Five closed in controller v0.202.0 + agent v0.126.0, each with its live or
red-proof evidence in the row. Five explicitly still open and named as such
rather than left to inference: R-214, R-220, R-221, R-213, R-202 — and R-220 is
flagged as currently worked around BY HAND on the campaign venue, which is the
only reason an app could be deployed there.
The capability map's recovery row STAYS FAIL and says why: fixes are not a
re-walk, nothing walked a customer end to end, and the customer-facing messages
were NOT re-driven live because /recovery correctly retires itself once the old
data is set aside — restoring that state is the reconfiguration the task forbade.
The campaign document is ANNOTATED, not rewritten: it records what was true when
it ran, and that is its value.
workspace-CLAUDE.md gains comment-vs-code entry 9 — the escrow header said the
errors were 'DISTINCT on purpose' and named THREE situations while a fourth was
folded into one of them, and a green test named the defect and did not prevent
it because it asserted a STRING one layer below the merge.
ROADMAP needed no collapse — it carries no rows for these IDs.
Says explicitly that these faults are NOT a re-walk, so the row cannot go green
on them. What they add: the BACKUP promise strengthened (the offsite tier ran
itself at 04:15 on a twice-rebuilt box, snapshot_count 1->2; all five daily jobs
fired once; nothing on the must-not list fired), R-217 and R-215 proven live
under exactly their faults, and the set-aside proved not to delete (12 535 KB
byte-exact at the far end).
What they do NOT add: any progress on the JOURNEY. R-224 is Phase 1's headline
defect relocated from the version channel to the transport — a hub outage and a
stopped agent are both reported as a bad recovery code, in 0.056s and 0.030s,
with no unseal attempted. Plus R-225, R-226, R-228.
Also records that §4.1 is now MEASURED rather than deduced, and §4.2's positive
half still is not.
The recovery codes are shredded with the plant->find->shred->fail-to-find
control the brief asks for, and THE CONTROL PAID FOR ITSELF ON ITS FIRST RUN:
it found the Phase 0 code in ~/.config/credentials as R_CAMPAIGN_11 — a copy
this session did not create and would never have looked for. Without it, a
'codes shredded' claim would have been false. That key was removed from the
shared file with a verified diff (every other line identical, nine keys intact)
and HUB_PW re-tested at hub:200.
Consequence stated plainly rather than left to be discovered:
/home/felhom-repo.orphaned-20260805 (12 535 KB, the three Phase 0 sentinels) is
now permanently unopenable — which is what the set-aside screen promises, and
teardown removes it anyway.
Venue left WORKING and said so: ONLINE, 4 containers healthy, backup target not
degraded, off-site on 2 snapshots. Two things a future session needs: the raw
/mnt/{adatok,mentes} mounts are deliberately left unmounted (R-220's
workaround), and the appliance root credential was shredded — re-fetch it from
the hub.
REPORT-campaign11-phase24.md rather than REPORT.md, per the repo's
parallel-session rule.
No product code changed. No version bumped.
All five daily jobs fired exactly once and completed on time. The 04:15 offsite
run produced snapshot_count 1 -> 2, last_status ok, 24.9s — unprompted, on a box
rebuilt twice and set aside four hours earlier. Nothing on the must-not list
fired, including offsiteheal: that is R-218's NEGATIVE control passing (a box
with a target must not declare), which does not substitute for its positive
half, still owed.
Investigated and DISPROVED: tier2-backup completing in 118ms looked like a
silent no-op; the copy is real and on the backup drive (818.5 KB verified).
Correction to my own pre-registration: backup_run_digest is a TEST FILENAME, not
an event type. The real one is backup_run_failures, a failures digest whose
silence on a clean night is correct — reporting it as a miss would have been a
finding I invented. What survives: the offsite run emits no hub event while both
lesser tiers announce success; failures and staleness are covered elsewhere, so
it is a consistency wrinkle, recorded not filed.
Two absences answered rather than assumed: the restore-test's silence was
PRE-REGISTERED as correct (6h eval, 24h settle); the agent's whole-guest tier is
left explicitly UNRESOLVED because routine local-api calls are not logged at INFO
— a 5h search returns 0 on a box that demonstrably served such calls, so the
instrument cannot answer.
No product code changed.
Leads with what held — nothing lost a byte, the set-aside really is set aside
(verified 12.5 MB untouched at the far end), a wrong code refused three times
with nothing written and no lockout, the alarm fired and cleared itself.
Then the four new findings in operator language: R-224 (our own systems being
down is reported to the customer as a bad recovery code — the same lie as
yesterday through a different door, and the machine had not even tried the
code: three hundredths of a second against a real attempt's one second),
R-226 (a mistyping customer can no longer be told to check their typing),
R-225 (0 snapshots / 0 GB shown above a paragraph saying the store holds
backups), R-228 (the set-aside backups become invisible).
States explicitly that nothing was fixed last night, on purpose.
Invariants across the phase boundaries: I1/I4(product)/I5/I7 held; I3 breached
twice (R-227's raw Bad Gateway, and R-220's refusal naming an impossible
action, reproduced live a third time); I6 breached twice (R-224, R-225). I2 is
recorded as untested rather than passed, because F10 could not be injected.
I4 was breached by the HARNESS, not the product — sourcing ~/.config/credentials
echoed two demo-box recovery codes into the transcript.
RTO unchanged and explicitly not re-measured: Phase 2's faults are not a
re-walk. Phase 1's 61 attended minutes stand; the unaided number stays
undefined.
Teardown recorded as OWED with all three layers named plus the off-site side —
including that the campaign's sub-account now holds TWO repos, the fresh one
and the 12 535 KB set-aside history, and that demo-felhom/demo-hp namespaces on
ep0 must not be touched.
Written BEFORE the soak so the comparison cannot be fitted afterwards. Sources
are the box's own [scheduler] Registered lines and the agent's backup tier armed
lines, read at 23:56.
MUST happen: db-dump 02:30, tier2-backup + fill-watch 03:30, metrics-prune
04:00, offbox-backup 04:15 (snapshot_count 1 -> 2), a backup_run_digest event,
reports every ~15m.
MUST NOT happen: host_stale/host_recovered, offsite_selfheal_restaged (this is
also R-218's negative control — a box WITH a target must not declare),
offbox_repo_orphaned, offsite_repo_key_changed, escrow blob SERVED, any
controller self-update.
Genuinely uncertain and recorded as such: the restore-test has a 24h settle and
every archive here is hours old, so NOT running is correct, not a gap.
The move-aside is correct and verified byte-for-byte; what follows it is not.
settings.json records orphaned_renamed_to and OrphanedRenamedTo has zero
references in any template or handler — 12.5 MB of deliberately retained
customer data at a path the box knows and never shows. Fifth instance of the
project's seam-built-but-never-wired pattern.
Campaign document gains the F7/F9/F10/F11 write-ups: F7 split (set-aside PASS,
afterwards FAIL), F9 partial (R-215's gate proven live on a narrower shape),
F10 NOT INJECTED (harness — three self-healing attempts), F11 PASS.
No product code changed.
F11 PASS ok->stale->ok, an operator mail each way, customer mail correctly
pairing-gated. DOWN (>1h) not reached — stated, not implied.
F7 the set-aside PASSES decisively: move-aside to
/home/felhom-repo.orphaned-20260805, mtime and du -s (12535 KB) and
snapshot f3d9cd67 all unchanged; a fresh empty repo beside it.
NOTHING DELETED.
the afterwards FAILS -> R-228: settings.json records
"orphaned_renamed_to" and OrphanedRenamedTo has ZERO references in
any template or handler. 12.5 MB of retained customer data at a path
the box knows and never shows. Seam built, never wired.
F9 R-215's fix PROVEN LIVE on a narrower shape: with recoveryOffer() false,
GET /recovery now 302s instead of rendering its story. The literal
never-had-offsite precondition was not staged (it needs a rebuild,
which the brief forbids before Phase 4) — recorded as partial.
F10 NOT INJECTED, harness not product. Three attempts, each with a control:
the app, then the controller's monitor, then the run itself recreate
the mandatory directory within ~1 s. Kept as an observation: at
capture the directory held only a recreated metadata.db and NOT the
customer's file, and the run still said ok.
Also reproduced live for a third time: R-220 (candidates empty; unmounting only
the raw mounts flips both drives back) — still OPEN.
Venue left WORKING: 4 containers healthy, backup target not degraded, off-site
fresh repo last_status ok, escrow escrowed.
No product code changed.
R-224 every non-code failure on the unlock path is reported as a statement
about the customer's code. F3 (hub REJECTed) and F4 (agent stopped) both
returned M4 for a CORRECT current code, in 0.056 s and 0.030 s — neither
compatible with a real unseal (~1.0 s of scrypt). The agent's err field
distinguishes fetch-failure from unseal-failure and both become one HTTP
400; the controller has no reach-failure branch. The vocabulary exists
and is wired to agentClient() construction, not to the RPC. R-216's gate
answers source=version and cannot see reachability.
R-225 the store reports 0 snapshots / 0 GB when it cannot read it, above a
card saying it holds backups. Measured over SFTP: snapshot f3d9cd67 and
12 535 KB are really there. snapshot_count/repo_size_bytes are ABSENT
from settings.json after a rebuild — unknown renders as zero.
R-226 M1, the only message that tells a customer to check their typing, is
unreachable on any box that has re-escrowed (M4's branch precedes it).
R-227 a restart mid-unlock returns a raw English "Bad Gateway" (I3).
Recorded against existing rows: R-216 §4.1 now MEASURED twice (and a correction
— SetFloor's DEBUG line can never reach the debug ring, so a restart alone
would not have produced it); R-218's live half still NOT measured, deliberately,
because the venue has a target; R-217 and R-215's fixes HELD under their faults.
R-199's back-pointer was already present in the capability map — the brief's
assumption that it was owed is stale.
No product code changed.
Phase 2 (eleven injected faults) and the §4 positives that were owed.
- §4.1 MEASURED, twice: the box's rendered GetFloor() is 0.200.0, and a
cold-started controller logs "settle-gate: GO — at/above floor 0.200.0"
against the same line reading "floor still unknown" while the hold was in
force. Also corrects the brief's plan: SetFloor's line is u.dbg(), gated on
logging.level=debug and written to the logger, so it can NEVER reach the
debug ring — a restart alone would not have produced it.
- §4.2 still NOT measured, deliberately: the venue has an off-site target, so
needsOffsiteCredential correctly returns false. Recorded, not inferred from
the unit test.
- F1 PARTIAL, F2 PASS, F3 FAIL, F4 FAIL, F5 PASS, F6 PASS, F8 PARTIAL.
F3+F4: a hub outage and a stopped agent are both rendered as "this code does
not open your package", in 0.056 s and 0.030 s — no unseal attempted. The
agent's own err field distinguishes them exactly and it is discarded at the
HTTP boundary; the R-216 capability gate answers source=version and cannot
see reachability.
- R-217's fix HOLDS under exactly its fault (F5), verified with the false-claim
strings absent and accented positive controls present.
hub/CHANGELOG.md: v0.97.1 had no heading of its own — the change was written
into the v0.97.0 entry while the deployed tag is 0.97.1. Given its own entry,
marked as added retroactively. Second occurrence of the class (agent 0.90.1).
Evidence: documentation/tests/campaign11-evidence-2026-08-05/journal-phase24.md
No product code changed.
The first vouch of agent 0.125.0 was REFUSED by R-120's gate: the artifacts form saves as
a unit, and golden 0.192.0 was older than the newest controller the fleet reports. The
golden had been stale since before controller 0.193.0, so the Day-0 manifest had been
effectively unvouchable for days and nobody had cause to notice. Correcting STATUS.md and
OPEN-ITEMS, which said "one dropdown".
Golden 0.201.0 baked in the drill VM, round-trip verified from Gitea
(e730d7cab343eb35...f007654, 658165766 B), teardown clean, 0 token hits in the saved log.
Manifest now agent=0.125.0 golden=0.201.0 min_agent=0.125.0, read back after the save.
The held floor: the HOLD is established positively (hub log + the box's own "floor still
unknown"). Its RELEASE is not — no HELD line and no dashboard reason are both absences,
the served path logs nothing by design, and the box-side positive needs a restart the
venue cannot take before Phase 2. Recorded as deduction plus a pinned test, not a live
positive.
Registers and evidence for the campaign and its fix pass.
OPEN-ITEMS: R-214..R-223. Six SHIPPED (R-215/216/217/218/219/222); three deliberately
still open and each blocks a real flow (R-214 console banner, R-220 drives unenrollable
after a rebuild, R-221 a rebuilt box cannot run the escrow ceremony); R-223 minted and
WAITING-ON-OPERATOR (vouch agent 0.125.0). R-213 and R-202 untouched.
Capability map: a new row for the customer's UNAIDED journey, recorded FAILED and staying
failed until a re-walk passes — fixes are not a journey. The existing rebuild row is
corrected where it said R-198's retention was unit-proven only: it was proven in production
on the first supersession since the fix, identity_blob retained at 572 B byte-length exact.
CLAUDE.md comment-vs-code table: eighth entry — ResolveManagedFloor, the first where the
false invariant was a GUARD rather than a comment alone.
STATUS: the headline is now "the backup promise is proved, the recovery journey is not",
and the one thing waiting on the operator.
v0.97.0 introduced a second hold reason and left both surfaces printing the first. The
freshly deployed hub logged, for the campaign box:
managed floor HELD for c11: agent "0.125.0" < MinAgent 0.113.0
which is FALSE — 0.125.0 is ABOVE 0.113.0. That box is held because its floor sits above
the vouched golden, not because of its agent. CLAUDE.md's corollary exactly: when a verdict
changes which field it counts from, the alarm text has to change with it, or a true alarm
reads as one to dismiss.
Both the ACK log line and the Hosts-dashboard HeldReason now come from one
ManagedFloorDecision.HoldReason(), and TestResolveManagedFloor_HoldReasonMatchesTheCause
pins each reason to its cause.
R-216, the hub half. ResolveManagedFloor's own comment says it exists to "never push a
controller past the agent it depends on", and it compared against ArtifactManifest.MinAgent
— which by ITS own comment describes the GOLDEN's controller. publish-train-rules.md rule 3
states the rule about the FLOOR's controller. Measured live: golden 0.192.0 / MinAgent
0.113.0, floor 0.200.0, agent 0.120.0 — served, and the box was pushed onto a controller
needing agent 0.125.0.
A floor ABOVE the vouched golden is now HELD with its own reason (HeldBeyondGolden), reusing
Part D's dashboard visibility. Nobody types a number twice: the vouched MinAgent keeps its
meaning, the guard stops applying it to versions it does not describe. An uncoupled release
is untouched; an unparseable golden degrades rather than gating.
R-222: the report ACK's escrow object gains superseded_present / superseded_at, counting only
rows that actually carry an identity blob. One boolean and one timestamp, for one message.
No read path — that link is still unbuilt.
Red-proof: removing the floor-above-golden branch reproduces the campaign's measurement.
- OPEN-ITEMS: R-193 CLOSED with both 2026-08-05 rulings (unlocking and restoring
are separate; 'I do not want the old data' moves the store aside after a double
confirmation), and the shape-(b) reasoning — WriteOffboxSecrets auto-generates a
repository password on re-apply, so the literal 'fresh data area' trigger would
have opened a window that closes by itself.
- R-213 MINTED (R-212 was and still is the highest, re-checked for the second
writer): putting files back in place, with the live-versus-backup comparison
named as its requirement. Not started, deliberately.
- capability map: the 'needs someone who knows to look' qualifier is GONE; what
remains is stated narrowly — no correct-code run through the page, the put-back
is out of scope, and the journey has not been re-walked end to end.
- 07-backup-architecture 7.0: a fifth row, and where the screen deliberately stops.
- CONTEXT: standing ruling S-34.
- STATUS: the headline change and the two things still owed as proof.
No hub change and no hub bump.
The register said 'two set-aside stores, ~1.2 GB'. Measured before touching
anything: THREE set-aside stores totalling ~1.45 GB, and the thing that was
exactly 1.2 GB was demo-felhom's LIVE felhom-repo. Matching on the size would
have deleted a working repository. The operator was shown the corrected list
and confirmed 'delete all three'.
Deleted: demo-felhom orphaned-20260717 (1.4 G) + orphaned-20260718 (3.0 M);
demo-hp orphaned-20260804 (43 M). Both LIVE repos untouched, confirmed by full
listings before and after on each account.
Proof nothing live was caught: a real off-site run on demo-hp immediately
afterwards returned status ok, orphaned false, no error, 6 snapshots.
Method note recorded for the next session: the storage box has a RESTRICTED
shell. 'test -d X && rm -rf -- X' returns 'Command not found' and does nothing
(it failed CLOSED, verified by an unchanged listing); 'rm -r <path>' as one
simple command is the working form.
- OPEN-ITEMS: R-204 all four CLOSED with both 2026-08-05 rulings recorded (the
declared-state trigger and its four-meanings-of-absence reasoning; the recovery
preview's dashboard-password exposure accepted as metadata, not content).
R-193's credential half CLOSED, screen + deletion still open. R-192 CLOSED by
REPLACEMENT. R-202 untouched.
- R-212 MINTED (R-211 was the highest, grepped): the orphaned-ciphertext deletion
HALTED at its STOP because the measured paths do not match the register — three
set-aside stores totalling ~1.45 GB, and the thing that is exactly 1.2 GB is
demo-felhom's LIVE repo. Nothing was deleted.
- capability map: all four interventions closed; the row KEEPS a qualifier for a
new reason — no step needs an operator, but there is no customer-facing recovery
screen, and the journey has not been re-walked end to end.
- 07-backup-architecture 7.0: the four-step table updated; the declaration-vs-
inference reasoning and the credential-automatic/key-customer-present split.
- CONTEXT: standing ruling S-33.
- STATUS: the headline change and the deletion STOP.
- REPORT-r204-item4.md rather than REPORT.md: a parallel session is active in this
shared clone.
New internal/offsiteheal, the sibling of pbsdrheal: it acts ONLY on the state the
box declares, sustained across two distinct reports, re-staging the stored
credential before ever minting a new one. A healthy box is a pure no-op; it never
blind-timer-reissues and never re-runs a provisioning step.
RESTAGE IS POSSIBLE because the stored value survives a consume — established from
the schema and ConsumeOneTimeSecret (which stamps consumed_at and nothing else),
not inherited from the PBS analogy, and pinned by a test that asserts the SAME
value comes back.
reportHasOffsite is TIGHTENED to require enabled:true. Its comment asserted that
presence == applied-on-the-box, and the declaration deliberately breaks that
premise; left alone it would have read a request for help as proof the tier was
applied. Provably a no-op for every report shape that existed before, because an
attached object has always carried enabled:true.
R-192's guard half is CLOSED BY REPLACEMENT: the delivery checker's counting
inference read the OLDEST 500 reports after a consume — all predating a rebuild,
which is why demo-hp sat stranded for 108 reports under a confident regressed-shape
verdict. A declaration outranks both inferred shapes, and the checker stands down
with a record so the two mechanisms cannot double-issue.
No escrow ceremony is ever run or requested: credential automatic, key
customer-present.
Operator ruled "proceed" after reading the pre-analysis; the storageReserved
condition CC made the move conditional on was applied with it. The pre-analysis
is retained verbatim as §11-bis so the ruling can be audited against what it
was given.
MOVED WITH ZERO LOSS, verified BEFORE the original was touched on four
independent observables: 550,891 = 550,891 filesystem entries; 448 = 448
trusted.overlay xattrs (load-bearing — overlayfs stacking rides them, which is
why rsync -X is not optional); 37,243 = 37,243 hardlinks; byte-identical
meta.db sha256. Verified again after: identical image/tag/volume ID SETS,
cache 2.782 GB / 38 records, ceiling still 30 GiB, pg 4 DBs / 31 tables /
175,135,767 B, redis DBSIZE 2437. End-to-end proof was a real build on the
relocated store, rc=0 — not an inventory count.
k3s was never at risk, and that was established BEFORE stopping anything: it
runs a separate containerd, so Gitea, the registry, the hub, PBS, Longhorn and
~160 pods stayed up. Only the two jarr-* dev containers were affected.
TRAP FOUND WHILE PROVING THE GUARD, and it is the reusable part:
RequiresMountsFor on a path with NO mount unit is a SILENT NO-OP — containerd
started normally against an absent-but-unmounted path. A typo'd guard buys
nothing and says nothing: the built-but-never-wired shape again. The guard was
therefore verified positively at the unit level (Requires= AND
After=mnt-ssd_2.mount on both units), and refusal proven with a genuinely
absent DEVICE via a temporary synthetic .mount unit — /mnt/ssd_2 hosts 12 live
Longhorn replicas and must never be unmounted, and editing fstab on a
production host risks emergency mode at boot. Result:
"Job containerd.service/start failed with result 'dependency'", is-active
inactive. It refused rather than creating an empty store on the root disk.
storageReserved on SSD2 0 -> 80 GB; still Schedulable=True at 76.34%.
NOT PROVEN, AND NOT GLOSSED (R-209a): the operator ruled DO NOT REBOOT, so the
move has not survived a reboot — which is this task's own standard for
validated. The MECHANISM is proven; the CONSEQUENCE (that a real boot mounts
/mnt/ssd_2 before containerd starts, in this host's actual ordering) is not,
and mount-ordering reasoning is exactly the class this project has been burned
by. So: the pre-move tree stays MOVED ASIDE, not deleted (34.3 GB, which is why
/ sits at 54% and not lower), and felhom-store-postboot-check.service — oneshot,
enabled, dry-run PASS at install — validates it automatically at the next boot,
asserting positively that /var/lib/containerd does NOT exist. Read
/var/log/felhom-store-postboot-check.log after the next boot; on PASS the
rollback copy can go and ~34 GB returns.
Gates: repo_gates.py --fast — all OK, rc=0 (run separately from this commit).
Spike output only; no production Go code. The one shipped change rides in
homelab-manifests 6808a4b (R-205, the monitoring rule).
VERDICT: mechanism confirmed, with one correction and one refutation.
- CONFIRMED: builder.gc IS honoured under the containerd worker and DOES evict.
Proven by naming a 440 MB `go mod download` record present at build N and
absent by N+2 — not by absence of an error.
- CORRECTED: honoured ONLY in the `policy` array form. The flat form is
SILENTLY ignored — daemon starts, logs nothing, keeps its defaults.
`dockerd --validate` returned "configuration OK" for a bogus key AND for a
config that then crashed the daemon. The oracle is `docker buildx inspect`.
- REFUTED: Docker's `data-root` would NOT move the cache — it moves 0.62 GB.
The 181.4 GB belongs to the system containerd (`root` in
/etc/containerd/config.toml).
P3 (operator-approved) executed: prune claimed 156.9 GB, the filesystem
returned 150.35 GB (the 6.5 GB gap is layers shared with images), SYNCHRONOUSLY
— / went 86% -> 53% used, and Longhorn's default disk went
Schedulable=False (DiskPressure) -> Schedulable=True (18.85% -> 50.32%).
P7 root-caused the largest item and it is NOT the cap: all 208 `go mod download`
records had Usage count 1. Isolated by controlled builds — same VERSION build-arg
-> CACHED, new VERSION -> executed, byte-identical tree. `ARG VERSION`/`ARG
GIT_COMMIT` sit ABOVE the module-download step, and a RUN's cache key includes
the stage environment. Both Dockerfiles have it. One line each to fix -> R-208.
P6 NOT EXECUTED — stops at the operator, as specified. Pre-analysis: the move is
safe as measured (+38.8 pp above the 25% floor) but SSD2 is the only Longhorn
disk with storageReserved=0 and is overcommitted 6.9x; at full inflation the move
lands 12 pp BELOW the floor. The prune removed the move's urgency, so CC
recommends against it unless ~80 GB is reserved on SSD2 -> R-209.
Register: R-205 (CLOSED, shipped), R-206 (Ansible: cap + prune + narrowed Docker
ban), R-207 (DRY_RUN guard), R-208 (ARG ordering), R-209/R-210 (operator),
R-211 (Prometheus has no config-reloader — rules changes have never applied
until something restarted the pod; found while verifying R-205).
Gates: repo_gates.py --fast — all OK, rc=0 (run separately from this commit).
- OPEN-ITEMS: R-196 CLOSED; R-204 items 1-3 CLOSED with item 4 named and
its dependency stated. Header restates that R-202, the 1.2 GB ciphertext
deletion and R-198's still-unit-proven retention all REMAIN OPEN.
- capability map: the recovery row keeps its 'with a person present'
qualifier, names which crutch remains, and cites the three now gone.
- 07-backup-architecture: new 7.0 - what a customer can and cannot do
ALONE, the four steps in a table with status. This is the section a
future reader will use to answer that question.
- CONTEXT: standing ruling S-32, superseding S-31 steps 2-5.
- STATUS: rewritten to one screen per its own header; removes a corrupted
half-overwritten section left from the drill session.
- ROADMAP: R-196 and R-204 collapsed.
ReissueCredentials marked the escrow stale on every re-issue, on precautionary
grounds — the box's re-apply MIGHT mint a fresh repository password. It usually
does not. A stale flag withholds restic_pw_sha256 from the ACK, which stops the
controller's auto-confirm, which leaves EscrowState pending, which makes
OffboxRunnable false: every off-site backup refused on a box whose key was never
in doubt — and the customer told to re-run the one ceremony that would have
superseded the key just recovered.
The case it guessed at is measured elsewhere: the controller's Scenario-F
re-check compares the sealed hash against the live repo password on every ACK
(and the mark was BLINDING it by emptying that hash), and R-197's
offsite_repo_key_changed fires on a proven difference across a supersession.
offsite_reissued is unchanged. MarkEscrowStale is kept without a caller so a
future EVIDENTIAL writer has the mechanism, with a test pinning it live.
TestReissue_InvalidatesEscrow is replaced by its exact inverse.
Link 6 of the recovery chain had no client. The hub has served the identity blob since
slice 10D from handleReEnroll / handleGetRestoreDirective, gated on operator-armed recovery
mode and the global key -- and nothing in the agent, the hub UI, any script or any runbook
ever called either. The only documented retrieval was sqlite3 writefile() by hand on a
kubectl cp-ed database.
GET /api/v1/hosts/{host_id}/escrow is the box-authenticated mirror of the PUT that put the
blob there. Self-scoped (a per-host key reads only its own; global may read any). A host with
no bundle gets 200 {present:false} -- a 404 is indistinguishable from an unknown host and a
bare empty 200 from a zero-length blob.
THE TRADE IS RECORDED IN THE HANDLER, not inferred: obtaining the blob used to require the
operator to arm recovery mode; now whoever controls a rebuilt box can obtain it with that
box's own credential. They still cannot open it -- the hub has never held R and a wrong code
fails closed at age's scrypt KDF. The mitigation is that every retrieval raises
escrow_blob_served (warning, operator-only), recorded before the bytes leave.
escrowSelfServiceRetrieval is the single decision point: flip it to false and the endpoint
additionally requires recovery mode, changing nothing else.
The operator-driven DR path is untouched, pinned by a test. Red-proofs observed: removing the
ownership check serves host B's blob to host A; removing the record makes it silent.
R-198 — host_escrow_superseded shipped with `blob` (the K-escrow / PBS datastore key) and
identity_blob was added to host_escrow LATER, never here. The offsite restic REPOSITORY
password lives in identity_blob. So demoteCurrentEscrowTx -- whose own comment calls it "THE
ONE escrow row-copy routine" -- retained the whole-guest key and silently dropped the off-site
data key, which is the secret the retention was built to preserve. And because the copy happens
as the new blob overwrites the old, the destroying act was the ESCROW CEREMONY: the exact thing
a rebuilt box tells its customer to run, on a card promising in Hungarian that the old backups
stay recoverable. Both demo boxes crossed that line on 2026-08-04.
- identity_blob added to the table (CREATE + additive ALTER) and carried in the shared copy
routine, so BOTH callers are fixed at once: re-escrow and host-delete demotion.
- ListSupersededEscrow reads it back; store.HostEscrow gains IdentityBlob.
- CountCurrentEscrowWithIdentity is the census of who the fix protects.
- Nothing is backfillable: pre-v0.93.0 retained rows have no blob and their sources are gone.
- Tests assert the CONSEQUENCE (a retained row can still yield a repo password), which is why
the pre-existing retention test stayed green for two months asserting the mechanism.
R-197 — SaveHostEscrow returns the hash it replaced; the escrow PUT raises
offsite_repo_key_changed (warning, operator-only, edge-triggered) when both hashes are known and
differ. No hash value travels. Severity chosen for the world v0.93.0 creates: with the identity
blob retained, a changed key is "this history now depends on an older recovery code", not a loss.
R-192 (half) — the stuck alert now reports the two shapes it actually covers, burned and
regressed, each stating its own measurement; the regressed text withdraws the Re-issue
recommendation. Every self-heal refusal leaves a notification_log row with its reason. The
guard's logic is unchanged; its 500-oldest-reports scoping stays OPEN and the window is named in
the alert text so the limitation travels with the number. offsite_delivery_stuck and
offsite_credential_restaged are added to operatorOnlyEvents -- neither was registered and neither
has a customerMessages entry, which is not a block.
R-196 — five comments (not the three the spec expected) claimed ReissueCredentials rotates the
restic repo password. It resets the PROVIDER password and cannot touch the repo password, which
is generated on the box. All five corrected; the staleness mark documented as precautionary. The
BEHAVIOUR stays open.
Not in this release: R-199, R-200, R-201 remain open -- the chain that hands the key back is
still unassembled. Part 5 hit its gate; the orphan card is untouched (R-202).
Read-only recon of the escrow -> recovery chain, from a dead node to an open
repository. No production code, no build, no version bump.
Headline: the hub's superseded-escrow retention does NOT retain the offsite
repository password. host_escrow_superseded has no identity_blob column and
demoteCurrentEscrowTx copies only the K-escrow blob, so what survives a
supersession is the PBS datastore key, not the restic repo password. The next
escrow ceremony -- which the system tells a rebuilt box's customer to run --
destroys the last copy. Both demo boxes crossed that line on 2026-08-04.
Also established:
- the hub's blob-serving endpoints (re-enroll / restore-directive) have zero
callers anywhere: agent, hub UI, scripts, runbooks (R-199)
- POST /backup/offbox/inject-password is routed and handled but no template
contains the form (R-200)
- nothing in the recovery path has ever been exercised; the one live
round-trip proof (2026-06-10) predates the ResticRepoPassword field (R-201)
- a fail-closed mint refusal IS implementable: the report ACK already carries
escrow{identity_blob_present, restic_pw_sha256} and the controller discards
it whenever no offbox target exists
Corrections: yesterday's spike annotated (candidate (b) overturned in part --
unattended recovery is impossible, customer-present is not); capability-map
retention claim struck through and replaced with what the code does.
Deliverable: documentation/audits/RECON-offsite-dr-chain-2026-08-04.md
Register: new R-198..R-201; R-193 and R-192 updated; STATUS.md refreshed.
Part 4 (ships): `david` — a prospective customer with hosts=0, host_deletions=0,
reports=0 — e-mailed an expected_dbdump_missed ERROR at 03:00 UTC three mornings
running. The existing down-skip could never cover it: it reads the staleness
checker's state, which is seeded from a query over the `reports` table, so a
customer that never reported has no state at all and GetState() returns "" rather
than "down". store.HasEverBoundHost (hosts row OR host_deletions tombstone) is
consulted once per customer at the top of the deadline loop. The discriminator is
"was a host EVER bound", never "has a report arrived" — a box installed and never
heard from is a real fault and keeps alarming. Fail-OPEN on a read error. Red-proof
observed: removing the guard fails with `got [expected_dbdump_missed]`, verbatim the
event david sent.
Parts 0-3 (spike, NO production code for R-193/R-192):
audits/SPIKE-offsite-credential-recovery-2026-08-04.md establishes that the one-shot
provider password is the RECOVERABLE secret and the restic repository password is the
irreplaceable one — and that a guest rebuild mints a fresh one, orphaning the previous
off-site history. Measured without touching a box, by comparing
host_escrow.restic_pw_sha256 against host_escrow_superseded: BOTH demo boxes changed
(demo-hp 15 snapshots / 40.9 MB, demo-felhom 36 snapshots / 1.14 GB). demo-felhom's
"lucky" 76-second recovery restored delivery and not the repository, silently, for 13h.
ReissueCredentials does NOT rotate the restic password (R-39's record and two hub
comments are wrong -> R-196); candidate (b) is not implementable against a
zero-knowledge escrow; candidate (a) already exists as F3 and is wired to the wrong
event. Ends in ranked options and an unanswered question for the operator.
R-195 SHIPPED; R-196 + R-197 filed; R-192 + R-193 updated, neither closed.
The 20-minute latch expired at 10:20:29 and the hub logged degraded -> ok
(agent_capability_recovered) at 10:30:40. Final state on both boxes: agent
0.124.1, two ACL rows on /storage/felhom-backup.
CI run 28 failed and run 29 passed on the same sha. The tag was created locally at
07:38:36Z; run 28 started 07:38:31Z (commit push) and run 29 at 07:38:41Z (tag
push). The old race was 'tag before package'; the new one is 'package before its
tag is pushed' — the window the converse probe exists to detect, and it did.
Not confirmed from the run log (the endpoint 404s), so recorded as the
timing-consistent explanation rather than a proven one. The gate passes locally
with all 7 versions installable and none untagged. Both obvious closures are the
'make the gate blind for a window' shape this row refused, so the options are to
accept a seconds-wide window or to make releases quiet to CI another way.
Part 0's gate PASSED — ep0 prunes both namespaces daily since 2026-07-27 (18
tasks, all OK) — but three of my own queries said the opposite and all three were
broken instruments. Acting on them would have disabled the only pruning attempt
while filing a finding that nothing prunes.
Also records that v0.124.0's transition record failed in production with a green
test suite, that two red-proofs did not fail on the first attempt (one could not
compile, one asserted a helper rather than the path), and that two hollow tests
were caught in one file.
R-191: the gate was run first and it mattered — ep0's prune jobs have run daily
since 2026-07-27 (18 tasks, all OK). THREE of my own queries said the opposite and
all three were broken instruments (worker-type vs worker_type, prune vs prunejob,
proxmox-backup vs proxmox-backup-proxy); acting on any would have disabled the only
pruning attempt while reporting that nothing prunes.
R-190: the row now reflects the MITIGATION, not the cause, and says so. Includes
that v0.124.0's transition record failed in production while every unit test
passed, and Part 3's single pass — the token-rotation class is real and documented
in our own installer but does not fit this box (same token still authenticates, the
other three grants survived, no installer run evidenced); ruled out on this box, not
fleet-wide.
R-194: PVE caches permissions (~40s and ~16min measured), so a single permission
read is a lagging indicator and may explain when R-190's refusal surfaced.
07-backup-architecture: the offsite retention row was RIGHT and the configuration
disagreed with it — noted, since a doc that states a contract does not enforce it.