ISO 1.27.1 gated PASS and proven live: first-boot console Felhom-only,
pvebanner masked across a proven reboot. Hub v0.113.0 hand-over copy live
(R-497 closed). Full first hour walked again on customer tester-1 (three
disks + one disk): deploy, use, backup, removal, byte-identical restore,
power cut, typo all PASS. The tunnel gives a fresh box no routes: 12/12
503 from DooPlex (R-505); the record has no e-mail (R-508). Rows R-507,
R-508 filed; R-496/R-495 fixed/answered awaiting publish; day-0 A.1 no
longer claims the controller creates hostnames (R-506). NOT PUBLISHED.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0159rPz1ZhFKsS53msqPYxtS
Machine: VM 330 destroyed with its disks. Host: ISO and scratch removed,
~8.5 GiB returned on nvme-scratch. Hub: customer drill0242 DELETED via the
cascade (journal #17), pages 404; its ep0 WireGuard peer dropped at the next
full-list push. Evidence pulled before the destroy. R-501: the documented
CI-check recipe reads only the last jobs page, which is not in id order.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0159rPz1ZhFKsS53msqPYxtS
Golden 0.242.0 baked, round-trip verified and vouched (cadence rule, R-468).
Fresh box from the public ISO on demo-hp: landed on the vouched set, two apps
deployed and used, backup, remove, byte-identical restore, power cut and code
typo all PASS. Stopped for a volunteer by R-493 (no instructions) and R-494
(the setup mail's dashboard link has no DNS; intervention I1). R-493..R-500
filed. Capability map: first-hour row added (PARTIAL), journey row scoped.
Stopgap Hungarian volunteer guide written. Hub teardown layer pending.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0159rPz1ZhFKsS53msqPYxtS
Hub v0.112.0 serves a floor above the golden with a declared MinAgent;
controller v0.239.0 reached both demo boxes by that floor in 14 s and 15 s
and updates on any backup tier. 09 §3 decisions 7 and 8, §6/§6.1; 07 §6
line; capability map row; STATUS items 15/16 done and the cadence line
corrected; CONTEXT; register: R-470/R-472/R-475 compressed to CLOSED-ITEMS
(full text at 2f5d3af), R-477..R-480 opened, R-474 reproduced a third
time. OPEN-ITEMS 431689 -> 432156 bytes, CLOSED-ITEMS 118051 -> 120598.
Evidence: documentation/audits/rulings-r472-r475-2026-09-13/.
Operator ruling 2026-09-13. Above the vouched golden, a floor saved with a
declared MinAgent is served under the same agent comparison; an undeclared
one is still held beyond the golden. The declaration is stored beside each
floor as FLOOR=MINAGENT so it never carries to a later floor. Both floor
forms require min_agent above the golden (flash floor_needs_min_agent,
nothing stored). The Hosts page and the API log name the source.
Vouch path and R-120 gate untouched. Scenarios A-E tested; red-proofs A
and C in documentation/audits/rulings-r472-r475-2026-09-13/.
Controller v0.237.0-v0.238.1: the Update button is a guarded job — refusals, backup-first when the
proven Tier-2 copy is stale, safety dump, pin, pull (pin back on failure), health, HOLD on failure.
Proven live on demo-hp: A, B, E, F, H and the restore walk (audits/slice4-2026-09-13/).
Correction to this morning's pages: between golden bakes the hub HOLDS a floor above the vouched
golden, so a release does not reach the fleet by floor (R-472, operator decision). Corrected in the
runbook, STATUS, CONTEXT, R-468 and the gate docstring.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0159rPz1ZhFKsS53msqPYxtS
Operator rulings 2026-09-13, both shipped the same day:
- MariaDB finishes its own conversion (catalog eec1228/bd32830/3525e35). Harness E3/E3b `proven`
with engine_state_after "already upgraded to 12.3.3-MariaDB [exit=1]", the skip line gone, C3
still `failed`; landed on demo-hp through the real 15-min cycle, nothing recreated, one deliberate
restart logged "MariaDB upgrade not required" with the app serving. Evidence:
documentation/audits/r459-close-2026-09-13/. The engine-major rule + gate keep every engine
inside its major until Slice 4 (R-448) — removal tracked as R-469.
- Goldens on a cadence, not per release. golden_currency_gate.py reads a dated waiver
(documentation/tests/golden-waiver.yml, <= 14 days, row-bound): valid + BEHIND -> loud advisory,
exit 0; expired -> red again naming the date; UNRECORDED (R-385) never covered; malformed -> 2,
never 0. Tests cases 5-15 incl. the R-421 decoy; red-proof old-vs-new on the real behind tree.
R-242's vouch half stays open. Cadence in RUNBOOK-manual-build.md §4.2 + the checklist.
- Golden 0.236.0 baked, round-tripped, vouched, floor raised 0.232.0 -> 0.236.0
(documentation/tests/golden-0.236.0-2026-09-13/) — the last per-release bake; the waiver was
issued AFTER it landed. No --no-verify anywhere in this session.
Rows: R-459 CLOSED, R-467 CLOSED, R-242 narrowed; R-468/R-469/R-470/R-471 opened. 09 §3 gains
decisions 5 and 6; STATUS items 11 and 12 closed; CONTEXT records the cadence ruling.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5.1 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_0159rPz1ZhFKsS53msqPYxtS
Outcome A, qualified. Not B and not C.
It does not degrade: 5 of 5 restarts of 12.3 on an 11.6 datadir, readback passed
every time, mariadb_upgrade_info unchanged, the entrypoint line never escalated
past [Note]. It also never heals - the engine answers 'Major version upgrade
detected from 11.6.2-MariaDB to 12.3.3-MariaDB. Check required!' on every start
and will forever.
The trade R-459 was expected to produce is not real. Converting properly SUCCEEDS
across the multi-major jump, takes 7 seconds, backs up the system database
unasked - and putting 11.6 back afterwards STILL starts and serves the data. So
the operator is being handed a cheap correction, not a choice between a correct
engine and a reversible one.
The exit-code polarity was measured rather than read: 0 means the upgrade IS
needed, 1 means it is not. Assuming either the flag name or the polarity would
have inverted the headline. And run without credentials the same command returns
a confident-looking FATAL ERROR that is an auth failure.
R-464: after converting and going back, the entrypoint prints 'MariaDB upgrade
not required' on a state the same engine calls an unsupported downgrade. The
obvious cheap instrument for R-459 would have been to grep for that line, and it
would have reported fine for the broken case.
R-463: the PostgreSQL analogue, deliberately NOT measured here. 11 templates, 8
on postgres:16-alpine, register grep for pg_upgrade returns zero. The two engines
fail in OPPOSITE directions - MariaDB skips quietly, Postgres refuses to start -
so that one cannot hide; it presents as eight apps down at once.
No template changed. Teardown all three layers, hub checked rather than asserted,
local-lvm 30.53 percent before and after.
R-449. Until today one app upgrade out of 53 had ever been measured, by hand, and
the whole update arc was designed against that single data point.
C3 first: the negative control, whose TO image exits immediately, came back
failed. That is what makes the greens mean anything, and it cost 556s because a
negative is only honest if it waits out the full settle window.
Seven edges, three apps. All five real catalog upgrades kept the customer's data.
The finding that changes an assumption the arc was carrying: whether an upgrade
can be UNDONE is a property of the individual APP, not of upgrades. Docmost
refuses - 'corrupted migrations: previously executed migration
20260213T085259-notifications is missing' - and privatebin does not. That
reproduces the Nextcloud result on a second app by a DIFFERENT mechanism, so the
struck word 'rollback' now rests on two measurements instead of one.
The finding nobody was looking for, R-459: our own bookstack template moves
MariaDB across a major and sets no MARIADB_* env at all, so the engine logs that
the datadir upgrade it requires is being skipped, and serves anyway. The cause is
assigned rather than guessed - the app half alone produces no upgrade line, both
edges that move the engine produce it - which is exactly what decomposing E3 into
E3a and E3b was for. It also explains why E3's abort looked like it worked: the
datadir was never converted. Whether that ever breaks is NOT established, and the
row says so.
Also opened: R-460 (bookstack's file half cannot be seeded headlessly), R-461
(target-selection.md names a venue that does not exist and fences a VM that is
gone), R-462 (the widening, costed with this run's real numbers - and the cost is
dominated by fixtures, which do not amortise).
Teardown all three layers, hub checked rather than asserted. local-lvm read 30.50
percent before and after. The capability map was deliberately NOT edited: this
measured apps, not the product.
THE GATE IS ANSWERED: YES. compose up -d upgrades an app whose compose file has
already moved, and the Restart button does it — 18.3s with a network pull when
the target image is absent, 0.5s when present, against a negative control that
did not even recreate the container. The boot reconciler does the same thing
unattended when an app fails to come back (bootrecon.go:269 -> StartStack).
AND ONE FEAR IS SMALLER THAN THE BRIEF CLAIMED: a plain power cut upgrades
nothing. Docker restores the old containers and the reconciler logs 'no
boot-orphaned apps (nothing to start)'.
AND ONE IS BIGGER: app data CANNOT be rolled back. Once a migration has run,
the old image refuses to start — Nextcloud: 'the version of the data (32.0.9.2)
is higher than the docker image version (31.0.14.1) and downgrading is not
supported'. 'Rollback' is the wrong word for this arc and is struck.
Phases 0-6 all run, on demo-hp (Tier 0, disposable). Phase 6 run on operator
confirmation. Peti's box was never contacted. No production code written in any
repo: felhom-controller is at 960d29b0612c before and after, tree clean, and
build/vet/test are green — run at the end to prove exactly that.
Register: R-438/439/440 updated with live evidence; R-441..R-445 opened
(restore-vs-sync conflict; remove_hdd_data inert with no paths.hdd_path, 128 MB
left behind; update reports success over a broken app; no fleet fstrim; hub
telemetry outlives the app). Capability map gains three measured rows. The
mechanism is written down in 02-controller-module-map.md as MEASURED BEHAVIOUR,
not [DESIGN] — the operator has not ruled. STATUS.md carries the one decision.
Five claims in the brief are named as wrong, including two of my own method.
The drill was to delete demo-hp's off-site history and get it back out of a Storage
Box snapshot, filling row 10's blank RTO. Phase 1 found there is nothing to get it
back from: no snapshot is reachable from a sub-account BY ANY NAME.
Measured, read-only, no delete verb issued against any live store:
- 777,600 exact names in the vendor form YYYY-MM-DDTHH-MM-SS, nine full days at
second granularity, plus 126 alternative shapes -> ZERO hits.
- The control is what makes that mean anything: the identical 600-name batch shape
with one real path appended returned it, 6 of 6.
- Structural cause: /home (u629488-sub3) is st_dev 0,82; /.zfs/snapshot is st_dev
0,276; /home/.zfs does not exist. A snapshot under /.zfs/snapshot belongs to a
different dataset than the one holding felhom-repo.
- Three tools agree with controls in the same run: SFTP, the port-23 shell,
rsync --list-only.
So yesterday's re-scope splits: clause (a) "the box cannot write into the snapshot
area" STANDS and is re-confirmed; clause (b) "the rest is recoverable file by file"
is NOT SUPPORTED. STOPPED before Phase 2 on the operator's ruling — with no recovery
leg the deletion would have destroyed real history to buy only an alarm test that
could not fire at the specified size. Store verified untouched at 69 snapshots.
R-432 ANSWERED (negatively; its panel-read next step withdrawn as unnecessary).
R-433 no snapshot reachable by any name — decides R-95's remedy and its rank.
R-434 the drop alarm's text promises a file-by-file recovery that cannot be performed.
R-435 the drop detector is blind to a single-app deletion (>50% of 69 needed, ~9 given).
R-436 LEAD: the provider offers `rclone serve restic --stdio` and restic 0.14.0 speaks
`rclone:` (measured, controlled) — real prevention may need no new machine, IF
the vendor pins --append-only. Ask before building.
07 §8 row 10: text corrected, status NOT moved, RTO still blank.
No code, no version bump, no image, no golden. REPORT.md's only copy of the R-331
report preserved as REPORT-r331-backup-card.md before overwrite.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01LB8FmJaGd2cyjvy6dbEjpM
READ-ONLY STUDY. No code, no version, no image, no golden. No delete verb was issued against any
live store. ep0, DooPlex and Peti's box were not touched at all.
Q1 FIRST, AND IT DID NOT GO THE EXPECTED WAY. The brief supposed a working seven-day snapshot net
might bound the worst case. Measured on BOTH boxes over their own SFTP credential, with a positive
and a negative control on each: NO .snapshots is visible to either sub-account - not in the account
home, not inside the repo - and the account is jailed at /. Either none exist or a sub-account
cannot see them, and the second is not a reprieve: a snapshot the box cannot see is one the box
cannot restore from, so recovery would be an operator act at the Hetzner panel.
The register's claim rests on nothing that was checked. The row has NO R-number, so nothing can cite
it; its "confirm tomorrow" was 2026-07-27, 36 days ago; and the DUE-CHECKS block built for exactly
this (R-341) is EMPTY. R-95's word "ARMED" is withdrawn pending R-429. The confirming field is a
Hetzner API field, so this spike STOPPED at the section 11-D fence and left it for Viktor - ten
minutes in the panel, and it re-ranks everything.
Q2: TEN verbs, not nine. `check` was missing from the brief's list; `dump` is not a verb (it is a
progress phase constant) and was withdrawn. There are TWO `forget --prune` sites - offbox.go:1388
AND offbox.go:1759 - and disarming one without the other reproduces R-191 exactly.
Q3 (documented, from our own API mirror): AccessSettings has five booleans and `readonly` is the
only permission axis. No append-only. So the PBS shape does NOT transfer - PBS is a server that can
refuse; a Storage Box is a filesystem that runs nothing.
Q5 (measured, faithful append-only model, both controls passed first): withdrawing delete does NOT
wedge the store - restic treats a dead owner's lock as stale and proceeds. The constraint everyone
feared is not the blocker. But `unlock --remove-all` printed "successfully removed locks" while the
lock was still there, and resticStep's crash-lock self-heal is built on that call - R-430.
Q6 (measured, with a control): restic 0.14.0 DOES speak rest:. Append-only is a rest-server flag,
not a restic one.
Q7 (measured): detection is nearly free. snapshot_count already reaches the hub and the hub APPENDS
reports, so the history to compare against is already on disk.
RECOMMENDATION: answer Q1 today (Viktor, ten minutes), then build detection, then move retention off
the box. Defer the transport change until Q1 is answered.
Register: OPEN 179 -> 181. Filed R-429, R-430; R-95 updated and kept OPEN. 07 row 10's status is
deliberately UNCHANGED.
THE CLASS, now a row: an instrument that matches a LABEL rather than the fact it names. Five
instances - R-410, R-400, R-378, R-419, R-94 - and EVERY ONE was found by accident, by someone
looking at something else. The gates enforce every other rule in this project, including the rule
that findings must be written down rather than left in prose. Nothing had ever checked the gates.
METHOD, and it is the transferable part: for each gate, construct the label WITHOUT the fact - a
directory with the right name and no bake log, a handler case that exists only in a comment, a note
whose prose mentions the marker it lacks - run the gate, record what it says. No verdict was reached
by reading. Reading is how all five hid.
RESULT: 29 distinct scripts (35 registrations; three are shared across three runners). 19 sound, 4
holes left OPEN with rows, 6 that no plausible decoy could be built for and are named UNTESTED rather
than called sound. A gate nobody tried to fool is UNKNOWN.
SCOPE IS A FACT TOO - the largest single cause, and mundane. Eight gates decided what to look at with
os.listdir, one level. Every one was green AND CORRECT today, and every one would have gone blind the
moment anyone added a subdirectory. mojibake and docker-v already used os.walk, caught the identical
planted file, and are the control that proves the cause was the listing and not the decoy.
IN THIS REPO: hub-confirm and manifest-bearer now walk. observations_gate (R-419, CLOSED) requires a
marker at a line start or after a sentence boundary and strips inline code spans - a note SAYING it
carries no marker no longer satisfies the marker test. closed-register now CONVICTS on a row it
cannot parse instead of warning: FOUR rows were in that state, TWO of them written by the session
that closed them the day before, and every one was exempt from the only check that reads that file.
The rows were repaired first and the conviction added second - registering a failing gate refuses
every push.
THE META-GATE: decoy_coverage_gate.py refuses a gate registered without a decoy or a named exemption.
It convicted ITSELF the moment it was registered, which is how it came to have one. Coverage is a
DECLARATION the gate AST-parses, never a grep - searching a test file for a gate's name would be the
very shape this sweep exists to find. The 20 uncovered gates are listed by name (R-426).
NOT FIXED, each with a row and a decoy asserting TODAY's behaviour so the fix must be deliberate:
R-422 reuse-refs (only 7 extensions; a rotted .md citation is invisible), R-423 site (PAGES is a
hardcoded list of 7), R-424 one-register (a defect parked as `idea`), R-425 offbox-rename (fixed
FILES list). R-427: closed_register_gate checks ONE direction - twelve open rows carry a closed
verdict and were NOT moved, because telling finished from partly-finished is a judgement and R-378
is the record of a machine getting it wrong.
FIVE DECOYS WITHDRAWN AS ILLEGITIMATE, mine, named in the audit. A decoy nobody would write proves
nothing, and manufacturing a finding to fill a row is worse than an honest NO.
No product code. No version bump. No image. No golden owed. All four runners green.
Register: OPEN 172 -> 178, CLOSED 160 -> 161.
Part 2.1's determination is the first artifact: the scratch resolver was consciously OUT OF
SCOPE for R-356, not excluded on state-only grounds - established from R-356's own commit
08eb1a6, whose tests say 'the prepared scratch still resolves ... only the DESTINATION
moves'. So 07 section 6.3's rule applies and now has a FOURTH consumer, and the section
says so.
Live evidence: the collision rerun on demo-hp with the sampler positively controlled first
(12 locks=1 across a real check, 4 locks=0 quiet), showing unlock --remove-all 0 times where
the drill saw it twice; and the proof reaching verdict pass on demo-felhom - the box that
could not run it at all - recorded where last_proof_result had been ABSENT every night.
Capability map: the off-site proof row now records that the nightly firing IS proven (it ran
unattended at 05:30 on demo-hp) and that a driveless box can now be proved.
Register: six rows closed and compressed. OPEN 176 -> 170, CLOSED 152 -> 158.
R-410. golden_currency_gate.py matched EVIDENCE_RE against os.listdir and read nothing
inside, so `mkdir documentation/tests/golden-9.9.9-2026-01-01` turned it green with no bake
behind it - noticed while the 0.230.0 bake was running, when the evidence directory existed
before the bake finished. It now reads the GOLDEN_SHA256= line out of that directory's bake
log: a directory name is a label, that line is a fact only a completed publish produces.
Still offline, still --fast, one file read. Directories that look right and hold nothing are
printed by name rather than silently ignored, so a half-finished bake is visible.
test_golden_currency_gate.py ships the red-proof with a POSITIVE CONTROL, without which
"it fails on an empty directory" would be satisfied by a gate that fails on everything:
CASE 1 empty directory -> rejected and named
CASE 2 log with no GOLDEN_SHA256 -> rejected
CASE 3 real bake log -> counted, and its sha read <- the control
CASE 4 the tree is left byte-identical
Red-proofed: reverting the gate to name-matching fails cases 1, 2 and 3.
R-406. Citations MEASURED before choosing, which is what the row asked for: hub-uniqueness
had 3 references (all inside one audit doc), plaintext-break-glass had 5 (CONTEXT.md,
break-glass.md, hub/CHANGELOG.md, the capability map, a spike). The FEWER-cited one moved -
hub uniqueness is now R-415 - and all three citations were rewritten to "R-415 (was R-133)"
rather than silently swapped.
THIS IS THE OPPOSITE OF THE TASK'S LITERAL INSTRUCTION, which said renumber the second row on
the stated ground that "the older number has the longer reference trail". Measured, that
ground points the other way. The principle was followed and the letter was not, and the row
says so rather than leaving an unexplained diff.
R-416 filed: the within-register duplicate rule was deliberately NOT added in the same commit
that removed its only subject - a guard whose red-proof can only be a planted fixture is not
this project's standard. Now that the register is clean it can ship with the next real
duplicate as its first subject.
Overnight soak 22:39->06:10 CEST. demo-hp the victim, demo-felhom the untouched observer.
No production code, no golden, no version bump. Report at
documentation/audits/DRILL-soak-2026-08-31/REPORT.md.
VERDICTS: 1 lock-collision FAIL, 2 guard-interactions PASS-with-one-defect, 3 R-357 PASS,
4 proof-edges PASS, 5 mutated-cycle PASS, 6 observer FAIL, 7 teardown PASS.
R-414 - THE MOST VALUABLE FINDING, AND ONLY AN UNTOUCHED BOX COULD HAVE FOUND IT. On
demo-felhom the nightly proof fired for the first time unattended at 05:30 and REFUSED:
"nowhere to restore to - nincs regisztralt adatmeghajto". Cause established, not inferred:
storage_paths is EMPTY, so there is no path to put a scratch on. It will fail this way every
night forever with only a WARN, and because the error path reaches no verdict,
last_proof_result stays ABSENT - which is also what a pre-0.231.0 controller sends. The hub
cannot tell "never ran" from "not deployed": the StatsKnown trap one level up. The box is
NOT unprotected; its off-site backup ran fine in 46.9s. It is the PROOF that cannot run.
R-411 - measured, not reasoned: restic stats TAKES A LOCK; a customer full-restore runs it
while holding no acquireRunning; the integrity check is therefore not blocked, meets that
lock and escalates to unlock --remove-all. The sampler caught "restore ..." and
"unlock --remove-all" in the SAME sample. Contained: the check was classified unreachable,
not damage, so no false alarm.
R-412 - CORRECTED from HIGH to LOW. I filed it on a mechanism I had not finished measuring.
The off-site run has its own pre-push dump leg, so a hollow unit is REPAIRED before it
ships - proven on two apps and confirmed by pulling the snapshot back out of the store.
What survives is a narrow race, plus a success line over a backup holding no data.
R-413 - the R-87 proof caught a product-produced hollow snapshot unattended, and the
nightly job fired on its own schedule at 05:30 for the first time (bentopdf PASSED on
9d002b38 in 2.315s). Both were listed "not yet live-validated" yesterday.
R-403 mirror guard PROVEN live, with a negative control: it fired when a unit was hollow
("The copy was PRESERVED rather than replaced with an empty one") and skipped 0 legs at
teardown when every unit was sound.
R-357 PASS at last, six days owed: a real full filesystem, refused BEFORE StopStack, app
never stopped, live data byte-identical, and it worked once the space came back.
Phase 4 built the false-alarm control the whole R-87 design rests on: bentopdf is the only
template of 53 with neither a database nor a named volume. It passes silently.
EIGHT of my own instrument errors are named in the report, each caught by its own control -
including a time guard that fired an injection four hours early, and filing R-412 at the
wrong severity.
Teardown clean on all three layers of both boxes; both healthy on 0.231.0.
OWED: a golden for 0.231.0, and a decision on keeping bentopdf.
R-403 MIRROR GUARD - PASS, forced after the natural test evaporated. privatebin was
injected hollow at 23:34 to meet the 03:30 mirror; the 02:30 db-dump re-made its tar, so
by 03:30 the primary was complete and the guard had nothing to refuse. Forced instead on
calibre-web through the real Tier-2 path: the guard fired and named itself -
"unit leg SKIPPED ... The copy was PRESERVED rather than replaced with an empty one
(R-403). The other legs continue." Secondary byte-identical, 23 files, tar sha d7e7f422.
R-412 CORRECTED, AND I OVERSTATED IT WHEN I FILED IT. The first wording claimed the hollow
unit sits in the store for a whole cycle because the volume-dump leg runs only on the
backup schedule. That is WRONG. The 04:15 off-site run has its OWN pre-push dump leg -
"Stopping calibre-web for safe volume dump", "Volume dump: ... -> 877.5 KB" - so a unit
that is hollow when a run starts is REPAIRED before it is pushed. Measured twice: opengist
and calibre-web both went in hollow and came out complete, and the snapshot pulled back
from the store (6fee3b5a) holds the volume tar and all 17 userdata files.
What remains real is narrower: the one hollow snapshot that DID reach the store was created
when the unit was destroyed INSIDE a run that had already completed that app's dump leg.
The race is real and was observed, and "backed up opengist (... 0 mandatory path(s))" is a
success line over a backup holding none of the app's data either way. Severity HIGH -> LOW,
with the correction stated in the row rather than quietly rewritten.
Phase 6 interim: the observer is clean so far - db-dump 674ms, tier2-backup 3ms (a no-op,
cause to be established not assumed), zero ERROR/WARN since 23:00.
Also recorded: two of Phase 5's four injections were NOT performed, with the reasons
established rather than asserted - there is no endpoint that reaches SetDisconnected and a
hand-set flag would be reverted by the live monitor before 04:15; and a corrupted manifest
provably never reaches the store because the capture rewrites it first.
Overnight soak on demo-hp, phases 0-4 of 7. Evidence
documentation/audits/DRILL-soak-2026-08-31/. No production code written, no golden,
no version bump - findings only.
PHASE 1 FAIL - R-411. The R-408 hazard was only ever reasoned about; tonight it was
measured through the product's own endpoints. restic stats TAKES A LOCK (clean-room:
nothing else running, 4x stats, sampler reads locks=1). A customer full-restore runs
stats in its preparation while holding NO acquireRunning, so the integrity check is not
blocked, runs, meets that lock, and resticStep escalates to unlock --remove-all - the
sampler caught "restore ..." and "unlock --remove-all" in the SAME sample at 20:50:51.
The log calls it "a stale exclusive lock left by a previous crash"; there was no crash.
THE CUSTOMER-FACING CONSEQUENCE IS CONTAINED and that is R-359 working: the check was
classified Unreachable, NOT damage, so no alarm and due-ness held. The opposite direction
is FENCED - five restores fired into a running check at 5/15/25/35/40s were all refused by
restoreOpBlocked with zero restic invoked.
PHASE 2 FAIL - R-412, and it is the natural instance of R-403's shape that yesterday's
session had to hand-build. A lost primary unit is rebuilt by the capture WITHOUT its
volume dumps (185664 B -> 4382 B, volume_dumps: None), and the off-site backup then ships
it and logs "backed up opengist ... 0 mandatory path(s)" - a success line over a backup
holding none of the app's data.
PHASE 2 also R-413: the R-87 proof CAUGHT that hollow snapshot unattended -
verdict "fail", volumes_expected_none_captured: opengist_data, one offsite_proof_empty at
severity error, while the four apps ahead of it in the rotation passed.
2.3 stale marker PASS, 2.4 two restores PASS, 2.5 corrected the runbook's premise
(RunTier2 has zero acquireRunning and zero restic references - a local mirror cannot
collide with the repo, so the proof correctly does not skip for it).
PHASE 3 PASS - R-357 live-validated at last, six days owed. A real full filesystem
(1900544 B free vs 5878421 B needed) on a separate 1 TB device that does not back Docker.
Refused BEFORE StopStack: app "Up 6 minutes (healthy)" unchanged, 0 safety dumps, live
userdata tree fingerprint 5a9b2db75dfd4ba4131adb3255670472 unchanged, message names both
numbers in Hungarian. Ballast removed, the SAME restore then worked and the fingerprint is
still identical. On the same full disk the Tier-2 run, the proof and the integrity check
all behaved: the proof refused before any download through the shared unitOnlyHeadroom
gate extracted today, reached no verdict and did not alarm.
PHASE 4 PASS - the false-alarm control the whole R-87 design rests on now EXISTS. Found by
reading all 53 catalogue composes: bentopdf is the only template with neither a database
service nor a named volume. Deployed, backed up, proved: PASSED in 2.224s with zero alarms.
Four of my own instrument errors were caught by their own controls before any result was
believed: a hub log line used as a controller positive control, a grep pattern that missed
a registered job, a heredoc that mangled a planted marker, and a catalogue scan that read
0 of 0 apps from the wrong path.
Phases 5-7 to follow: the real nightly cycle with injected faults, the untouched observer,
and teardown.
Spike. NO production code. No version bump, no build, no deploy, no golden.
felhom-controller and felhom-agent were READ ONLY. The fleet stays on v0.230.0.
Q1 restic is 0.14.0 (go1.19.8, bookworm 12.15) - the four source comments asserting
it are CONFIRMED, not corrected.
Q2 --verify DOES exist and is NOT a content check. Red-proof: one byte changed in a
restored 160 MB tar with size and mtime preserved passed clean, rc=0. Verify took
131 ms on a 213 MB / 7-file tree, which cannot be hashing. A size or mtime mismatch
causes a silent re-download, not a failure. Controls: --target 1 hit, four post-0.14
flags and a nonsense string 0 hits each. Neither --verify nor --no-lock appears
anywhere in the controller source.
Q3 no reference for "correct" exists. restic ls --json carries no content hash in
0.14.0, and the unit manifest hashes 4918 B of a 213231242 B unit - 0.0023 percent,
the config files and not the dumps or the tars. R-409.
Q4 it is CHEAP. All 8 apps / 774378123 B logical restored back to back in 25 s, against
40257 ms for the weekly 100 percent check beside it. Individual restores 2253-3978 ms
regardless of size: cost is per-snapshot round-trip plus ~1 s per 200 MB. Peak scratch
is the app's full logical size. The 1.1 MB restic cache is index only and hides nothing
(--no-cache 5423 ms vs cached 3198 ms, trees byte-identical).
Q5 skip-if-busy stays right at 25 s against a 2m52s nightly backup. But
RestoreOffboxScratch takes NO acquireRunning, while offbox_integrity.go:28 asserts
every off-site operation does. R-408.
Q6 observed with a positively-controlled lock sampler: restic restore takes NO lock;
restic check DOES (locks 0 -> 1 for nine samples -> 0 across the check, zero across two
restores). The product writes anyway - unlockStale runs `restic unlock`, a delete verb,
before every restore (offbox_restore.go:289). The task's lead was right in direction and
wrong in mechanism. R-95's constraint IS satisfiable: --no-lock plus skipping unlockStale
writes nothing, and both mechanisms exist unused. Neither was fixed - the task forbids it.
offbox_integrity.go:255's "It NEVER writes to the repository" is R-407.
Q7 THE DECIDING ONE: of R-353/354/356/358/403 an unattended scratch-restore would have
caught ONE (R-356). The value is elsewhere, and the weekly check structurally cannot
reach it: `check` proves the stored bytes are the stored bytes, never that we stored the
RIGHT thing. A hollow unit backs up, checks at 100 percent and restores cleanly and
recovers nothing - R-403, measured in bytes on 31 August.
RECOMMENDATION: option C, the NARROW test - one app a night, restored to scratch, checked
against its own manifest.json through the existing unitCarriesData, scratch deleted, the
SNAPSHOT recorded as the proof. Options A (do not build) and B (scheduled attended drill)
considered explicitly; B is weakest because it is what already happens. R-87 should be
RE-SCOPED, not built as written, and that is Viktor's call - the row stays open carrying
the verdict and STATUS.md item 4 asks it in plain words.
Also corrected in 07-backup-architecture.md: matrix rows 4 and 10 both said "the depth
that ships ON does not re-read pack contents (R-399)". R-399 CLOSED in v0.228.0 and the
depth is 100 percent. Two stale cells, fixed, and the spike verdict added beside them.
Row 4's verdict is UNCHANGED by the spike and now says so.
Teardown: all three layers, none of them "nothing was created" - 6 files on the PVE host,
9 in the guest, 5 plus 2 run-flags in the container, all removed and verified empty. The
four scratch directories this session's restores created were removed; three that
pre-date the session were left alone. Two state changes recorded rather than hidden: the
control integrity run recorded its verdict (depth structure -> 100%, due-ness +7 days),
and four restores appear in the controller log. Nothing was written to the off-site
repository by hand.
Evidence: documentation/audits/evidence-spike-restic-restore-2026-08-31/ - 31 files,
every one pulled off the box BEFORE teardown (R-320).
golden-currency is RED at this commit and was already red at dddcc80. Pre-existing, not
this session's debt. Second --no-verify push of the day for that reason; R-404's count
goes six -> seven and its row says so.
Ceiling R-406 -> R-409.
07-backup-architecture gains section 8.2, placed beside row 5 on purpose: the derived-copy rebuild
rule is UNCHANGED and section 8.2 names the single exception, so a future reader who finds RunTier2
skipping a leg does not fix it back. It carries the measurement (120 082 104 B -> 7 036 B on the
shipped v0.229.0), the four-case table, why hollow is a manifest question and not a size question,
why the data legs are deliberately not guarded, and why the capture job is not guarded either.
00-capability-map: the Tier-2 row's status does NOT move, stated explicitly rather than left
ambiguous. R-403 removes a way the route could be DESTROYED between uses; it does not change what
the route can be relied on for.
Register: R-403 CLOSED and compressed into CLOSED-ITEMS (594 -> 593 open lines). R-404 FILED as a
DECISION and deliberately not acted on - should a documents-only push be subject to the
golden-currency gate, now that it has been correctly bypassed six times? Both sides stated, plus
what happens if Viktor does nothing. The gate was NOT changed.
R-242: seventh conviction, and the FIRST where the day-0 ground does not apply - R-403 is a defect
in the nightly Tier-2 copy, which a day-0 box starts running on its first night. This push uses
git push --no-verify, declared here and in felhom-controller/REPORT.md. A golden carrying 0.230.0 is
owed and is more urgent than the previous six.
STATUS: the R-403 item moves out of 'Broken' into what works, in plain words; the delivery item now
says a golden is owed and that the fleet carries the defect; R-404 goes into the decide section with
its do-nothing outcome.
Drill evidence: nine phase logs, including the two things that went wrong (a repair whose rsync was
not installed in the guest and silently did nothing, and a session that expired mid-run so a POST
did nothing).
admin