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gates / gates (push) Successful in 7s
store.New opened the DB with `?_journal_mode=WAL&_busy_timeout=5000`, which is mattn/go-sqlite3 syntax. The driver is modernc.org/sqlite, whose applyQueryParams reads only _pragma/_time_format/_time_integer_format/_txlock/_inttotime and IGNORES anything else WITHOUT AN ERROR. So the hub ran in rollback-journal mode with busy_timeout=0 for its entire life while its own source said otherwise. Surfaced as a false HOST STALE banner: in rollback-journal mode a reader excludes a writer, so rendering an operator page blocks a host report; the hub 500s, the agent waits its full 15-minute interval without retrying, and staleness fires at 30 minutes — two collisions is a false alarm plus an operator email. 13 collisions in one pod lifetime; the alarm fired twice on 2026-08-02 for a host that was up two days and reconciling throughout. The observable that proved it: a 128 MB /data/hub.db with no -wal/-shm beside it while the DB was open. Fix: ?_pragma=journal_mode(WAL)&_pragma=busy_timeout(5000)&_txlock=immediate. _txlock=immediate is not optional — database/sql's Begin() is DEFERRED, so a read-then-write tx must upgrade its lock and a failed upgrade is SQLITE_BUSY_SNAPSHOT, which busy_timeout does NOT retry; this store has 10+ db.Begin() sites and they are all write paths. Every test asserts what the DATABASE reports, never the DSN string — a string test would have passed for the whole life of the bug. Red-proof: restoring the shipped DSN reproduces journal_mode="delete", the missing -wal, and the live "database is locked (5) (SQLITE_BUSY)". Operational consequence handled: a WAL DB cannot be copied by taking hub.db alone — a bare `cat` opens cleanly and silently omits the newest writes. The break-glass retrieval in operations/nodes.md used exactly that; it and the recovery-inventory note are now WAL-aware.