Files
felhom.eu/STATUS.md
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admin 1d6f1c522d
gates / gates (push) Successful in 23s
Rehearsal 2026-08-09 COMPLETE: data BYTE-IDENTICAL, journey needs a shell twice
The walk finished. All four planted files came back byte-identical out of
snapshot 41c830db, including two Hungarian accented filenames verified as RAW
NAME BYTES (NFC preserved) — the discriminator the Gate 0 positive control was
built for, having been watched failing on an NFC->NFD rename that renders the
same. Unlock 21s, restore 13.2s.

It finished only because a terminal was available twice:

- R-273 CLOSED. v0.128.0 was published as a package and never git-tagged, so
  every install died at 5/8. Tag pushed on operator instruction after an
  INDEPENDENT download proved the package sha equalled the vouched value;
  --resume then reached Day-0 SUCCESS in 3m49s on controller 0.210.0. The two
  guards that would stop the class recurring are still owed.
- R-280 NEW, rank 1. A reinstalled box cannot re-attach its own data drive by
  any dashboard route: /api/disks/candidates returns empty because both lists
  are built from the UNCLAIMED-disk scan, and the drive is claimed precisely
  because it is also the backup target. Correct for "initialise", over-broad for
  "attach", which is non-destructive by definition. The restore page meanwhile
  says "Ez ket kattintas" and points at that empty list. Cleared by POSTing
  /mnt/sys_drive — an internal path no household could produce.

Also new: R-281 the hub said NOTHING through the entire reinstall and the
sealed-backup tripwire did not fire on a real unseal (positive control: 2 events
all day fleet-wide); R-282 one code with three names and a mail pointing at a
page the box does not show; R-283 hub reads "Claimed 18d ago" while the box
serves its setup page; R-284 "almost full" over a 93%-free store.

R-274 NARROWED by measurement rather than left as written: the resume path
fetched the vouched golden correctly, because --resume skips the preflight that
does local discovery. What survives is real — discovery is sort|tail -1 with no
manifest comparison — but a FRESH install taking a stale golden is still not
observed, and the row says so.

Two of my own claims were refuted by test and are recorded as refuted, not
quietly dropped: the leftover sudoers file is inert (sudo skips dotted names),
and demo-hp's off-site tier was healthy all along.
2026-08-09 12:35:26 +02:00

11 KiB

STATUS — what works, what's broken, what's next

Updated 2026-08-09.

A view, not a source. documentation/backlog/OPEN-ITEMS.md is the authority; this page restates part of it in plain words, and nothing may exist only here. Not CONTEXT.md, which is technical state written for Claude Code. Items, not paragraphs. One screen. If it does not fit, something belongs in the register instead.

Rebuilt from the register on 2026-08-07, from 258 lines. The old "what shipped recently" log is what the per-repo CHANGELOG.md files and the register are for, and is not restated here.

What works

A blank machine boots the Felhom disc, installs itself unattended, and is claimed by the customer, who sets their own password. They install apps from a catalogue of fifty-three, share files over the home network, and open apps from a launcher or a shared link. Backups run on their own to three places — the machine's drive, a second drive, and an encrypted off-site copy.

The backup promise is proved, and so is getting the data back yourself. A machine has been destroyed on purpose and its files came back byte for byte identical — four times now. On 2026-08-07 the household's own journey passed for the first time: someone with a browser and their recovery code got everything back with no command line inside the machine at any point, in 72 seconds. The two rough edges that walk found are also gone. (R-201, R-252, R-253 — closed.)

The rehearsal finished. The data came back byte for byte; the journey did not.

We wiped a working demo machine and put it back. All four test files returned identical — including the two with Hungarian accents, checked as raw bytes, not as text on screen. The unlock took 21 seconds and the restore 13. But it only finished because I could open a terminal twice. A household would have stopped, twice, and the second time the screen would have told them it was easy.

The two walls, both fixed-or-fixable, neither about the data:

  • The install died four steps in — the agent version you approved had been published as a download but never given its version label, and the installer looks it up by that label. Now unblocked — I pushed the label after checking the published file matched what you vouched. (R-273 — closed. The two guards that would stop it recurring are still owed.)
  • A reinstalled machine cannot re-attach its own data drive. Every route is a dead end, and the restore page cheerfully says „Ez két kattintás" while pointing at an empty list. The drive is fine and the machine can see it — it just is not offered, because the same drive is also the backup target. I got past it by typing an internal path no customer could know. This is the one to fix before the tester's visit. (R-280)

Also broken, found on the way:

  • Taking Felhom off a machine leaves the one thing that stops it going back on. We install a small network service at setup; removing Felhom restarts it without its settings, it seizes the port the next install needs, and the next install then refuses — appearing to blame the owner's network. (R-272)
  • A machine we removed keeps its private line to us open. (R-276)
  • The hub said nothing at all while a machine was wiped, rebuilt, re-claimed and had its sealed backups opened. No false alarm — but also no word, and the alarm that exists for "someone is opening this customer's backups" stayed silent through a real one. (R-281)
  • A rebuilt machine may still come back on software from last week — narrower than I first wrote: the resumed install fetched the right version, but a fresh one takes whatever copy is newest on the disk without checking it against what you approved. (R-274)
  • demo-felhom has not had an off-site backup in six days and is waiting for a recovery code nobody has entered. demo-hp, rebuilt the same day, recovered by itself. (R-278)
  • One code, three different names, and the email points at a page the machine is not showing — this cost us a wasted code today. (R-282, R-283)

What's broken

  • Nothing else new is broken. The check against a fourth secret-in-a-page covers 4 pages of 27, and the cheap one covering all of them is blind to the shape that shipped. (R-255)
  • An already-paired box is still told to pair itself, 25 minutes on. (R-214, R-235)
  • A backup that covered nothing still calls itself „Sikeres". (R-240)
  • A machine waiting for its recovery code can stop backing up off-site without alarming us. (R-243)
  • The card offering to reopen set-aside backups promises more than we can deliver. (R-202)
  • Deleting a customer leaves rows behind while reporting a clean teardown — no secrets, but it accumulates. (R-244)
  • Putting restored files back where they belong is still manual. (R-213)

The rest of what the rehearsal found

Sixteen findings in one afternoon, none of them visible from reading the code — three sessions of review had not seen any.

  • Removing Felhom leaves five files holding old keys (R-275), and rotating a leaked key does not revoke the old one until the service restarts (R-269) — the written recipe for it is a step short (R-270), and the alarm it raises can never be closed because the fix it recommends is what silences the all-clear (R-271).
  • It caught me being wrong twice, and that matters more than the count. I told you the fleet's off-site backups were down; demo-hp had eighteen snapshots and I had read three misleading screens instead of asking the machine (R-277). And I raised a leftover permissions file as a security hole, then tested it and refuted myself — it is inert.

What worked, and should not be lost in the count: the machine came up on its own at the approved version; the setup page appeared unprompted, in Hungarian, naming the customer; the recovery screen appeared without being looked for and said plainly that unlocking changes nothing; the restore told the truth about putting files in a checking folder rather than back in place; and no false alarm fired.

Full account: documentation/audits/REHEARSAL-byo-reinstall-2026-08-09.md.

Three rulings, written down so they stop living in a conversation

  • The managed-update floor. It is deliberately parked, and the trigger to raise it is the first machine that is not ours; after that it moves with the publish train. Worth knowing alongside it: the updater always aims at the floor, never at the newest, so a machine at or above the floor updates to nothing. Correction to the number that was going round: the floor is live at 0.200.0, not 0.156.0 — checked twice today, on the hub page and in both machines' own logs.
  • R-264 is decided. Build a reader for guest-network health, the staged-update pair, the restore-test depth pair, and the two backup-integrity timestamps. Record a stated "no reader wanted" for the repaired-recently flag, the tier-applied timestamp, the config fingerprint, the per-stack object and the drive-migration marker. Decide the reporting-disabled flag on its own merits — if that is a state we support, it must be visible or a staleness alarm will one day fire on a machine that is fine. A "no" ends by changing the allowlist reason from arguably owed to deliberately not consumed — not by ripping out an emitter, which is a two-repo change that also breaks a shared fixture. The implementation is its own session. And it is twenty facts, not twenty-one.
  • R-268 is closed — the leaked key is rotated, and the rotation is proved in both directions rather than assumed.

Fixed 2026-08-08 — four things the machine knew and did not say

A rebuilt machine can set up its own recovery again (R-221, agent 0.128.0 — proved on hardware); an unreadable disk is no longer drawn as a healthy empty one (R-259); a backup tick now answers about that app (R-258); our own alarm no longer points at a log that may not exist (R-265). Still true and not glossed: a failed disk reading still reaches us as "0 of 0 GB" — the quiet direction, it can only miss a true alarm, never raise a false one (R-266).

What we're working on

  • Widening the check so a fourth secret-in-a-page is caught by a machine. (R-255) · R-264 is now decided (above); building the readers is a session of its own.
  • Proving the hub really keeps the old sealed key when a machine re-seals. (R-198) · Still open, none urgent: (R-256, R-257, R-261…R-263, R-266)

Waiting on you

  • Nothing blocking. The rehearsal is finished and demo-hp is back in service: agent 0.128.0, controller 0.210.0, claimed, off-site backups unlocked and intact.
  • One decision worth taking before the tester comes: whether to fix the drive wall (R-280) now. It is the only finding that would stop his visit outright, and it is the difference between "his data comes back" and "his data comes back if someone types a path for him."
  • Two guards are still owed so the install cannot break the same way twice: refuse to vouch a version whose label does not resolve, and check that a published version and its label ship together. (R-273's tail.)

DooPlex infrastructure — separate from the product

Kept under its own heading rather than dropped: these are real asks that need you, but they concern the machine all this is built on, not what a customer receives. Mixing them in is why the page stopped being readable.

  • DooPlex's own backup keeps every copy inside the same box, and is silent when it fails. (R-232)
  • 193 old images exist only on this machine, ~27 GB — clutter, not space. (R-210)
  • The hub password needs rotating — a diagnostic printed it into a session log; nothing suggests anyone else saw it. (R-132)
  • After DooPlex next restarts, read /var/log/felhom-store-postboot-check.log — the second-SSD move has never survived a reboot; on PASS, 34 GB comes back. (R-209a)
  • Backup scripts on DooPlex are unversioned host state (R-231), and the instruction-file follow-ups each need a decision rather than an edit (R-229, R-230).
  • The Configuration page is fixed: 26 s → 0.14 s. It was never hashing anything — the hashes are already stored and simply read. It was making 42 calls one after another. Now they overlap, connections are kept, the answer is held for a minute, and the old artifacts are gone. Worst case is 5 s, once a minute at most. Your instinct to prune was right and my measurement said otherwise — trimming to ten of each halved the slow path. (R-267 — closed.)
  • The access token I printed into a log yesterday is rotated, and I checked it both ways: the old one is refused, the new one works, and the machine's own channel is back up. (R-268 — closed.)
  • Our build-check alarm has one gap left. A run that hangs is now cut off after five minutes and the mail says how long it took — but whether the alarm fires at all when the machinery kills a run outright is still unverified, and we have not claimed otherwise. (R-265)