The credential existed and was not reachable when it was wanted. Every box has
had a strong random root@pam password since TASK G1, vaulted in the hub at day 0
and used for real during the sshd incident — but the only way to read it back was
a hand-written curl carrying the global operator key, a secret kept out-of-band.
In practice the PVE web console on a demo box felt locked.
The host page grows a Console access card: presence + username + set_at by
default, Reveal fetches the plaintext on demand for 60 s with a Copy button.
Masking clears the JS variable, and also fires on a second click and on
visibilitychange. A host with nothing vaulted says so, and says why.
The secret is NEVER rendered into the page, and that constraint shapes the
change. The render path uses a new store.GetHostRecoveryMeta whose struct and
SELECT both omit the secret column, so it is structurally incapable of carrying
one. The plaintext crosses the wire only in the response to POST
/hosts/{id}/reveal-recovery-credential (Cache-Control: no-store, CSRF-gated at
the ServeHTTP level; POST precisely so that gate applies and so no secret is
retrievable by URL alone). Deliberately NOT the customer page's data-secret
widget, which embeds the plaintext on every load.
A delivered reveal writes one recovery_credential_revealed event on the host's
customer timeline (info, source hub, Hungarian) via SaveEvent alone — no
dispatcher, nobody emailed, the log_tail_requested shape. Two reveals write two
events: the register records accesses, not states. A 404 is not an access. An
unbound host reveals fine and writes no event; the [INFO] hub line, carrying the
username and a length only, is then the record.
The global-key API path is untouched by design — it is the route for when the
hub UI itself is broken, and coupling it to the session layer would delete the
independence that makes it a fallback.
Recorded as a real trade: the hub session password alone now unlocks console root
fleet-wide, where retrieval previously also needed the global key. Accepted for a
single-operator, HU-geo-fenced hub that already stores these passwords in
plaintext at rest (CONTEXT.md ruling S-4). The plaintext-at-rest half is filed as
R-133 — every hub DB backup is a fleet-wide console-credential dump.
Tests 550 -> 559; four red-proofs (page leak, audit event, CSRF gate, route
order) each run, observed failing, and reverted. The route-order proof is a seam
test driving ServeHTTP: a handler-level test cannot see that defect, because the
handler is correct and simply never runs.
§5: add the standing note that a host's root@pam may be pinned to a known
operator-chosen password instead of the random day-0 one — set via chpasswd +
re-vault (PUT /hosts/<id>/recovery-credential, host api_key), guarded by the
break_glass state marker so plain installer re-runs skip it. Caveats: never
--rotate-recovery such a host; a full from-scratch reinstall wipes state.json
and re-randomizes (re-run the set-and-vault). Captures why demo-felhom-01's
root@pam "kept changing" until it was pinned 2026-07-12.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_017CDMFpFx84pfviCTVuGGhf
The KEXINIT-reset diagnostic, the three-layer model, PVE-web-console recovery with
the vaulted root@pam credential, the /run/sshd one-line fix, finding a recurring
clobber, and the keep-the-180-token-fresh standing note.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01PSK5g6qYLknKj8u3QAFEr6
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