Read-only diagnostic; nothing restarted, reconfigured or deployed.
CAUSE (H2, supported): the island migration rewrote bootstrap.json
(169.254.253.1:8443) but the controller reads controller.yaml, which still
holds the pre-island LAN address on both boxes -- mtimes 2026-07-21 and
2026-07-23, i.e. days BEFORE the migration. ensureLocalAPI
(bootstrap.go:254) returns early when local_api.endpoint is non-empty, so it
fills a MISSING endpoint and never reconciles a STALE one. The agent no longer
binds the LAN address, hence "connection refused".
H1 refuted: every island leg is healthy on both hosts -- agent active and bound
169.254.253.1:8443, vmbr9 up, guest eth1 up, TCP from the guest to the island
is OPEN. The island works; nothing is using it.
H3 refuted: hub-persisted events put the first alarm at 2026-07-25 12:44/12:46,
~17.5h before the v0.172.0 deploy. Today's re-fires are restart artifacts --
channel state is in-memory by design.
H4 refuted: felhom-agent is active on both hosts.
Also: the logged "up->down" is an ARTIFACT -- the debounce branch seeds an
unseeded state to "up", so the channel was born-down and has never been up.
Symptom B confirmed: EffectiveProtected gates cloudflared on a token predicate
but samba on smb.Enabled alone, so sharing-without-password reports FAIL for a
deliberately-undeployed stack. The function's own doc comment asserts the parity
that is broken. Caused by leg 4 of the R-75 task. Blast radius: zero emails so
far, but demo-hp flipped ok->fail and the health_critical path has reached the
CUSTOMER channel historically. The English issue strings are whole-surface, not
a one-off.
Fixes described, none applied.