felhom.eu/STATUS.md

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

**Updated 2026-08-04.**

> **A view, not a source.** `documentation/backlog/OPEN-ITEMS.md` is the authority on open work; 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 — keep the two separate. **Maintenance:** update
> at the end of every session in which something shipped, broke, or was decided. One screen; cut
> items rather than extend it.

## What works right now

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 — and a customer can
restore files and app data from the drive alone. Apps come back after a power cut: hard-reset the demo
box six times, everything returned every time, and an app switched off deliberately stayed off.
Proven end to end on real hardware.

## What's broken

- **Rebuilding a machine still throws away its off-site backup HISTORY.** The machine invents the key
  that encrypts its own off-site backups, and a rebuilt machine invents a brand-new one, so the old
  backups can no longer be opened by the machine that wrote them. Both demo machines did this on 3–4
  August — demo-hp lost access to 15 backups (41 MB), demo-felhom to 36 (1.14 GB), and **the second one
  happened in silence for thirteen hours**. From today that silence is fixed (below) and the old key
  survives the ceremony (below), but **the rebuild itself still starts a fresh history**, and getting
  the old one back is a path nobody has walked. *(R-193)*
- *(fixed 4 Aug)* ~~The safety net we believed was under all of this is not there.~~ **The central hub
  was keeping the wrong key, and the fix shipped the same day.** When a machine re-seals its backups
  under a new recovery code, the hub keeps the old sealed package — but it was keeping the one for the
  whole-machine backups and **not** the one for the off-site file backups, which is the whole point. And
  because the swap happens in one motion, **the act that destroyed the old key was the recovery-code
  ceremony itself** — the exact thing a rebuilt machine asks its customer to do, on a screen promising
  the old backups stay recoverable. Both keys are now kept. **What this cannot undo:** anything
  superseded before today is gone for good, which includes both demo machines' pre-4-August keys — so
  those 51 orphaned backups were beyond reach even if the recovery codes had been kept. *(R-198)*
- **IT WORKS. A customer's file survived a machine being destroyed and came back — proved last night on
  real hardware, end to end.** We wiped the HP machine's controller data on purpose and deleted the
  marked file from its disk. Using the recovery code you saved: the backup key came back **identical,
  character for character**; the existing off-site store **opened** rather than starting over (the same
  three backups, the same 42 026 bytes as before the wipe); and the file was restored **byte for byte
  identical**. That is the whole backup promise, demonstrated for the first time. *(R-201)*
- **But a customer could not have done it alone, and that is now the open work.** Getting from "the key
  is recoverable" to "the file is back" took four steps that appear in no instructions: re-issuing the
  storage credential; re-claiming the machine (whose local reset-code tool **does not work until the
  controller is restarted** — two attempts failed before we spotted it); manually clearing a "stale"
  mark that the re-issue sets even though the key never changed; and choosing the *full* restore,
  because the default one returns the app's settings and **not** the customer's documents — with
  nothing saying so. **The capability is real; the experience is not built yet.** *(R-204)*
- **One screen still tells the customer something we cannot yet promise.** The „elárvult tároló" card
  says the old backups may later be restorable with the matching recovery code. From today that is true
  for machines that re-seal from now on and **false for anything already orphaned** — and the machine
  cannot tell which case it is in without the recovery path above. We deliberately did **not** patch the
  sentence: a conditional promise that can still be wrong is worse on that screen than a vague one.
  *(R-202)*
- *(fixed 4 Aug)* ~~The weekly off-site backup reports FAILED although it worked.~~ It uploaded fine
  and then tripped on a tidy-up step it is deliberately not allowed to perform. The machine no longer
  asks — tidying up is the endpoint's job, and **that was checked first**: the endpoint has been doing
  it every day since 27 July. Both machines and all future ones. *(R-191)*
- **The off-site copy can be erased by the machine that made it.** The credential that writes it can
  also delete it. A daily snapshot is armed as a stopgap.
  *(R-95, R-87)*

## What shipped recently

- **The daily error email about David is gone.** David's record was created when he said he would try
  Felhom; no machine was ever attached to it, so nothing has ever been expected of it — yet every
  morning at five the system reported that a database backup had not happened. **A customer with no
  machine ever attached now produces no alarm.** A machine that *was* attached and went quiet still
  does, because that is a real fault, and there is a test whose whole job is to make sure a future
  change cannot take that away. David's record was not touched — the record was right; the alarm was
  wrong. **The first quiet morning will be 5 August, so this is not confirmed yet.** *(R-195)*

- **A permission the machine needs can now repair itself — and it tells you it had to.** Yesterday we
  found a permission that vanished with no reinstall and no recorded action; the machine now notices,
  restores it through the same controlled helper that grants it in the first place, and **raises an
  alert saying it was missing and was restored**. The alert is the point: a permission that silently
  fixes itself is one that can be lost over and over and never investigated. Proven twice on a demo
  machine by taking the permission away by hand. *(R-190 — the repair; why it vanished is still open)*

- **The on-machine backup copy has now been proved to restore — by the machines themselves**, both of
  them, overnight and unasked (84 and 109 seconds). Every restore proof before this was of the
  off-site copy. *(R-86, R-185)*
- **Three ways the alarm system was misreporting its own work — all fixed.** None of them ever risked
  data. **(1)** When the machine proved a backup restores, that result could vanish if the agent was
  restarted in the following quarter-hour — and yesterday's change made the gap a week rather than a
  day, because the machine correctly refuses to re-prove an archive it has already proven. It is now
  written to disk with the result and survives. This was caught happening, not predicted: a real
  14.5 GB off-site restore passed and left no record at all. **(2)** Every release had about a
  fifty-fifty chance of emailing you a failure for a release that worked; the version tag is now
  published after the binary, and a new check catches the opposite mistake so nothing is traded away.
  **(3)** A released binary can now be rebuilt by anyone and checked against the fingerprint you
  approve — until today, rebuilding produced different bytes. *(R-189, R-188, R-186)*


## What we're working on

- **Now:** making that journey something a customer can actually follow — the four steps above, worst
  first: the restore default that silently returns the wrong thing. The HP machine is sitting
  mid-drill with the recovered key already on it; it needs re-claiming and one setting confirmed, then
  the backup runs and the file is restored. **Do not let it make a new recovery code** — that would
 The marked file now lands in
  the off-site backup, so there is finally something to recover. Everything else is already in place on
  the HP machine — the recovery code you saved, a working off-site store, the app and the file. Nothing
  has been wiped; that step waits for your go-ahead at a marked stop point. Both honesty fixes shipped today: a changed backup key now
  raises an alarm on the day, and the email that stated the opposite of what it measured now describes
  what it actually saw.
- **Also tomorrow:** confirming what the 04:15 off-site run does on both machines. We expect it to
  refuse and ask, rather than start fresh — but that is a prediction from the code, not something
  anyone has watched happen.
- **Next:** proving the off-site *app-data* copy can actually be restored — the one tier nothing
  tests unattended. Most of the machinery it needed arrived with the restore-test change below.
  *(R-87)*
- **After:** the off-site copy that the machine making it can still erase. *(R-95)*

## Waiting on you

- *(decided 4 Aug — recorded here until the work it unblocks is done)* You chose **not** to keep a
  copy of the backup key on the Proxmox host. That is a coherent choice and it has a consequence worth
  restating: **the customer's own recovery code is now the only route back from a rebuild**, so the
  sealed package the hub keeps is the single copy. Today's fix is what makes that true rather than
  wishful — until this morning the ceremony destroyed it. *(R-193)*
- **Your ruling about the recovery screen has been priced, and it can be built.** You said: a freshly
  installed machine that finds a sealed package waiting should say so loudly, offer the customer a box
  to type their recovery code into, and show what would come back before doing anything. **All of it is
  buildable, and one part is already free** — the hub is *already* telling every machine, on every
  check-in, that a sealed package exists and which key it covers, and the machine currently throws that
  message away. Showing a preview is also cheap: listing what is in an off-site store reads it without
  writing to it, so the customer can see how many backups, from when, and for which apps before
  committing. The real work is one new connection: the unsealing has to happen in the part that runs on
  the Proxmox host, because the customer-facing part cannot do it — the same crossing your recovery-code
  ceremony already makes in the other direction. **One thing for you to weigh, which we deliberately did
  not decide:** a screen that takes a recovery code and then shows what is in a backup store is reachable
  by anyone with the household's dashboard password, and the preview reveals backup dates and app names.
  *(R-193)*
- **Should we run the proof?** Nothing about recovery has ever actually been done, so we designed the
  exercise: on the spare demo machine, make a recovery code and **keep it**, put a marked file into an
  app, back it up off-site, wipe the machine, reinstall, recover with the saved code, and check the
  marked file comes back byte for byte. About half a day, of which under an hour needs you. The failure
  we are watching for is precise: **if the recovered machine reports one backup instead of the ones we
  put there, it started a fresh history and the proof failed** — "the store opened" is not good enough.
  It costs that machine's contents if it goes wrong, which is acceptable there. **You said yes, after
  R-198 — and R-198 shipped this morning, so this is ready to run on your word.** *(R-201)*
- **The orphaned backups on the storage box — you said delete, and it is still owed.** About 1.2 GB
  across the two demo machines, in set-aside stores nobody can open and nothing prunes. Deliberately not
  done today: erasing data on the storage endpoint is not something that should ride along with a
  database change, so it wants its own session. *(R-193)*
- **A job, not a decision: the hub password needs changing.** A diagnostic command printed it into a
  session log; nothing suggests anyone else saw it. *(R-132)*
- **One small question, not urgent.** The automatic check cannot see which version you have told
  machines to install, only which ones exist. Closing that needs either a password given to the build
  server or a check inside the hub itself. *(R-184)*
- **Nothing else.**

## Changed since last update

- **2026-08-04 (night)** — **The drill PASSED.** We destroyed a machine on purpose and the customer's
  file came back byte-for-byte identical, using the recovery code you saved. First time the backup
  story has been proved end to end. It needed four undocumented manual steps to get there, which are
  now the next piece of work. The machine is up, healthy and re-armed. *(R-201, R-204)*
- **2026-08-04 (evening)** — **Fixed the folder-left-out-of-the-backup problem, both halves.** The app
  and its backup now look in the same directory, and a backup that misses a folder marked essential
  reports *incomplete* instead of success. Proved by listing the backup's own contents and finding the
  marked file. The wipe-and-restore proof is unblocked. *(R-203, R-201)*
- **2026-08-04 (late)** — Set up the wipe-and-restore proof on the HP machine and **stopped before the
  wipe**: a folder marked as protected was missing from the off-site backup while the backup reported
  success. Three things were proved on the way, all firsts: a rebuilt machine's off-site backup now
  **refuses and says so** instead of quietly starting over; the "start a new store" repair works and
  keeps the old data aside; and the HP machine's pre-3-August history is gone for good — its key was
  destroyed four hours before the fix that would have kept it. *(R-203, R-201, R-193)*
- **2026-08-04 (evening)** — **Proved the backup key comes back.** A demo machine fetched its own
  sealed package, opened it with the saved recovery code, and produced a key identical to the one it
  uses. A wrong code was refused and wrote nothing. The recovery code left no trace anywhere on the
  machine — searched, with a planted copy first to prove the search worked. *(R-199, R-200)*
- **2026-08-04 (earlier)** — **Fixed the worst of it.** The hub now keeps the off-site backup key when a
  machine re-seals, instead of only the whole-machine one — four lines of database change that stop the
  recovery ceremony from destroying the thing it exists to protect. A changed backup key now raises an
  alarm the same day. The daily email that described the opposite of what it measured now states what it
  saw, and a refusal to auto-repair leaves a record instead of silence. *(R-198, R-197, R-192, R-196)*
- **2026-08-04 (later)** — Established what a machine rebuild actually destroys: not the storage
  password we had been re-issuing, but the key that encrypts the backups. Both demo machines lost
  access to their off-site history, one of them silently. A decision is now waiting on you. The daily
  false alarm about David is fixed. *(R-193, R-195)*
- **2026-08-04** — Both demo machines proved their on-machine backup restores, on their own,
  overnight — the copy an ordinary recovery uses, never tested until now. Found while checking: the
  weekly off-site backup reports failure after a successful upload. *(R-185, R-191)*
- **2026-08-03** — Fixed three ways the alarm system misreported itself: a proof of a working backup
  that could vanish on a restart (seen happening), a release that emailed a failure for a release
  that worked, and a released binary nobody could rebuild and check. *(R-189, R-188, R-186)*