THE GAP, measured not supposed. On 2026-08-18 ep0's PBS proxy was wedged for
9 h 37 m and the hub emitted NOTHING on the operator channel. Both box
checkers hold their last snapshot and return silently on a failed fetch --
correct for a FILL signal, since a missing reading must never be read as 0%,
but it makes a dead off-site endpoint and a healthy one indistinguishable.
The only mails that morning came from the boxes' own backup failures, and
only because the WEEKLY offsite run happened to land inside the window. Two
days earlier nothing would have fired at all.
REACHABILITY is now a second, independent signal on both checkers:
consecutive failed fetch windows, reported past a default 3 windows
(~30-45 min) as pbsdr_box_unreachable / offsite_box_unreachable (warning) on
the customer-less pbsdr-box / pool-box scopes, each with a paired *_recovered
all-clear. Tunable via alerting.box_unreachable_windows (0/invalid -> 3).
THE FILL LOGIC IS UNTOUCHED. No threshold, throttle, band or escalate-once
behaviour changed; a degraded read still drives no transition.
Three decisions a later reader would otherwise "fix" back, so each is
argued in-code:
- the unreachable event REPEATS rather than escalating once. The band shape
would give exactly ONE mail at ~minute 30 of a nine-hour outage, and one
mail is missable. It leans on the dispatcher's 1 h operator cooldown to
become an hourly "still blind" heartbeat.
- ErrUsageUnsupported is NOT blindness: an old ep0 answers "no such op",
which means we reached it. Counting it would alert for days on a healthy
pre-update endpoint.
- born-blind is reported: the counter is not gated on having a snapshot, so
a hub restarted INTO an outage still speaks. last_ok is OMITTED rather
than zero-valued -- a fabricated timestamp reads as "it was fine until
then".
Both recoveries are severity "info" and severityNotifies drops "info", so
they are registered in recoveredPairedDownTypes or the operator hears that
the tier broke and never that it healed. A cross-package test drives
ProcessEvent and asserts an actual operator MAIL, not a map entry -- a green
checker test proves nothing about the seam (agent v0.91.0 shipped fully green
with SetAuthSink never called).
Tests: box_reachability_test.go (Scenarios A-F) + dispatcher_box_reachability
_test.go (wiring). Three red-proofs run and reverted, each seen failing with a
message naming the right cause: threshold 3->1, the sentinel counter guard,
the pairing entry.
Register: R-339 filed and marked SHIPPED (PROVEN-LIVE still owed -- no real or
constructed outage has exercised the emit path, and one cannot be manufactured
against Tier-2 ep0). R-340 filed: the reachability read rides ep0's LOCAL API
daemon, which the incident explicitly cleared, so this check would have shown
GREEN for all 9 h 37 m -- the honest boundary, recorded rather than glossed.
R-336's next-step corrected: pvestatd's interval is NOT tunable (Proxmox staff
have said so); the only lever is disabling the storage entry, which collides
with the agent's consume-the-one-time-secret path. Doc-only, no agent code
touched.
