Four defects of one family, all shipped today: something the box already knows, thrown away or drawn
as its opposite. Agent v0.128.0, controller v0.210.0. NO HUB CODE, no hub bump, no ArgoCD sync.
R-265 (this repo). timeout-minutes: 5 on the gates job — every honest run in the observed session
finished in 18-34s, so this is ~9x the slowest and far under whatever reaped run 264 at 834s with no
log. The alarm mail now carries Elapsed (start stamp via $GITHUB_ENV; an absent stamp prints
"unknown (no start stamp)", never a bogus 1.7-billion-second figure) and its "names itself in the run
log" sentence is qualified so it cannot mislead when there is no log.
⚠ THE UNKNOWN IS NOT CLOSED. Whether the if: failure() alarm fires for a REAPED job is still
unverified. The timeout makes the reap unreachable in practice; it does not answer what happens in
one. Demonstrating it means deliberately hanging a run on main, which would leave the branch red for
a parallel session. Said in the workflow comment, the changelog, R-265 and the report — none of them
claiming it is answered.
GOLDEN 0.210.0 baked, published, round-trip verified, NOT VOUCHED. The currency gate went red the
moment the controller was bumped — correct — and is closed by the bake, never --no-verify. No
--no-verify anywhere this session.
⚠ THE AGENT WAS NOT PUBLISHED UNTIL THIS SESSION CHECKED, AND IT MATTERED. R-221's fix is in the
AGENT, and a fresh install takes its agent from the Day-0 manifest. The binary had been hand-deployed
to felhom-pve and never published, so agent_version 0.128.0 was not selectable and a fresh install
would have received 0.127.0 — the golden would have carried the controller fixes and NOT the one the
headline defect needed. Caught by checking each Day-0 value was FETCHABLE rather than assuming.
Published from the live-deployed bytes, sha-verified across the hop first.
Registers. R-221, R-259, R-258, R-265 CLOSED. R-266 MINTED (READY): the failed root statfs still
travels to the hub as a 0-of-0 disk; ranked LOW because it is the quiet direction — it can only miss
a true alarm, never raise a false one — and it is now a two-repo wire change governed by G-1's gate.
Highest ID moved R-265 -> R-266.
CONTEXT S-39 rules the convention this project was missing: "we do not know" is never drawn as
"fine", and the codebase has ONE way of saying it — an explicit ...Known bool companion checked in
the template. ROADMAP G-3 was explicitly blocked on that decision and is unblocked; what remains
there is a survey-and-convert of existing sites, not the gate.
Capability map row 93 CHECKED and it was NOT claiming something untrue — it is about the operator
notification path. But its narrative ("the page you open to ask whether ONE app is backed up")
invites the wrong reading, and the adjacent thing WAS false until v0.210.0, so the row now records
that the two halves disagreed and only the operator half was true.
Six red-proofs across the two code repos, each with the mutation asserted applied. The one that
matters: Part 1 Scenario A FAILED against today's tree, with the intended message.
Part 1's operator-present live validation is OWED and is the session's STOP.
repo_gates --fast: all 8 OK.
New shared scripts/instructions_gate.py, registered in controller_gates.py and
agent_gates.py, never copied into a sibling repo (the reuse_refs_check.py
precedent). 20 fixture tests, all asserting the effect: exit code AND that the
message names the file and the reason.
It is a consistency gate, not a budget gate, and the failure message says so. A
/context reading measured the instruction files at 15k tokens against 869k free in
a 1M window -- space is not the constraint, and a future reader must not re-derive
the wrong reason. The 200-line ceiling is adherence guidance; a file nobody can
hold in their head is where contradictions hide, and five were found here.
Checks run against effective text (HTML comments stripped, because they are
stripped before injection): the line ceiling; every .claude/rules/*.md declares
paths: or an explicit unconditional: true; no component version literal; no
TEMPORARY block carrying a past date; and the workspace-root CLAUDE.md is
byte-identical to its versioned copy -- the live file sits outside any git repo,
so that copy is its only version-controlled record.
Two traps recorded so they are not reintroduced: a bare \d+\.\d+\.\d+ matches the
first three octets of every IPv4 (the gate excludes dotted quads, or it fails on
192.168.0.180 in the agent's own file); and unconditional: true is NOT a Claude
Code feature but this project's own marker.
Workspace-root CLAUDE.md 208 -> 182 lines (142 effective), copy kept identical.
The nine-instance invariant table moved into the felhom-testing skill, which
triggers when writing or reviewing a test; all three directive bullets stayed in
the core. felhom.eu/CLAUDE.md got surgical corrections only and is knowingly still
over the ceiling at 227 effective lines -- closing it needs the restructure R-229
defers, said plainly rather than quietly absorbed.
CONTEXT.md gains standing ruling S-35. OPEN-ITEMS.md gains R-229.
Docs only -- no Go, no version bump, nothing built or deployed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01JJc8sAGRWmavP3rMtdpkr2
- 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.
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.
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.
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.
Four SCHEDULED runs, none triggered by hand: demo-felhom host 83.8s / offsite
540.4s; demo-hp host 109.3s / offsite 300.1s. Each restored into a scratch guest,
booted, verified and destroyed itself; zero 990000 guests or volumes afterwards
and both local-lvm figures returned to their pre-run values.
Both boxes had BOTH tiers due at once, so R-86's ordering was observed live for
the first time: never-proven sorted first, each box took its HOST tier, deferred
the offsite one, and picked it up on the next evaluation six hours later. The
host-tier proofs reached the hub through R-189's merge — demo-felhom's report
carries two tiers, and the local one can only have come from disk.
The capability map's optimistic half is cashed, with its scope stated: these two
boxes, not the fleet.
Surfaced and filed rather than fixed:
- R-190: a storage ACL that demonstrably worked at 04:44 was gone by 09:24, with
a reinstall, any logged pveum activity and any cluster-log entry ruled out.
- R-191: every weekly offsite backup uploads successfully and then fails the job
on a prune the box is deliberately not allowed to do (R-89 moved it
server-side; both boxes still arm keep_last=2).
Two corrections to yesterday's record: the R-185 drift DID surface as 403s on the
write path (six, with the hub raising whole_guest_backup_failed at the first), and
my earlier "no restore_test_* events" was produced by grepping a 404 page.
- OPEN-ITEMS: R-86 CLOSED with the trap in its own wording recorded (the literal
reading is never true on a daily tier); R-87 re-ranked UP because R-86 built
most of what it waited for; R-185 (the agent cannot list demo-felhom's host
backup tier — a missing storage ACL, pre-existing), R-186 (a released binary's
sha is not reproducible from its tag), R-187 (R-115's publish leg had never
actually run) filed. R-184 was the highest ID in use.
- ROADMAP: R-86 collapsed, keeping the reasoning and correcting the shape the row
itself proposed — which would have been the never-fires version.
- 07-backup-architecture: new contract section — restore-testing is per ARCHIVE
GENERATION, with the trap and what did not change (S-1).
- 00-capability-map: the unattended restore-proof row upgraded to PROVEN-LIVE on
the 635 s due-triggered offsite run, with the restart and teardown evidence.
- CONTEXT: S-17 (the rule, the trap, the config key, the hub's derivation) and
S-18 (ep0 is Tier 2 — extends D-d's protected list to three machines).
Numbered 17/18 because S-14 and S-15 were already duplicated in the file.
- STATUS: rewritten for the operator, trimmed back to one screen.
R-182 CLOSED (controller v0.194.0 + hub v0.90.0/.1), proven live on demo-hp. The
hub's notification_log for the run reads: two per-app failures RECORDED, one
digest SENT naming both, and the customer channel SKIPPED with operator_only.
Against the measured previous behaviour — two failures, one email naming one
app, one leaving no trace anywhere.
Scenario D proved itself on an event I had not planned: disk_critical alarmed on
two filesystems, the second was collapsed by the cooldown, and that collapse is
now visible WITH ITS KEY. Yesterday it would have left nothing at all.
A gap the spec did not anticipate is recorded with its fix: the per-app event
also fires from the periodic sweep, outside any run, so making it record-only
would have created a NEW silence. The sweep emits a digest too, with no run_id,
so it stays under the ordinary hourly cooldown.
ep0: MEASURED on the box — 7757 MB (8 GB), 4 vCPU, and the 4 GiB swapfile
SURVIVED the resize and is active (checked, because a resize is a stop/start).
The 40 GB local disk is UNCHANGED, so no disk figure was touched anywhere.
Five documents corrected — three of which the task's list did not name, found by
searching. Two audit/evidence documents ANNOTATED, body untouched: they record
what was true when written and that is their value.
R-90 CLOSED. R-86 unblocked and re-ranked, stated honestly: 8 GB is comfortable,
not unbounded — the original OOM was a 14.46 GB restore — so the restore-test
cadence should still be paced, just not by fear of the endpoint.
target-selection.md's "D-d did not name ep0 either way" is deliberately left
standing. It is the operator's question, not CC's.
STATUS.md 127 -> 83 lines, items rather than sentences.
R-182's direction REVERSED by Part 0's measurement. Filed yesterday as "the
reserve re-alerts on every status refresh" — too many alerts, seen at the
sending end. Measured at the receiving end: 9 events received today, 2 operator
emails sent. When two apps are refused in the same second the operator is told
about ONE; the other is dropped before LogNotification, so it leaves no row on
any channel and cannot be audited. The operator cooldown key is
customerID:eventType(+tier) and the capture-failed event carries `app` but no
`tier`, so the key has no app identifier. Same failure mode as R-97a, in a
second event type that never opted into the narrow fix. Nothing changed —
Part 0 was investigation only.
Correction owed: yesterday's report said "one recovery_unit_capture_failed per
app, HTTP 200". True of what the CONTROLLER pushed; a reader would take it as
"the operator was told about each app", which is false.
R-110 CLOSED (installer v1.23.0). Both channels moved. The spec's mechanism for
channel 2 rested on a factual error — the run-time fetches are sixteen, not
nine, and come from felhom-agent, not this repo — so no tag here could cover
them; pinned to the agent version being installed instead, on the operator's
ruling. Channel 3 needed no change: the URL never carried a ref, so no hub
change and no hub bump.
R-115 CLOSED. release-agent.sh builds, tags, publishes and verifies by an
independent download; check-published-versions.py refuses a tag with no package;
CI now runs the full gate set so it actually runs.
R-183 NEW+CLOSED: a fresh install fetched the vouched agent binary and its
sixteen config files from two different refs, and nothing compared them.
R-184 NEW: nothing stops the hub vouching a version that was never released.
The R-115 gate cannot see it — measured, the hub manifest and Gitea's package
listing are both 401 anonymously.
capability map: new PROVEN-LIVE row for the published installer channel.
STATUS.md 138 -> 127 lines.
R-181 CLOSED (controller v0.193.0 + v0.193.1) and proven live on demo-hp for
BOTH reserve terms. The reserve is now a per-app, per-run ADMISSION decision
taken before the app's first write and covering all three write legs, and it
gained a size term. The refusal's wording was not weakened; the behaviour moved
so it became true, verified by sha256 tree fingerprint.
R-156 CLOSED — papra's template mounts the app's own data root. Precondition
re-measured rather than inherited (both boxes were wiped today).
Part 4, documentation only, nothing built:
- R-110 WAITING-ON-OPERATOR -> READY. Ruling: option (b), the installer's
publish channel moves to a TAG. Recorded with the condition that decides
whether it works at all — it must cover BOTH the /scripts/ git-sync and the
nine files the installer fetches from raw/branch/main.
- R-115 WAITING-ON-OPERATOR -> READY. Ruling: mechanism (b), a build-side gate
refusing to deploy or vouch an unpublished version. The third instance (agent
v0.120.0) would have silently downgraded both demo boxes while succeeding.
R-182 NEW: the periodic status refresh has no admission scope, so a refused app
re-alerts on every poll (measured: a second alert pair 13s after the run's).
Pre-existing in v0.192.0; deliberately not fixed in the R-181 task.
capability map: the local-backup row moves to PROVEN-LIVE in BOTH halves.
ROADMAP: R-165 collapses to CLOSED; R-181 collapsed into it.
07-backup-architecture.md: the reserve's contract stated as what the code
provides (S-1 — an architectural contract changed in the same session).
STATUS.md trimmed 150 -> 111 lines, "What's broken" no longer holds shipped
work, and the stale "After:" line (pointing at work that shipped on 2 August)
is fixed.
Two boxes, two DIFFERENT supply paths, so the session proved the disk shape and
the delivery route rather than one of them twice.
demo-hp (layout proof, --golden <local volid>): mp0 at /var/lib/felhom,
backup=1, 70G, no mp1; /var/lib/docker and /mnt/sys_drive both real mounts of
its subdirectories via fstab; one df figure and one device id (64519) on all
three paths; reboots 3/3 with the binds surviving each.
demo-felhom (pipeline proof, --force-gitea-golden): fetch_verify succeeding
against the vouched manifest for BOTH artifacts -- 'verified sha256
54e2a4c431daf580... matches the hub manifest' for the golden, a7763d31... for
the agent. 250G single volume, grep -c '^mp1:' = 0, reboots 3/3.
Journey proven on both, endpoint-level: claim -> deploy -> back up -> restore,
with a planted marker returning byte-identical on each box. Ceiling measured
gone: 65 GiB and 233 GiB available to a recovery unit, against 19 and 45.
R-165 -> IMPLEMENTED, not PROVEN-LIVE, on the operator's ruling. B2, which that
row records as the bulkhead's replacement, fired live for the first time and
does refuse per app, delete nothing and alert -- but it is checked only in
captureAllRecoveryUnits while runVolumeDumps writes the bulk unguarded, and its
'the previous unit is untouched' claim was measured false (182,272 B dump
replaced by 2,147,666,432 B under a manifest still dated 06:34:26). -> R-181.
New: R-179 (uninstall leaves NAS network-storage units), R-180 (--archive-storage
not cross-checked against the ACL grant; 403 at step 8/8 after root@pam is
rotated), R-181. Third instance of R-115 recorded (agent 0.120.0 unpublished).
No code written, no version bumps -- this was a runbook.
07-backup-architecture.md gains §7.5.1 (S-1: the contract changed in the same
session): the ceiling §7.5 describes no longer exists for a box built from
golden >= 0.192.0, the bulkhead's replacement is recorded, and R-175 is FIXED
here rather than left standing — the bound is restated as a function of mp1
and scoped to split-layout boxes, naming all three real shapes.
Capability map: new row as IMPLEMENTED, deliberately NOT proven-live, with
the missing leg named — no box has been reinstalled from the golden, and
"the golden baked" is not "a box built from it works".
R-163 CLOSED: the ceiling it recorded stops existing. R-176(a) answered by
P1; (b) WITHDRAWN, since every node is reinstalled rather than migrated.
R-178 filed for the reinstalls, which were not done this session.
CONTEXT S-13 (the variant chosen on measurement; pruning rejected with its
reason) and S-14 (prove first, then vouch — the golden is published but
deliberately unvouched, because vouching is what makes a fresh install pick
up a layout no box has been proven from).
STATUS: plain-language section; both operator questions now answered, so the
waiting-on-you item is cleared. Two older entries trimmed so the page did
not grow.
R-167/R-158 shipped and proven live (controller v0.191.x, hub v0.89.0):
two new capability-map rows PROVEN-LIVE with live citations, and
07-backup-architecture.md §7.5's closing claim "nothing warns when an app
crosses the line" is now false and rewritten (S-1: an architectural
contract changed in the same session). §7.5 also gains the caveat that its
size bound is ONE BOX'S, not the fleet's.
Part 3 SPIKE (audits/SPIKE-r165-mp1-merge-2026-08-02.md): M1-M5 measured,
NO layout touched. Three findings the merge session must not re-derive:
"the layout" is not one thing (200G/50G vs 50G/20G vs 16G/8G); mp1 is a
BULKHEAD and not only a ceiling, so after the merge an overflow reaches
/var/lib/docker; the golden fails closed on the split in four places.
D-a's condition (1) is currently SATISFIED — no external box is in the
hub's register, and both demo boxes are Tier 0 and reinstallable.
Recommendation given, choice NOT made — it ends at the operator's ruling.
CONTEXT.md S-11 (D-c's routing, and why R-158's own backup_failed proposal
was overruled) and S-12 (the monitoring landed BEFORE the merge).
STATUS.md gains the plain-language section and the merge decision, with two
older entries trimmed so the page did not grow.
New rows R-174 (closed same session), R-175, R-176, R-177; each ID grepped
free before minting.
SPIKE-ci-runner-2026-08-02.md: all six probes with method, measurement and ruling; none
STOPped. P2 (stock image has git but no python3) and P6 (a runner that loses its state
re-registers and orphans the old record) changed the design; P5 (a failed run signals
NOTHING) is why the alarm exists at all.
R-168 SHIPPED with its evidence. R-29 CLOSED — on the demonstrated alarm and not on a green
run, as required: the class it opened is answered at both ends, the hook refusing locally and
CI catching a --no-verify bypass and emailing. R-161 noted: its automatic half now exists for
the STATIC gate, while its original scope, the runtime gate, is deliberately still not
automatic and should stay that way.
NEW R-169 (grep established R-168 was the highest in use): CI can only report, because there
is no gate in the road. Making it blocking needs branch protection plus a PR workflow, both
of which change how the operator works — so it is theirs to decide, and the row states the
cost honestly rather than recommending it.
CONTEXT gains S-8 (CI detects, does not block, and why that is structural), S-9 (a detector
that tells no one is not finished, plus the curl and Cloudflare-1010 traps), S-10 (the runner
is unprivileged because DooPlex is Tier 2), S-11 (CI reproduces the sibling layout).
CLAUDE.md gains the rule earned by red-proofing: a go test -run pattern that matches no test
prints ok and exits 0, and an instrument that can silently drop results is not a measurement.
REPORT overwritten per the standing rule; every red-proof, the core.hooksPath probe's four
measured outcomes, Scenario C's refusal-and-bypass, the hub deployment and the live Setup-tab
read are recorded there, plus three observations and two deliberate deviations from the spec
(a comment-only edit to felhom-host-install.sh, and __pycache__ in .gitignore).
STATUS: the 'check that needs a person to remember it' line is rewritten — the checks now run
themselves before every push, with both honest limits stated in plain words; and one entry
records the thirteen-check cleanup and the deleted installer version number.
Documentation only — no code, no box, no build.
STATUS.md (repo root, 652 words / 67 lines): what works · what's broken ·
what we're working on · waiting on you · changed since. A VIEW of
OPEN-ITEMS.md, holding nothing of its own; not CONTEXT.md, and both files
now say why they stay separate. No R-n is the subject of a sentence —
identifiers are bracketed pointers only.
CONTEXT.md S-5 records the four operator decisions taken 2026-08-02
(D-a … D-d), none of them implemented:
D-a merge mp1 into mp0 rather than resize it — before any external
install, and D-c ships in the same step → R-165
D-b desired/observed app state in its own store, with the state-store
safety rule verbatim → R-166 (BLOCKED)
D-c customer fill warning + operator backup-failure alert → R-167
D-d only DooPlex and Peti's box are protected → target-selection.md
R-163 RE-FRAMED, not closed: the sizing question is withdrawn rather than
answered; the row survives as the record of the constraint until R-165
lands. R-156's papra referral RESOLVED — deployed nowhere, so the template
fix strands nothing; the docker ps evidence is recorded with its
provenance and its scope limit.
target-selection.md: two protected machines, everything else disposable.
ep0 is no longer Tier 2 but is not scratch (it holds the only off-premises
copy of real customer data) — flagged for explicit operator confirmation.
The demo-box backup-target fence drops from prohibition to stated cost,
because D-d spends that reference anyway.
CLAUDE.md gains an End-of-session checklist carrying the STATUS.md
maintenance rule and "a finding goes in OPEN-ITEMS.md first".
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.
Live: hub 0.81.0, agent 0.113.0, controller 0.185.1 on both demo boxes;
host-install 1.22.0 (script; no reinstall performed).
E-2a wrapper proven live as root on demo-hp: F-1 subdirectory refused, F-2
unmounted path refused, root device refused, idempotent re-apply is a no-op,
repointing refused -- 0 stray storages. The agent PVE role was NOT widened.
Scenario E proven live on BOTH boxes: healthy renders nothing, no message key.
Records three defects I introduced and caught: unreachable routes (mounted
outside /api/storage/, caught by the first live call), a hollow test exposed by
its own red-proof, and another gofmt-realignment no-op.
Not live-proven: the degraded banner and offer acceptance (both boxes healthy),
backup_target_absent end-to-end, Case A/B on a real install, drive-loss recovery.
hub 0.81.0, agent 0.112.0, controller 0.184.1 live on BOTH demo boxes.
E-2c: eject/decommission of the backup-target drive refused 409 on both boxes,
drives unmoved. E-2b: the never-called disconnect seam is wired, with the target
case raising the specific backup_target_absent.
Records the keying bug caught before deploy (a.Path is the GUEST path, so the
target branch was unreachable -- 0.184.0 superseded, never deployed) and states
plainly that backup_target_absent is NOT proven end-to-end live: proving it needs
a live enrolled drive to go absent.
Parts 2/3/4 and E-2a remain open; Peti risk stays parked.
Supervised operational run. No code, no version bump, nothing deleted.
Primary backup tier on both demo boxes moved from `local` (a dir storage on
/var/lib/vz -- the SAME physical device as the guest) to `felhom-backup`, a dir
storage on each box's secondary drive:
demo-hp /mnt/nvme-1tb uuid:91d2dc2d-... archive 2,256,044,492 B
demo-felhom /mnt/hdd_1 uuid:47a3361a-... archive 5,957,878,962 B
Both proven end to end via the real UI path: archive lands on the secondary
drive (df delta matches the archive byte-for-byte), restore-test auto-selects it
and passes with mount_parity: ok, and freshness survives an agent restart with
an empty in-memory store -- so the age can only have come from the new storage.
Phase 0: the target is CONFIGURATION, not converged (the sole writer of
agent.json touches only escrow.pbs_storage_id and preserves unknown keys), so
the runbook's STOP did not fire. No consumer hardcodes "local" on the backup path.
Findings:
- F-1 the storage path must BE the mountpoint; a subdirectory fails exactMount
and the target reports disconnected permanently (observe.go:321)
- F-2 --is_mountpoint 1 is load-bearing; proven live, an unguarded storage on a
non-mounted path reports active with the ROOT filesystem's free space and
had already created dump/ on pve-root -- a silent retarget onto the very
device this change escapes
- F-3 FelhomAgentStore is granted per storage path; without it every backup
403s. felhom-host-install.sh must issue it for new installs
- R-109 (new) the DR recipe records no backup target, and each box now carries
two content=backup dir storages, one live and one frozen
- R-105 narrowed and TRACED: dr_recipe drives was [] fleet-wide because the
enrolled drives were never PVE storages, so isUserDataDrive never saw
them. Both boxes now populate drives; SMART on the backup drives too
Absent-drive behaviour today is fail-loudly with no silent retarget (PVE half
live-proven; agent half source-traced). That is NOT the intended fall-back-and-
alarm design -- filed as E-2 with the honest single-drive label.
Reported in full in the record: the agent was restarted with a felhom-pbs backup
in flight, producing a spurious tier failure. The backup had in fact succeeded
(PVE task OK, 6,264,034,053 B snapshot) and the spurious failure reached no
channel -- R-84 ground truth superseded it.
Outstanding: full drive-loss recovery (needs physical access) and the agent half
of the absent-drive behaviour.
Phase 0 sized C9-F1 properly before anything was designed: 43 of the 53 catalog apps have NO
subtree the Tier-2 restore can read (not 2), 9 are covered only for their file legs and never
their database or volumes, 1 is stateless. The asymmetry is Tier-2's alone — Tier-1 and offsite
both restore the unit and replay volume dumps, so BookStack always had a working restore and
only this button lied.
Shipped: the restore refuses BEFORE stopping the app and names the action that does work; a run
that proceeds claims only what it EXAMINED and discloses that the database and volumes are not
covered. C9-F2 alarms after a 5-minute sustained-restarting threshold, set above the 120s deploy
timeout, Mealie's 60s start_period and R-97b's 180s grace; StateRestarting is deliberately NOT
added to IsDownState.
Live: silent through ten 30s samples then app_start_failed at 5m25s, heartbeat now reads
"1 currently down" where Campaign 9 recorded 0; a real deploy stayed silent; bookstack refused
with its uptime unbroken; paperless re-restored 43/43 byte-identical, 16/16 docs clean.
Filed, not fixed: C9-F1b (route to the Tier-1 restore — its own task because it puts a
destructive operation behind a non-destructive button) and C9-F4 (nothing reads the Tier-2
copy's recovery-unit/ mirror, so the second local copy that exists for drive loss is unreachable
by any customer action — potentially larger than C9-F1).
Phase A is the headline and it passed on live hardware, through the real endpoints the UI
posts to: a customer who deletes files — or their entire app data directory — gets everything
back byte-identical, and the app works afterwards (paperless served the restored bytes over
its own API at the exact pre-deletion sha256). A1's two non-destruction promises both hold.
Three defects, recorded not fixed:
C9-F1 (HIGH) the Tier-2 restore button is offered for apps it can never restore, takes a
real outage, and reports "nothing was missing" — indistinguishable from a
genuine result, while 156 MB of that app's data sits unread in the same copy.
C9-F2 (HIGH) an app in a crash loop never alarms on any channel; StateRestarting is in no
down-set, so F-OBS's own heartbeat printed "0 currently down" for 9 minutes.
C9-F3 (MEDIUM) an interrupted offsite run leaves a lock the self-heal cannot reach; the tier
is dead until a human unlocks and the operator is told "unknown reason".
This answers Phase C item 8.
Two candidates were deliberately NOT filed: a recovery-unit poisoning the catalog sync healed
in ~3 min, and a snapshot_id that is documented as logging-only. Reporting either would have
been reporting an artifact.
Stopped at the end of Phase B (plus D10), then full recovery — both boxes healthy, real
cadences, offsite tier proven working again, no leaked scratch guests, peti untouched.
D11's approved staleAfter compression turned out not to be a knob; reported, not worked around.
Seam sweep: TieredBackend was the FIRST, not the only one. BackupArchiveLister
has the identical silent-degrade shape and a worse blast radius (it degrades to
the pre-R-84 in-memory-only behaviour), and no compile-time witness existed in
production code anywhere in either repo. No defect found, so no version bump and
no deploy — the witnesses are guards, proven by breaking a signature and watching
go build fail where it previously passed.
Live outage: age_state=unknown captured on real hardware for the first time, with
demo-felhom's local tier genuinely due throughout — the controller deferred and
zero app stacks were stopped. The R-88 breaker did NOT arm and no
whole_guest_backup_failed travelled, because felhom-pbs was not due; recorded as
conditions-did-not-arise rather than claimed as coverage.
Post-boot: the volume changed device name (sdb->sda) across the reboot and the
mount survived only because fstab uses by-id. That was never tested before.
Corrects two wrong severity readings with evidence from the box and the code.
The PBS outage was ~15 min (07:00-07:18 UTC), caused by a global OOM at 06:58:12:
proxmox-backup-proxy peaked at 3.2G on a 3.8G box and a concurrent 1.9G rsync
tipped it over. Root SSH to that box works from DooPlex via the public IP, not
from felhom-pve via the tunnel IP — the documented path I failed to try first.
R-88: internal/quiesce has NO failure limiter, backoff or breaker; the loop
stopped after three cycles only because PBS recovered. Verified additionally that
scheduledRunAllowed (quiesce.go:476-478) returns true whenever lastAgeSecs is nil,
so the same missing value that makes every poll due also bypasses the time-of-day
gate — the cycles ran outside the [04:30,08:30) window. Fixing the due-verdict
without fixing the nil-age bypass would leave the hole open.
Recorded after the session report was written. The offsite PBS service stopped
listening on 8007 five minutes after this session's 14.46 GB restore-test read
from it; the box is up and the tunnel is healthy, but no SSH key to it exists so
the cause is unestablished — the restore load is a plausible mechanism on a cx23
and is recorded as correlation, not cause.
The agent restart then exposed R-88: an unreachable target reads as 'no backup
exists', so the offsite tier is perpetually due and the controller runs a full
quiesce cycle every ~5 min. Operator ruling: leave it running, it self-heals when
PBS returns and masking it would hide the fault.
The unattended offsite restore-test on demo-felhom passed: 14.46 GB archive,
duration_s=635.07 (10m35s), then it rotated to the local tier. Persisted state
confirms the credit: {"felhom-pbs": "2026-07-27T06:14:42Z"}.
CORRECTION: I estimated ~2 hours for this restore. It took 10m35s. I derived
the estimate from a download rate measured during the FAILED attempt, which was
running under contention; the real link does ~1.4 GB/min. I then used that wrong
figure to raise a design concern — that the heavy-op gate would block backups
for hours on this box — which at 10 minutes largely evaporates. An estimate
extrapolated from a degraded measurement is not a measurement.
The SPEC's closing risk note is corrected in place, with the original left
visible for the lesson.
R-86 (NEXT, operator ruling 2026-07-27): backup-ALIGNED restore-test scheduling
— test a tier ~1 day after ITS OWN backup. R-85 schedules on a free-running
interval, which cannot express 'the day after the PBS backup': any fixed offset
drifts, so alignment would be luck. Shape: trigger from the tier's own last
successful backup rather than a clock. Interim in force: 302400s (3.5d), which
lands each tier ~weekly — the cadence half of the ruling, not the alignment half.
R-87: the restic app-data offsite tier is NEVER restore-tested. R-85 covers
whole-guest vzdump tiers only; the agent has no restic surface. That is arguably
the tier that matters most — the only one that survives losing the box AND
carries the customer's app data, since the whole-guest snapshot excludes the
bind-mounted drives. Exactly the state PBS was in before R-85.
REPORT.md: the full R-80 -> R-85 arc, including a section on the seven mistakes
I made and the two recurring shapes behind them (inferring behaviour from an
artifact instead of the code that consumes it; reading a result without its exit
code). Records demo-felhom's restore-test as IN FLIGHT at close, with the manual
recovery step if the deferred restart watcher does not complete.
Hub gate green (17 packages, rc=0).
Restore round-trip on demo-hp: pass=true, verified=boot+running,
mount_parity=ok, source_tier=pbs (the v0.100.0 fix — the earlier attempt said
'local' and died at 600s), 4m5s restore+boot+verify+teardown, clean teardown
with no 403 and no leak. That last point confirms 06's reading that the
teardown 403 was a phantom, and corrects my earlier framing of it as a standing
privilege gap.
Multi-tier quiesce driven through the REAL UI endpoint (authed+CSRF):
exactly ONE stop/start pair with BOTH backups inside it, local-first/PBS-last,
app quiesced through the non-last tier, early resume on the last tier's
snapshot. Total downtime 1m27s for both tiers; app healthy after.
Capability map row upgraded IMPLEMENTED -> PROVEN-LIVE, kept distinct from the
DR-tier row above which proves ACTIVATION not ARRIVAL. Remaining gaps recorded:
the SCHEDULED restore-test still only selects the primary tier (manual path
proven, unattended not), and the hub infers cadence from storage type.
Slice D.1 — host-install 1.20.0: a FRESH box defaults to local-daily +
offsite-weekly (felhom-pbs, 604800s, keep_last=2). setdefault semantics proven
both ways: fresh gets the tier, an UPGRADE preserves the existing backup block
verbatim — so an in-place upgrade can never silently start writing to an
offsite datastore. Existing boxes are migrated explicitly.
Slice E:
- 07-backup-architecture.md: honest status header per CONTEXT ruling S-2, with
an explicit STALE-outside-the-PBS-tier verdict (the controller tiers were last
verified 41 controller versions ago). The PBS row claimed 'PBS on DooPlex'
(the retired spike store) with no cadence; it now names felhom-pbs ->
felhom-offsite on ep0 over wg-felhom, weekly, keep_last=2. NOT marked
ratified — that is Viktor's review of the section 10 list. Discharges R-83.
- 06-offsite-connectivity.md: the target-split remaining-work note collapsed
(shipped), and records HOW S4.1's tier-aware timeout silently regressed — the
mechanism was never removed, its INPUT changed when local_backup_target was
retargeted to 'local'. Also notes S4.1 already diagnosed the teardown 403 as a
phantom (a timeout consequence, not an ACL gap).
- capability map: new row for recurring offsite backups actually LANDING, as
distinct from the existing row proving ACTIVATION. IMPLEMENTED, not
PROVEN-LIVE — the restore round-trip has not completed under the fixed code.
- ROADMAP: R-82 SHIPPED with its remaining gate named, R-83 DISCHARGED, R-84
left open.
- CONTEXT + REPORT: the arc, including the mid-arc correction I had to make.
- B2 demo-hp + B3 demo-felhom migrated to the island (agent 0.96.0), apps
served throughout (0 container restarts), island /storage 200, LAN DNS pinned
to the LAN IP, hub reports 0.96.0. No rollback.
- capability-map 'site/network change' row PARTIAL -> PROVEN-LIVE
- ROADMAP R-50 -> SHIPPED (fleet-migrated); add R-74 (island on Peti's cluster)
- nodes.md: both boxes island-bound, agent 0.96.0
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