felhom.eu/STATUS.md

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

**Updated 2026-08-06.**

> **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.

**The backup promise is proved. The recovery JOURNEY is not.** On 5 August we built a brand-new
machine from the published disc, gave it three marked files, destroyed it, and tried to get them back
**the way a household would** — no shortcuts, no command line. The files came back **byte for byte
identical**, all three, including one with Hungarian accents in its name. But **the journey needed us
four times**, and the very first thing the machine did was tell the customer their correct recovery
code was wrong. *(CAMPAIGN 11)*

## What's broken

- **A machine installed today still gets the older in-house service, so it cannot open a recovery
  package until you approve the newer one.** It is no longer *lied to* — it says plainly that the
  machine cannot do this yet — but **approving the new service is one click from you**, and until then
  such a machine also gets the cautious "we do not know why" wording rather than the helpful one.
  *(R-216, R-223, R-224)*
- **Three things a rebuilt machine still cannot do by itself.** Its owner cannot re-attach their own
  drives, so no app can be put back on its data; it cannot create a new recovery code at all; and the
  screen at the machine itself never stops showing a stale pairing code. Each is understood, measured
  and written down — none is fixed yet. *(R-220, R-221, R-214)*
- **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 new one. **The good news:
  the old key really is kept now — we proved it on a real machine today, for the first time**, and a
  changed key raises an alarm the same day. *(R-193, R-198)*
- **The kept older backups cannot be opened — by anyone.** We keep the previous sealed package and
  there is no way to open it. The screens now say exactly that and stop. **One place still promises
  otherwise**: the older-backups card says they "may be restorable later with the matching code",
  which is not true today. *(R-222, R-202)*
- **The off-site copy can be erased by the machine that made it.** A daily snapshot is armed as a
  stopgap. *(R-95, R-87)*

## Can a household get their data back on their own? Asked again today — still no, but nearer

We built a **brand-new machine** from the published disc, gave it three marked files, destroyed it —
guest and both drives, as a hardware loss would — and tried to get them back the way a household
would. *(R-201, the re-walk)*

**The files came back perfectly.** All three, byte for byte, including a 12 MB file and one whose
Hungarian accented filename came back **letter-for-letter identical**. Out of the pre-destruction
backup, in **23 seconds**, through the customer's own restore screen.

**And much of the journey now works.** The machine showed the recovery screen **without being asked**,
told the customer what was waiting and when it was sealed, said plainly that nobody can replace a lost
code, and accepted the real code first time. The emailed claim code worked first try.

**But it still needed us twice**, and a household has neither hand:

- **The machine never picks up its own storage connection.** Our hub hands it over and says "the box
  will collect this on its next cycle" — the cycle came and went and it did not. Nothing the customer
  can click fixes it; it took a command inside the machine. *(R-218 — we had recorded this as fixed;
  only half of it was)*
- **A rebuilt machine still cannot re-attach its own drives** — and without them no app can be put
  back, so the restore screen stays empty. *(R-220)*

**Two dead ends, down from four.** The verdict stays **FAILED** until a walk needs us zero times.

**One thing to decide.** A machine installed today still gets the older software — **the fixes are
built and published but not approved for new machines**. We installed them by hand for this test. So
this proves the journey works on the fixed build; it does **not** prove a customer would receive it.

## What we fixed this morning, and what it did not fix

Overnight we tried to break the recovery journey with eleven faults and then left the machine alone
for a full cycle. Nothing lost a byte; the set-aside backups really were kept; the alarm fired and
cleared itself. What it found was that **the machine blamed the customer for failures that were not
theirs** — our hub being unreachable came back as "your recovery code is wrong", in three hundredths
of a second, without the machine even trying. **That is fixed and deployed** *(R-224, R-226)*, along
with three smaller truths: "0 snapshots" where the answer is "we have not looked yet" *(R-225)*, a raw
English error mid-recovery *(R-227)*, and set-aside backups that had become invisible *(R-228)*.

**None of that shortened the journey**, which is why today's re-walk above still says FAILED — the two
remaining dead ends are different ones.

## What shipped recently

- **2026-08-06 (later)** — **The page that says which machine may be wrecked had one wrong sentence,
  and it has been checked against the machine rather than corrected from memory.** It claimed the
  spare HP box keeps no off-site copy, and used that as the reason to aim risky backup tests at the
  other one. The HP box **does** keep an off-site copy — two of them, the newest from 4 August, in
  its own space on the off-site server. The sentence was true when it was written and went out of
  date on 23 July. It matters because a belief that a machine holds nothing is how a destructive test
  lands on one that does. Also today: the notes the assistant keeps had three statements that were
  simply untrue (including that the demo boxes were still away) — those three are fixed, the rest are
  now flagged automatically rather than rewritten by hand. *(R-229, R-230)*
- **2026-08-06** — **The assistant's own working notes were on one machine with no copy anywhere.**
  Everything the assistant has learned about this system over months — where things live, which traps
  cost us an incident — sat in a folder on the build machine that no backup touched and no repository
  held. It is now included in that machine's nightly backup. **Two things you should know before
  treating that as solved:** the copy lands on the **same physical disk** as the original, so it
  survives a mistake but not a dead drive, and the build machine's backups have **no off-site copy at
  all**. **A full survey of that machine's backup, done the same day, confirmed both and found two
  more things worth knowing.** The good news first: it has run every night without missing a set, and
  we pulled a file back out of it and checked it matched the original exactly — the first time that
  has ever been demonstrated. The rest: **if a backup ever fails, nobody is told** — the alert was
  configured but never given anywhere to send to — and **every copy it makes stays inside that one
  box**, so it survives any single disk dying but not the room. Nothing was changed; the survey was
  read-only and the decisions are yours. Also tidied the same day: a quarter of those notes had become unreachable — filed but listed
  nowhere, so nothing would ever read them — and the instructions the assistant reads at the start of
  every session were cut roughly in half, with a check added so they cannot quietly grow back. Nothing
  was deleted. *(R-229, R-230, R-231)*
- **2026-08-05 (late)** — **New machines now get current software again — and the disc image had been
  quietly un-updatable for days.** Approving the newer in-house service turned out to be impossible on
  its own: the system correctly refuses to publish a set where the pre-built machine image is older
  than the software the fleet already runs, and that image had been behind since late July. **So the
  image was rebuilt and both were published together.** A machine installed from now on lands on
  current software and can open a recovery package on day one. *(R-223)*

- **2026-08-05 (evening)** — **Four sentences where there was one, and none of them blames you.**
  "We did not accept your recovery code" used to appear when the code was wrong, when the machine
  could not ask, when the store could not be read, and when the customer held the code for an older
  backup we still keep. Only the first is the customer's doing. Also today: succeeding at recovery no
  longer switches off the machine's own request for the thing it still needs; the screen now finishes
  the job and shows what is in the backups instead of promising a list it could never produce; and the
  recovery page can no longer be reached on a machine that never had backups.
  *(R-216, R-217, R-218, R-219, R-222, R-215)*

- **2026-08-05** — **The recovery screen: a customer whose machine was rebuilt is now told, and shown
  how.** Until today they had everything needed to get their data back and no way to find out — the
  only route was a command line. The screen unlocks the backups and lists what is in them; it does
  **not** restore anything, because unlocking and restoring are two different decisions and mixing
  them would turn one clear moment into a wizard. Three ways out, none of them a dismiss button — and
  the „most nem" option keeps the route to the data permanently visible in the backups area, because
  a notice someone clicks past once is a notice that never happened. *(R-193)*

- **2026-08-05** — **The orphaned backups are deleted — and the list you were given was wrong, which
  is why you were asked again.** You had approved "about 1.2 GB in two set-aside stores". Measured
  before touching anything: there were **three** set-aside stores totalling **~1.45 GB** — and the
  thing that was exactly 1.2 GB was demo-felhom's **live** store. Matching on the size would have
  deleted a working backup. With the corrected list confirmed, all three were removed and both live
  stores left alone; a real off-site backup ran successfully straight afterwards to prove nothing
  working had been caught. *(R-212)*

- **2026-08-05** — **A rebuilt machine now asks for its storage credential, and the hub gives it back.**
  The machine says plainly what it needs — it can tell it has been rebuilt, because its data area is
  empty *and* the hub is holding a sealed recovery package for it — instead of leaving the hub to guess
  from a silence that has four possible meanings. The hub waits long enough to be sure it is not a
  restart, then **re-uses the credential it already holds** before creating a new one at the storage
  provider. **The recovery ceremony stays manual, deliberately:** a credential can be replaced, your
  recovery code cannot. *(R-204 item 4, R-193)*

- **2026-08-05** — **The DooPlex server's disk is out of danger: 86% full → 54%, and the storage layer
  is unstuck.** The cause was leftover working data from building our own software — 157 GB of it,
  growing about 5 GB a day, which nothing was allowed to delete. **148 GB came back in 86 seconds.**
  The storage layer had already stopped accepting new copies of any volume onto that disk; that is
  fixed the same day. A **30 GB ceiling** is now in place and was **proved to work by deliberately
  overfilling it and watching it evict** — not by assuming the setting took. Two things that failed
  quietly around it: the warning meant to catch exactly this **could never fire** (fixed and proved),
  and the weekly cleanup is still forbidden from touching the thing that grows (next session).
  *(R-205 … R-211)*
- **2026-08-05** — **The build data now lives on the second SSD, moved with nothing lost.** All 345
  images, every saved volume and both development databases came through identical — checked before
  the original was touched and again afterwards, and confirmed by running a real build on the moved
  copy. **The server's own services never went down:** Gitea, the registry, the hub and the backup
  system run on a separate system and stayed up throughout. The second SSD now also **reserves 80 GB**
  for this, so the storage layer can no longer quietly claim the space and repeat what happened to the
  first disk. The old copy is kept as the way back until the machine next restarts. *(R-209)*
- **2026-08-05** — **Three of the four recovery crutches removed.** The reset code works first time;
  a credential re-issue no longer blocks off-site backups on a healthy machine; and the default
  restore no longer quietly returns the wrong thing. *(R-204 items 1–3, R-196)*
- **2026-08-04 (night)** — **The drill PASSED**, end to end, on real hardware. *(R-201)*
- **2026-08-04** — The folder-left-out-of-the-backup problem fixed both halves: the app and its backup
  look in the same directory, and a backup that misses a folder marked essential reports *incomplete*
  instead of success. *(R-203)*
- **2026-08-04** — The hub now keeps the off-site backup key when a machine re-seals, instead of only
  the whole-machine one, and a machine can fetch its own sealed package back. *(R-198, R-199)*
- **2026-08-04** — The daily false alarm about David is gone; a vanished permission now repairs itself
  **and says it had to**; the weekly off-site backup stopped reporting failure after a successful
  upload. *(R-195, R-190, R-191)*

## What we're working on

- **Next: the retention proof.** The hub keeping the old sealed key when a machine re-seals is the one
  remaining link that has **never run outside a test**. Proving it needs a second deliberate wipe on
  the spare demo machine, and it is its own procedure. *(R-198)*
- **Then:** the orphaned-backup deletion you asked for (below), and the off-site copy the machine can
  still erase. *(R-193, R-95)*

## Waiting on you


- **One thing to read after the machine next restarts — and nothing to do until then.** You told me
  not to restart DooPlex, so I did not, and the move to the second SSD has therefore never been
  through a restart. It works right now and nothing was lost, but a restart is the one test that
  matters for this kind of change, and it has not happened. **I made it check itself:** whenever the
  machine next starts, for any reason, it writes a plain PASS or FAIL line to
  `/var/log/felhom-store-postboot-check.log`. **If it says PASS, the old copy can be deleted and 34 GB
  comes back.** Until then I have deliberately kept that old copy, which is the only quick way back —
  it is why the disk sits at 54% rather than lower. *(R-209a)*
- **One list to rule on: 193 old images that exist only on this machine.** 131 controller versions and
  62 hub versions are not in the registry, so they cannot be re-downloaded — all of them old
  (controller up to 0.135.0, hub up to 0.57.0; everything newer is safely in the registry). **Nothing
  was deleted.** Worth knowing before you spend time on it: they only account for about 27 GB against
  199 GB now free, so this is about clutter, not space. *(R-210)*
- **Nothing.**
- **The recovery screen you described has been priced, and it can be built.** A freshly installed
  machine that finds a sealed package waiting should say so, offer a box for the recovery code, and
  show what would come back before doing anything. One thing to weigh, deliberately not decided: that
  screen is reachable by anyone with the household's dashboard password, and the preview reveals
  backup dates and app names. *(R-193)*
- **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. It wants its
  own session rather than riding along with other work. *(R-193)*
- *(decided 4 Aug)* You chose **not** to keep a copy of the backup key on the Proxmox host, which
  makes the customer's own recovery code the only route back from a rebuild. *(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 version check cannot see which version you have
  told machines to install, only which ones exist. *(R-184)*