot.

**The fence, proven live by asking sudo rather than executing** (executing the negative case against a
live guest is precisely what must not happen):

| command | sudo verdict |
|---|---|
| `pct destroy 990000 / 990005 / 990009 --purge` | **PERMITTED** |
| `pct destroy 9201 --purge` (the live customer guest) | **REFUSED** |
| `pct destroy 9100 / 9999 / 1 --purge` | **REFUSED** |
| `pct destroy 990010 --purge` (one past the band) | **REFUSED** |
| `pct start 990000` / `pct set 990000 -memory 512` | **REFUSED** — the grant is this one op, not this vmid |

Also proven at the API seam, and worth keeping because it establishes the *shape* of the refusal: a
`DELETE` of the non-existent `990010` returned **403**, not "does not exist" — PVE evaluates
**permission before existence**, so these are genuine authorization refusals rather than artifacts.

Granting `VM.Allocate` at `/vms` was rejected throughout: it would authorise destroying every guest on
the box, including a co-tenant's.

### F-OBS — FIXED (controller v0.180.0, 2026-07-28)
`deadapp-check` now emits a summary line at **INFO** every 20th scan (10 min at its 30 s cadence),
carrying scans-since-boot, stacks evaluated, and how many are currently down. The original silence
came from its per-cycle line going through `Scheduler.dbg()`, which is gated on `logging.level==debug`
and so was never *produced* on a default box — meaning "no alarms" was indistinguishable from "the
detector never ran", the exact fallacy this project has a standing rule against. A line per run was
not an option either (2880/day is what made silence attractive), so the cadence is asserted by test in
both directions: it must not flood, and it must stay frequent enough to expose a stalled detector
inside the 180 s alarm grace it feeds.

*(Full write-ups for every finding, with complete evidence, are in `~/campaign8/evidence/phaseB/`.)*

---

## 6b. Follow-up investigation, 2026-07-28 — R-100 (filed, deliberately NOT fixed)

### A restic offsite tier that fails every night never goes stale on the hub

This is **F-CRIT-2's defect class, one layer up and on the other tier** — a *failed* run resetting the
freshness clock — and it was found by asking whether the F-CRIT-2 shape existed anywhere else.

Two halves, each verified in the source rather than inferred:

- **Controller.** `o.LastRun = time.Now()` is set **unconditionally** in
  `controller/internal/backup/offbox.go:716`, outside the `runErr` branch. The failure is recorded
  faithfully — but in a *different* field: `o.LastStatus = "error"` at :725.
- **Hub.** `isStale()` reads **only** `off.LastRun`
  (`hub/internal/monitor/offsite.go:120`, `:127`, `:131`). It never consults `LastStatus`.

So a nightly restic run that fails every night keeps `LastRun` fresh, `isStale` is permanently false,
and the staleness alarm never fires — while no successful offsite backup has occurred at all.

**Scope of the silence, stated precisely.** `LastStatus` *does* reach the hub: it is parsed into the
report struct and **only logged** (`offsite.go:270`). It drives no checker and no notification. The
controller's own guest UI does surface `LastStatus="error"`, so the failure is *visible to someone who
looks*; what is missing is the push — the operator's fleet-wide alarm plane is silent, which is the
plane that matters for an unattended appliance.

**Not fixed**, per this task's investigation-only scope. Filed as **R-100**; the fix direction is to
gate staleness on the last *successful* run rather than the last attempt, which is precisely what
F-CRIT-2's `NewestArchiveTime` fix did for the PBS tier.

---

## 7. What can come off the "never validated" list

**Retired — proven live tonight:**
- **The R-88 breaker arming** — and its full ladder 15m/30m/1h/2h/4h/4h-cap, its per-target
  isolation, and its recovery edge.
- **`whole_guest_backup_failed` from a real failure, end-to-end** — controller → hub → operator
  email, with correct tier attribution.
- **R-97c operator-only routing** — verified against the hub DB: **zero** customer rows with
  `status='sent'`, plus the deliberate `skipped`/`operator_only` row. (The spec's "zero customer
  rows" is imprecise: the skip is logged on purpose so it cannot look like a delivery that never
  happened.)
- **`whole_guest_backup_recovered`**, at severity `info`, including the R-68 **pairing gate**
  firing live: *"customer mail skipped — no unanswered customer down mail (pairing miss)"*.
- **`age_state=absent`** — a genuinely never-backed-up tier fired the window-gate safety valve and
  ran outside a closed window.
- **R-97b's suppression half** — with the detector proven alive by 5 scans inside the window.
- **The crash-recovery unquiesce** — by an actual SIGKILL, recovering in 1 second.
- **R-87: the restic tier has a restore round-trip**, byte-verified.
- **R-82 one-quiesce-two-tiers**, and per-tier isolation under a real one-tier-fails case.
- **Single-flight**: backup vs restore-test, and scheduled vs manual trigger.
- **A restore-test whose source vanishes fails loudly and does NOT falsely advance the tier's
  proven-restorable timestamp** (fault 18).
- **R-89's write-only box grant** — the box was correctly refused when it tried to delete its own
  offsite snapshot (`missing Datastore.Modify|Datastore.Prune`). A compromised box cannot destroy
  its own backups.

**Still NOT validated:**
- **R-97b's other half** — an app that genuinely fails to restart does **not** alarm (F-CRIT-1).
  This is now a known defect rather than an open question.
- Restic restore into a fresh guest; the `place`/`reconstitute` legs; demo-hp's restic repo.
- The agent's own DR bring-up path (`ModeDRGuestLoss`) — read in code, never executed.
- Backup + restore-test + **GC** three-way concurrency.
- Guest and host reboots mid-backup.

---

## 8. Final fleet state — HEALTHY, nothing left broken

All four compression knobs reverted and verified on both hosts (`local= 0`, `restore_test= 302400`,
`felhom-pbs 604800`); windows restored (demo-felhom `02:30`, demo-hp back to genuine ABSENCE);
every fault injection unwound. Sweep:
```
leaked scratch guests (990000-990009): NONE      nft c8 tables: 0/0
ballast files (host+guest, both boxes): 0        clocks synchronized: yes/yes
ep0 .bad chunks: 0                               ep0 pbs daemon: active
ep0 rollback copy /srv/pbs-felhom: PRESENT       ep0 datastore: 98G 14G 85G 14%
```
demo-felhom 15/15 containers healthy; demo-hp 8/8. In-memory breakers cleared by the revert
restarts. **The answer to Phase-0 question 4 is that it did not come to that.**

One campaign artefact was removed as part of restoring service, not merely tidiness: F2's partial
snapshot. Leaving it would have left demo-felhom's PBS tier silently suppressed for seven days —
F-CRIT-2's live effect.

### Final verification at 04:57:33Z / 06:57 CEST — after EVERY fault, including the two
### post-Phase-D re-injections (faults 18 and 11)
```
[demo-felhom] agent=active guest=running containers=15 unhealthy=0 scratch=0 nft_c8=0 ballast=0 ntp=yes
[demo-hp]     agent=active guest=running containers=8  unhealthy=0 scratch=0 nft_c8=0 ballast=0 ntp=yes
[ep0]         pbs=active bad_chunks=0 ballast=0 rollback_copy=PRESENT df=14G/98G 14%
```

**One outage the campaign caused, stated plainly:** fault 11 left demo-hp guest 9201 powered off
for **~9m47s** (03:43:13Z → 03:53:00Z) before I noticed and ran `pct start 9201`. That is finding
F-REBOOT, and it is the longest unplanned downtime of the run. Recovery needed no lock clearing and
all 8 containers returned within ~25 s. Everything else was reverted without incident.

Two re-injections were performed AFTER Phase D because clock-bound work (the 03:30 UTC prune and
GC run 2) left time available. Both are declared rather than hidden: fault 18 needed a bounded
restore-test cadence change on demo-hp (reverted, re-verified), and fault 11 needed no config
change at all. The sweep above is the state after all of it.

---

## 9. What could NOT be tested, and why

- **Fault 4 (storage box unreachable during restic)** — four approaches tried; all failed to
  interrupt the run. Root cause of the failure to inject is itself informative: restic runs inside
  the guest, so its traffic never enters the host's `output` hook (which is exactly why F1/F3
  *did* work — PBS/vzdump traffic is host-originated), and guest 9201 is **bridged**, so it does not
  traverse the host's `forward` hook either. `bridge`-family rules would not parse on this nft
  version, and a guest-side blackhole route did not cover the container's path. **This is the single
  most valuable follow-up**, because F-CRIT-2 raises the analogous question for restic: does an
  interrupted restic run leave a partial pack that later looks like success?
- **Fault 12 (host reboot mid-backup)** — not run. Deliberate: F9 and F10 already exercised
  hard-kill crash safety for both the agent and the controller, and rebooting a remote Proxmox host
  with no console access carried recovery risk disproportionate to the marginal information.
- ~~Fault 18~~ — **was run** in the campaign's tail (see the matrix). It required a single, declared
  re-injection after Phase D (restore-test cadence on demo-hp only, 84h→600s), which was reverted
  and Phase D re-verified immediately afterwards.
- **Fault 13's true THREE-way overlap** (backup + restore-test + GC simultaneously). Legs A and B were each proven, never together.
- **Fault 6** — inconclusive: ext4's 5% root reserve (2.07 GB, confirmed via `tune2fs`) meant the
  filesystem was never truly full for a root-run vzdump. Driving a Proxmox host's root filesystem
  to genuine zero risks wedging `pmxcfs`; not attempted.
- **Fault 8** — partial: the volume filled was not the one this guest's app-data backup writes to.
  Filling the real target would have meant writing ~890 GB to a remote demo box.
- **Booting either restored guest** — refused on purpose. Their `mp8`/`mp9` binds still point at the
  SOURCE guest's live data drive and bootstrap credentials (F-OPS); starting one would have mounted
  live customer data read-write beside the running guest.

### Two self-inflicted methodology traps, recorded so they are not repeated
1. **A noise filter deleted the evidence.** `grep -viE 'locale|perl|…'` silently dropped every line
   naming `pa`**`perl`**`ess-*` containers, producing a convincing false reading that a quiesce had
   failed to restart a stack. Caught only by an arithmetic inconsistency (`docker ps -a -q | wc -l`
   = 8 vs 5 formatted lines) and the controller's own container count. Filters are now anchored to
   the actual warning lines. **This is the spec's own "absence of a signal is not evidence" rule
   biting the campaign's instrumentation rather than the system.**
2. **A ~64 KB single-line ceiling through `ssh → pct exec`** silently returned 0 bytes for a
   debug-ring fetch at `limit=400`, and the parser swallowed the error — presenting as "this box has
   no DEBUG lines". Parser now fails loudly.
3. **`pgrep -cf <pattern>` matches its own shell** when the pattern appears in the `ssh` command
   line that `pgrep -f` inspects. `pgrep -cf vzdump` → 1 while
   `ps -eo args | grep -c '[/]usr/bin/vzdump'` → 0. This invalidated fault 11's injection outright
   and put one unsound line into fault 9's evidence (withdrawn; that finding stands on the
   controller's own job state instead). Drive such triggers off the controller's job log, which is
   authoritative and cannot self-match.

All three traps share a shape: **the instrument agreed with the hypothesis for the wrong reason.**
Two were caught only because a second, independent source disagreed — a container count, and a
job-state log. Where no second source existed, the campaign reports NOT TESTED rather than a pass.

---
