The dashboard now carries a type: clock card, which the browser draws
at capture time — so the time in the image is already the time the
screenshot was taken, and the renderer's overlay would print it twice.
Supersedes the overlay added a commit ago, which was itself replacing a
Home Assistant template sensor that fired a state-changed event and
wrote a recorder row every minute. The card does the same job with no
entity, no event and no row.
Pairs with homeassistant#221.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Sets the schedule's `timestamp` option, which the renderer already
supports and which I had written out as false without asking what it
did — the same mistake as leaving `lang` null.
The freshness stamp was a Home Assistant template sensor formatting
now(). That fired a state-changed event, woke every listener and wrote
a recorder row EVERY MINUTE, forever, so the panel could draw a line of
text. Pairs with homeassistant#221, which deletes it.
Baking it into the PNG is also more correct, not just cheaper. The
panel is poll-only and shows the last image indefinitely if the
renderer dies, so the stamp exists to prove the image is fresh. A time
read from an entity proves Home Assistant was alive when the shot was
taken; a time drawn by the renderer proves the RENDER happened, which
is the failure actually being guarded against.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The renderer's init container writes /data/schedules.json ONCE, at pod
start, and nothing re-reads either source afterwards. So a ConfigMap or
Secret change lands in git, updates the object, and the running
renderer keeps the old values indefinitely.
The app re-reads schedules.json every 60 seconds, which makes it look
self-updating. It is not — it re-reads the FILE, and only the init
container writes the file.
This was hit three times in practice, each needing `kubectl delete pod`
by hand:
* switching the theme to Graphite E-ink Light — the pod kept
rendering with a theme name that no longer existed
* setting the schedule's lang field to "de"
* every re-mint of the BYOS tokens, which is the Secret half
The theme case is the instructive one: nothing errored. HA silently
served the default theme for a name that did not resolve, so the panel
just looked wrong, and I was about to debug the design.
Annotates both sources. Named per-resource rather than the blanket
reloader.stakater.com/auto: "true", matching terminus.yaml and
mosquitto-deployment.yaml.
Terminus got this annotation earlier; the renderer did not, despite
having the same init-container pattern and hitting the same failure in
the same session.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
lang was null, so the screenshot session rendered in English — and the
dashboard grew a German weekday array, a German month array and a
fifteen-entry weather-condition dict to translate around it by hand.
The field is documented as "UI language code (HA mode only)" and calls
Home Assistant's own _selectLanguage() on the page before capture;
upstream's tests use lang: 'de'. So localisation is HA's job and the
field was sitting in the schedule template, already written out, set to
null because I copied the shape without asking what it did.
Pairs with homeassistant#220, which deletes both hand-written mappings:
the weather badge points at weather.garten directly and the date is a
device_class: timestamp the frontend formats.
The instance stays language "en". This affects only the render session,
so the panel is German without changing anyone's UI.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The renderer stopped pushing and the panel preview froze. Every webhook:
HTTP 401: Unauthorized - This session has expired, please login again
Terminus has TWO independent expiries and the earlier fix only addressed
one. API_ACCESS_TOKEN_PERIOD governs the JWT's own lifetime and is now
10 years. SESSION_EXPIRATION_ENABLED / SESSION_INACTIVITY_LIMIT govern
the SESSION BEHIND that token and were left at their defaults, so a
valid, decade-long token stopped being accepted after about half an
hour of session inactivity.
Worth being precise, because the two look alike and are not: the first
failure was 400 "expired JWT access token", the token itself. This is
401 "This session has expired", the session. Different mechanism,
different error, same symptom — a panel that silently stops updating.
I noticed both expiries when diagnosing the first one, wrote that
Terminus "has two independent expiries", and then fixed one and moved
on. That is the actual mistake here, not the missing variable.
Disabling session expiry is the state the renderer's own code already
assumes ("stock Terminus disables session expiration"), which is false
by default and has to be made true here — the same shape as the token
period. And it is the deciding constraint for an unattended appliance:
a session that expires needs a human with a password to restore it, and
a hallway panel has neither.
Reloader will roll the pod; the ConfigMap annotation added earlier
covers this. Existing tokens must be re-minted afterwards — the current
session is already dead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The renderer's own docs recommend Graphite by name — "Use e-ink theme
(Graphite recommended)", with theme=Graphite in the example — and the
Home Assistant community converges on it independently. The dashboard
now ships graphite-eink-light.yaml (homeassistant repo) in place of the
theme I hand-wrote from a spec sheet.
Pairs with homeassistant#216. The theme name must match the key inside
the vendored file exactly ("Graphite E-ink Light"); a name that does not
resolve fails silently — HA serves the default theme and the panel just
looks wrong rather than erroring.
Note upstream's example also passes `dark`. Not used here: the e-ink
LIGHT variant is the one that gives black-on-white, which is what an
e-paper panel wants. `dark: false` stays.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The setting was treated as an unverified assumption in review, and I
repeated that framing. It was not one.
Upstream's doc/configuration.adoc documents the variable and its
1800-second default in as many words, and this instance corroborated it
empirically: a token minted here was rejected roughly thirty minutes
later, which is the documented default behaving exactly as written.
Documentation plus matching observed behaviour is not an assumption.
The reviewer's uncertainty was reasonable — Terminus's source is not
vendored in this repo, so from the checkout alone the claim is
unsupported. The failing was mine for citing nothing at the point of
use, which is the same gap as the /health probe earlier: the evidence
existed and was not written where a reader could find it. Quotes the
documentation inline so the question is answerable from the manifest.
Note this does not make the post-merge check redundant. Whether Terminus
honours the variable is settled here; whether this ConfigMap edit
actually reached the running process via Reloader is a separate
question, and that is what decoding the new token's exp claim answers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review's remaining point: with API_ACCESS_TOKEN_PERIOD at 10 years,
nothing will ever expire the renderer's BYOS token or prompt anyone to
rotate it. Left undocumented, "never rotated" is indistinguishable from
"forgotten".
Records it where it is discoverable — the rotation directory itself,
whose purpose is that unrotated credentials are a visible choice rather
than an omission. Notes why there is no rotator: minting a Terminus JWT
requires the account password, which is precisely the secret this design
declined to hold in-cluster, so a rotator would have to store the thing
the long-lived token exists to avoid. Rotation is therefore manual, tied
to the Terminus account password changing.
Also flags that HA_ACCESS_TOKEN in the same OpenBao path is a different
case: secret-rotator already has an `ha-token` mode (home-assistant.yaml
uses it), so enrolling that one is a real follow-up rather than a
limitation, and doing so would leave only the BYOS pair unrotated.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review caught that this PR, as it stood, would not have fixed the
outage it describes.
terminus-config is consumed via envFrom, and env vars are read once at
container start — Kubernetes does not hot-reload them. The ConfigMap is
a plain resource rather than a configMapGenerator, so editing it does
not change the pod template hash and Flux will not roll the pods
either. Stakater Reloader is deployed but acts only on annotated
workloads, and this Deployment carried no annotation.
Net effect would have been a silent no-op: git and the ConfigMap object
would show a 10-year token period while the running app kept issuing
30-minute tokens, and the re-mint step in the PR plan would have
produced another short-lived token that looked correct and expired
anyway. The manifest and reality would disagree with nothing to
indicate it.
Annotates for terminus-config specifically rather than the blanket
reloader.stakater.com/auto: "true", matching the reasoning already
recorded on mosquitto-deployment.yaml — enrolling anything further
stays a visible, reviewable edit to that line.
Verified Reloader is actually running (kube-system/reloader-reloader).
This also removes a manual step rather than documenting one, which is
the point: a fix that needs a human to remember `kubectl rollout
restart` is not deployed, it is a runbook entry waiting to be missed.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The renderer renders correctly and pushes nothing. Every webhook is
rejected:
[webhook] Webhook failed: 400 {"error":"expired JWT access token"}
[webhook] BYOS auth: refresh failed (400) {"error":"expired JWT ..."}
Terminus issues API JWTs with API_ACCESS_TOKEN_PERIOD, default 1800s.
Minting a replacement via POST /api/jwt requires a still-VALID access
token in the Authorization header, so an expired token cannot refresh
itself — the second line above is the refresh attempt being rejected by
the very expiry it was trying to repair. There is no recovery path once
the window closes.
That makes "mint once, store in OpenBao" unworkable for an unattended
appliance, which is what this stack is. The renderer's own code assumes
"stock Terminus disables session expiration and issues effectively
permanent tokens"; that is not true of this deployment. Rather than work
around the assumption in the client, this makes it true: sets
API_ACCESS_TOKEN_PERIOD to 10 years.
The trade is deliberate. A long-lived JWT with full Terminus API rights
now sits in OpenBao. The alternative was putting the Terminus account
PASSWORD into the cluster so an init container could mint a short-lived
token on every pod start — a strictly worse secret to hold, for a
LAN-only service whose token is revocable by rotating the account.
Also corrects the obtained_at comment on the renderer, which justified
stamping "now" by repeating that same false permanence assumption.
Stamping now is safe ONLY because of this setting; against the 30-minute
default it is actively harmful, because the app would believe a stale
token had a fresh window, skip its proactive refresh, and strand itself.
The comment now says so, and says what to do if this setting is reverted.
The period is fixed at mint time, so this does not revive the existing
tokens — they must be re-minted after it deploys.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Follow-up to the HOME=/tmp fix in this PR, from review.
Pointing HOME at /tmp was correct but left it on the container's
writable layer, which was harmless while Chromium crashed on launch and
wrote nothing. With the browser actually starting once a minute for the
life of the pod, crashpad state and profile data now accumulate there
with nothing to bound them — resources.limits sets memory only, so
there is no ephemeral-storage ceiling to catch it either.
Backs it with an emptyDir at a 512Mi sizeLimit, matching the /tmp mount
convention already used in pve-exporter-deployment.yaml. The point of
the limit is the failure mode, not the size: unbounded it degrades into
node disk pressure, which surfaces far from this pod and hurts whatever
else lands on that node; bounded it is an eviction of the renderer,
attributable on sight.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two runtime faults from the first deploy. Neither is visible statically
— both needed the pod running to find.
1. The browser never launched. Every render died with
chrome_crashpad_handler: --database is required
Chromium cannot start without a writable HOME: crashpad builds its
database path from it. Diagnosed on the pod rather than guessed —
HOME=/, uid=1000, / is root-owned 0755 and not writable, /tmp is.
The cause is OUR securityContext, not the image: forcing
runAsUser 1000 with no matching passwd entry makes HOME fall back
to "/". Sets HOME=/tmp; crash dumps are throwaway, so they do not
belong on the PVC.
Worth being precise about, because review had flagged the dropped
capabilities as the likely Chromium risk and the comment I added
said they were fine. The capabilities were fine. Something adjacent
to that securityContext broke it anyway, and the comment now says
to check HOME before loosening the capability block.
2. Even once the browser works, nothing would have been pushed. The
scheduler logged
BYOS tokens ... expired beyond the refresh window
and skipped the webhook entirely. It derives token age from
obtained_at, and the template shipped a literal 0, so
freshly-minted tokens read as dating from 1970. The init container
now stamps it with jq's `now * 1000 | floor` at write time.
Verified the filter produces a 13-digit epoch-ms value. Stock
Terminus disables session expiry and issues effectively permanent
tokens, so a write-time stamp is honest enough.
Failure mode of the pair was quiet in the way this stack keeps being
quiet: pod Running and Ready, /health passing, schedule firing once a
minute, zero screens reaching Terminus.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both were verified against the upstream image while writing this, but
the evidence never made it into the manifest, so review flagged them as
unverified assumptions. Fair — the reasoning was invisible.
/health is not a guess: the image's own Dockerfile declares
`HEALTHCHECK ... curl -f http://localhost:10000/health`, so the route is
part of its published contract. That is the difference from
terminus.yaml, which got TCP-only probes precisely because Terminus
publishes no health endpoint.
Dropping ALL capabilities is safe despite the container running headless
Chromium because the app launches it with --no-sandbox
--disable-setuid-sandbox --no-zygote --disable-dev-shm-usage, baked into
its own PUPPETEER_ARGS. That last flag is also why no /dev/shm emptyDir
is mounted. Both hold only for the pinned tag, so the comment says to
re-check on a bump.
No behaviour change.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review caught a blocking bug, correctly. HOME_ASSISTANT_URL pointed at
http://ha.renner.uno:8123, which is unusable from inside a pod.
That hostname is served by the home-assistant-bgp LoadBalancer with
externalTrafficPolicy: Local, advertised to the LAN over BGP. It is
not backed by an Ingress, so CoreDNS's k8s_gateway delegation does not
intercept it — a pod resolving it gets the real external address
(10.2.99.87) and hairpins off the LB.
This cluster has hit precisely this before with precisely this
Service. kubernetes/infrastructure/openbao/rotation/home-assistant.yaml
reaches HA from a pod for token rotation and says so outright: "The
public name is unusable from a pod (ingress-LB hairpin)." The same
language recurs in the gitea and woodpecker network policies. I took
the hostname from the repo's own "internal http://ha.renner.uno:8123"
note, which is true for a workstation and false from a pod.
Now uses home-assistant-bgp.home-assistant.svc.cluster.local:8123,
verified to exist with ClusterIP 10.96.79.213 on 8123/TCP.
Fixing the URL alone was not enough. The home-assistant namespace's
default-deny-ingress had no rule admitting trmnl pods on 8123 — the
only 8123 rule is scoped to the openbao secret-rotator — so traffic
would still have been dropped. Adds a companion ingress rule modelled
on the rotator's, scoped to the renderer's pod label rather than the
whole trmnl namespace, since Terminus shares that namespace and has no
business reaching Home Assistant. Only the ingress half is needed:
trmnl has no default-deny egress selecting the renderer, unlike
openbao.
Worth naming the failure mode, because it is the fourth "fails
quietly" case in this stack: nothing crashes. The schedule fires every
minute, each render errors on connect, and the panel simply never
updates.
Also updates the trmnl-daily Velero comment, which enumerated PVCs and
so undersold itself once trmnl-renderer-data existed — the schedule
selects the namespace minus CNPG-labelled PVCs, so new PVCs are
already covered without editing it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Resolves the one field flagged as unverified on the renderer PR, now
that a Terminus API token exists to check it with.
GET /api/screens on the running instance returns model_id as a NUMBER
(an existing welcome screen carries model_id 11), and GET /api/models
gives TRMNL X as id 1, name "v2", 1872x1404, 16 colours. Upstream's
example value "og_1bit" matches no model on this server at all — the
2-bit OG model here is id 11, name "og_plus" — so that example was
illustrative rather than a real identifier.
Would have surfaced as Terminus rejecting every pushed screen with a
422, i.e. a permanently blank panel with the renderer looking healthy.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phase 4. Screenshots the Home Assistant e-ink dashboard, dithers it to
16 greys and hands it to Terminus, which the panel then polls.
Upstream ships this as a Home Assistant add-on. Ours is a plain HA
container with no Supervisor, so it runs standalone — viable because
the app prefers HOME_ASSISTANT_URL/ACCESS_TOKEN env vars over
/data/options.json and authenticates with an ordinary long-lived
token. SUPERVISOR_TOKEN is deliberately left unset: it only flips an
internal isAddOn flag and would switch the app to add-on behaviour.
The non-obvious part is the direction of travel. With the byos-hanami
webhook in `uri` delivery mode the renderer does NOT push image bytes
— it POSTs a URL pointing at its own /output/<file> endpoint and
TERMINUS FETCHES THE IMAGE BACK. That is why this lives in the trmnl
namespace: the fetch is intra-namespace and already permitted by
default-deny-ingress. Splitting the two across namespaces would have
needed a new policy for a dependency that is easy to miss.
Fully declarative, no clicks. Schedules are a JSON file at
/data/schedules.json which the app re-reads every 60s, so the whole
schedule — viewport 1872x1404, floyd-steinberg at bitDepth 4, the
trmnl-eink theme, the dashboard path — is reviewable in git rather
than typed into the app's web UI. An init container splices the BYOS
tokens into the ConfigMap template with jq; jq rather than sed because
the tokens are JWTs going into a JSON string and sed would corrupt on
any character it treats as special (verified with a token containing
/ + &).
No HTTP in the init container on purpose. The app exposes a
/api/byos/login proxy that trades a Terminus username+password for
these tokens, but using it would mean shipping the Terminus PASSWORD
into the cluster and making every pod start depend on a network call.
Stock Terminus disables session expiry and issues effectively
permanent tokens, so they are minted once out of band and kept in
OpenBao; the password never enters the cluster.
Three things that are load-bearing and would fail quietly otherwise:
* The PVC at /data is REQUIRED. The app picks its data directory by
testing whether /data exists — with nothing mounted it silently
falls back to /app/data in the container, so schedules and rendered
output vanish on restart and the panel goes blank.
* The Service is ClusterIP with NO Ingress. The app's web UI on this
port has no authentication whatsoever, per upstream, so it must not
be routable from the LAN.
* The memory limit is 2Gi, not the 512Mi upstream's troubleshooting
note suggests. The app's own watchdog restarts it past 900MB but
only measures its OWN rss — Chromium is a separate process, and it
is rendering a 1872x1404 page.
The image is arch-suffixed (trmnl-ha-amd64); upstream publishes no
multi-arch manifest. Pinned and not enrolled in image automation,
since a bad bump here surfaces as a corrupted or blank panel rather
than a failed rollout — rationale recorded in the image-automation
README alongside Terminus's.
PREREQUISITE: homelab/apps/trmnl/renderer must be seeded in OpenBao
with HA_ACCESS_TOKEN, BYOS_ACCESS_TOKEN and BYOS_REFRESH_TOKEN before
this merges, or the ExternalSecret never syncs, the init container
blocks, and the trmnl Kustomization fails its wait.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Two things the first reconcile surfaced.
Cilium IPAM allocated 10.2.99.0 for the device LoadBalancer. Nothing
requested it — the Service carried no lbipam.cilium.io/ips annotation, so
IPAM handed out the first free address in the pool block, which is the base
address of the 10.2.99.0-10.2.99.255 range. Each LB address is advertised
to the UDM as its own BGP route, so it is routable in principle, but a .0
host address is exactly the sort of thing constrained embedded IP stacks
get wrong, and the TRMNL firmware is the one client that has to work here.
Requesting .89 explicitly also brings this in line with every other LB
Service in the repo, all of which pin their address, and matches the
fd99::89 IPAM had already chosen for v6.
Omitting the annotation was my call on the original PR, on the reasoning
that the device is provisioned with a hostname so the address could move
freely. That reasoning still holds; it just is not worth spending it on an
address nobody picked.
Second, the sidekiq container exits 1 once on a fresh deploy with
`PG::UndefinedTable: relation "account" does not exist` — it loses the race
against the web container's migration, then comes up healthy on the
restart. Observed on the first deploy, converged in about a second. There
is no upstream ordering hook, and gating it behind an initContainer that
probes for a named table would couple us to Terminus's schema, so this is
left to Kubernetes' restart deliberately. Documented in place so the next
person reading `RESTARTS 1` can tell the benign case from a real one.
Verified on the live cluster before this commit: Kustomization Ready, tr-pg
"Cluster in healthy state" on PostgreSQL 18, both ExternalSecrets
SecretSynced, terminus and valkey Running.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Phase 1 of the TRMNL X dashboard plan: stand up the self-hosted Terminus
(BYOS) server the panel will poll. The Home Assistant dashboard, the e-ink
theme and the screenshot renderer are later phases and are not in here.
Phase 0 verification, all confirmed against upstream before writing any of
this:
* TRMNL X IS a first-class model in Terminus (id v2 / label "TRMNL X",
1872x1404, 16 colours, 4-bit) — the stop-and-report condition in the
plan does not trigger. Note it is NOT in config/db/seeds.rb: the model
list is populated by the MODEL_SYNCHRONIZER job pulling trmnl.com, so
the Models list is empty until that job has run once.
* The HA add-on can run standalone. Our HA is plain HA Core, not
Supervised, but the add-on reads env vars in preference to
/data/options.json and authenticates with an ordinary long-lived
token — SUPERVISOR_TOKEN only flips an isAddOn boolean. So the
fallback path in the plan (upstream container, not add-on) is viable.
That deployment lands with Phase 4.
Deviations from the repo's house patterns, each deliberate:
* tr-pg runs PostgreSQL 18, not the standard 16. Terminus ships a
committed config/db/structure.sql containing `SET transaction_timeout
= 0;`, a GUC that does not exist before PG 17, so schema load against
a 16 server fails outright. This is the first non-16 CNPG cluster
here. The existing 16 pin is inherited from 739a67e9 (Apr 2026) and
has no documented rationale.
* The device endpoint is cleartext HTTP on a Cilium BGP LoadBalancer
(trmnl-device.renner.uno) rather than an Ingress. The firmware cannot
be given the internal CA, and a TLS-less Ingress would be a new
pattern for this repo — a dedicated LB address is not. The admin UI
keeps a normal TLS Ingress at trmnl.renner.uno; both front the same
Service. Same split as home.renner.uno / ha.renner.uno.
* ghcr.io/usetrmnl/terminus is NOT enrolled in image automation despite
publishing a usable tag stream. It serves the firmware and
/api/display contract to a wall-mounted device, upstream is pre-1.0
with no releases or changelog, and an unattended bump that breaks
either leaves the panel dark. Bumps are manual and reviewed. The
Valkey sidecar is enrolled — it touches no device-facing contract.
* Egress is an FQDN allowlist (trmnl.com, plus the S3 host that serves
firmware binaries), not toEntities: world. The S3 host is returned by
the API at request time rather than being a source constant, so it can
drift; the policy comment says where to look when firmware sync
starts failing. This also means Terminus's Extensions/Poll feature,
which fetches admin-configured URLs, will not work — accepted, since
screen content is pushed in by the renderer.
* The CNPG pods are deliberately left OUT of that egress policy so the
barman WAL archive path is not behind a rule that fails closed.
Images verified to exist in their registries before pinning:
ghcr.io/usetrmnl/terminus:0.68.0, valkey/valkey:9.1-alpine,
ghcr.io/cloudnative-pg/postgresql:18.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Prometheus and Loki run in Kubernetes -- statefulsets
prometheus-kube-prometheus-stack-prometheus and the Loki release, both up 93
days. The standalone VMs these plays targeted are gone: neither
prometheus.srv.renner.uno nor loki.srv.renner.uno resolves at all, and the
proxmox_logging group install-log-aggregation.yml targets is not in the
inventory.
So these rendered scrape configs, exporter installs and log shippers for
hosts that do not exist. Removed:
plays/install-prometheus.yml -> prometheus.srv.renner.uno (gone)
plays/install-blackbox-exporter.yml -> prometheus.srv.renner.uno (gone)
plays/install-loki.yml -> loki.srv.renner.uno (gone)
plays/install-log-aggregation.yml -> proxmox_logging (no such group)
roles/prometheus-server, snmp-exporter, pve-exporter, unifi-poller,
roles/blackbox-exporter, loki-server, promtail
Each role was consumed only by the plays above; promtail was referenced by
nothing at all. Verified no dangling references remain.
plays/update.yml imported install-log-aggregation.yml, so deleting it alone
would have broken the fleet update play. That import is removed and
update.yml re-syntax-checked.
This also retires #473, which changed IPv4 literals to FQDNs in
prometheus.yml.j2 and nodes.yml.j2. That was a change to a template nothing
renders. Its PR body described the instance-label consequences for
dashboards and alert rules, which was fiction -- no dashboard reads those
labels. When it would not apply I reported it as blocked on Proxmox API
credentials; the actual reason was that the target host had not existed for
months, and `--list-hosts` returning 0 was the evidence I misread.
Worth checking separately, not assumed here: whether anything scrapes the
PVE node_exporter and chrony_exporter today. install-node-exporter-pve.yml
still installs them on pve_cluster, but the config that pointed a Prometheus
at them was in the templates just deleted. If that was the only reference,
those metrics have been dark since the VM went away -- and the FQDN change
in #473 would have masked the question rather than raising it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The image shipped without [unix_http_server], [rpcinterface:supervisor] or
[supervisorctl], so supervisorctl could not connect:
Error: .ini file does not include supervisorctl section
That means no way to query or restart an individual service inside the
container -- docker logs was the only introspection. Per-service lifecycle
management was the whole argument for running a supervisor instead of one
process per container, and the first revision did not actually deliver it.
Unix socket only, inside the container. Nothing outside needs it, and this
container runs with host networking, so a TCP listener would be exposed on
the host.
The build-time self-test now asserts the section exists and supervisorctl
runs, so this cannot regress silently the way it shipped.
NOT fixed here, because my diagnosis was wrong: the repeated
"mqtt broker disconnected. reason_code = Unspecified error" is not a client
ID collision. E3onCAN has no -mcid option at all -- verified against the
pinned source -- and generates its own ID; the native broker log showed
E3onCANclient.py-e380-7f847281 alongside open3e-edge, so the two never
collided. I nearly "fixed" it by passing a flag that does not exist.
Telemetry is flowing (each reconnect succeeds), so this is churn rather than
an outage, but the cause is still unidentified. The next step is the broker's
own log on edge-1 -- mosquitto records the disconnect reason, which the
client side reports only as "Unspecified error".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The migration did not stop anything. It ran stop + disable + mask in one
call with failed_when: false, then deleted the unit files. Masking a unit
whose file still exists conflicts, so the call failed, failed_when hid the
failure, nothing was stopped -- and the next task deleted the unit files out
from under two running processes.
That left systemctl is-enabled reporting "not-found", which looks clean,
while is-active still said "active". I reported the cutover successful on
the strength of the former.
On 2026-08-10 the result was two open3e instances issuing UDS requests on
the same CAN bus from 19:28 to 19:37, taking over each other's
open3e-edge MQTT session -- the exact failure the block's own comment said
it existed to prevent.
Fixed in three parts:
- Stop and disable FIRST, and do not swallow the result. Only units that
actually exist are touched (stat first), so a fresh host does not need
an error hidden to get through.
- No masking. It writes a symlink at the same path the next task removes,
so the two cancel out. With the unit files gone there is nothing to
start.
- Assert the invariant that actually matters -- no native process on the
CAN bus -- rather than inferring it from systemd reporting success.
pgrep, then fail loudly with the surviving command lines and why it
matters.
Verified against the live host: ok=15 changed=1 failed=0, the assert passing
with "No native CAN processes remain; safe to start the container", and the
run now idempotent (the single change is the compose up, not the teardown).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
#476 merged first, which removed edge_open3e_pkg, edge_e3oncan_repo and
edge_e3oncan_version in favour of the image. The audit entry added here still
told the agent to read those, so it would have gone looking for variables
that no longer exist and reported nothing -- the same silent non-auditing the
entry was written to prevent.
Repointed at where the pins actually live now: OPEN3E_REF and E3ONCAN_REF as
ARGs in ci/images/heating-can/Containerfile. The awkward specifics carry over
unchanged, since they are properties of the upstreams rather than of how we
package them: open3e publishes no tags so the comparison must be against
commits, and E3onCAN's pin is an untagged commit later than its newest tag.
Added a note the previous version could not have made: heating_can_image is
:latest, so the node follows whatever CI last built. The Containerfile ARGs
are what actually fix the versions, and bumping one is what requires a
rebuild -- otherwise a reader could reasonably conclude the tag is the pin.
The pin commit itself is now a no-op against master and survives only as the
audit registration; its conflict on heating-can/defaults resolved in favour of
the image.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Both from review on #475.
The rule "a host in a capability group must also be in [edge_host]" was
enforced by a comment, in a file that already uses :children a few lines
below for ntp_cluster. The three capability groups are now children of
edge_host, so the relation is structural: a host added only to [heating_can]
still resolves group_vars/edge_host, where the local MQTT contract lives, and
cannot silently come up without edge_mqtt_host and friends.
That matters more than it looks. The MQTT contract only moved to group_vars
in this PR because splitting the plays exposed that the roles could not
render without each other's defaults -- so an edge host outside [edge_host]
would hit exactly the failure that change was made to fix.
Verified all four groups still resolve to edge-1, and the redundant
ansible_user on the capability entries is dropped: it is inherited from the
[edge_host] declaration rather than repeated three times.
Also unstaled a Day-2 note that still read "the pip task tracks the git
default branch (pin edge_open3e_pkg to a tag if that ever bites)". Both
services are pinned to commits now, deliberately, and pinning to a tag is not
available for open3e -- it publishes none. Replaced with the actual workflow:
the weekly update-audit reports drift, bump the pin and re-run.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
open3e was installed from an unpinned git URL, so the heating bridge
silently tracked upstream main: whatever HEAD happened to be on the day a
converge ran was what ended up driving the heat pump. Now pinned to
6553c104, which was simultaneously upstream HEAD and the copy already
installed on edge-1, so the pin froze the running state and changed nothing.
A commit rather than a tag because open3e publishes none -- its tags API
returns an empty array. The package self-reports 0.7.5 at that commit, which
is useful context but is not a tag.
Honest about what this does NOT fix: pip still re-clones and rebuilds a VCS
requirement even when the SHA is pinned, because it cannot compare an
installed VCS dist against a requested URL without fetching it first.
Verified directly on the host:
pip install --dry-run "git+...@6553c104"
-> Cloning ... Resolved ... to commit 6553c104
Installing build dependencies: started
So the task still reports changed and still restarts open3e on every
converge. Pinning buys deliberate versioning, not idempotence.
Pinning without an update path only converts churn into silent rot, so both
services are now registered with the weekly update-audit -- which had been
auditing neither, despite E3onCAN having been pinned since July. The audit
prompt warns that anything not listed is silently not audited, and these two
were exactly that.
The new scope entry records the awkward specifics so the agent does not
report normal states as problems: open3e has no tags at all, so it must
compare commits against the default branch; E3onCAN does tag, but sparsely,
and its pin sits between the newest tag and HEAD.
Also corrected while there: edge_e3oncan_version was commented "# V0.5.2",
which does not exist upstream. The repo's only tag is v0.5.1 (6f43b3fb), and
461dcbdf is a later untagged commit from 2026-06-21, "Fixed: MQTT client ID
collision caused stale retained values; added publish error logging".
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Splitting edge-host into single-concern roles left the coupling one layer
up: install-edge-host.yml was still one play applying all eleven roles to
one group. A host in [edge_host] got the Z-Wave gateway and the CAN services
whether or not it had the hardware -- the monolith again, in the play.
Inventory groups now state which hardware a host physically has, and each
playbook targets the group for its own concern:
[edge_host] install-edge-host.yml base: flash-wear, log
shipper, MQTT bridge, VLAN,
docker
[heating_can] install-heating-can.yml Innomaker USB2CAN
[zwave_gateway] install-zwave-gateway.yml Nabu Casa ZWA-2
[power_meter] install-power-meter.yml FTDI meter head
No flags and no `when:` on the roles. Moving a stick to another box is a
one-line inventory change, which is what it should be. A host with nothing
attached is simply absent from the capability groups -- which is what lets a
second thin client join as an NTP peer without being handed peripherals it
does not have.
The split exposed a circular dependency the single play had been hiding: the
local MQTT contract was scattered across two roles' defaults, in both
directions. mqtt-bridge's config needs edge_open3e_mqtt_user, because the
bridge authenticates to the cluster broker AS that user; heating-can and
power-meter-sml need edge_mqtt_host, because that is where they publish.
Neither role could render without the other's defaults, and it only ever
worked because one play loaded every role at once.
Those four values are the interface between the broker and its clients, not
the property of either side, so they move to group_vars/edge_host -- where
the matching secrets (edge_open3e_mqtt_password, edge_sml2mqtt_mqtt_password)
already lived. Removed from the role defaults so there is one source of
truth. Each role keeps what is genuinely its own: mqtt-bridge the cluster
endpoint and CA path, heating-can the datapoints and poll interval.
Also dropped: the legacy shared-compose teardown pre_tasks. That migration
completed on the 2026-08-08 apply (verified: /opt/edge-host/docker-compose.yml
is gone), and carrying migration cruft in a base play would be the same
mixing this commit is undoing.
Verified by --check --diff against the live host, all four plays:
install-edge-host ok=33 changed=0 failed=0
install-zwave-gateway ok=8 changed=0 failed=0
install-power-meter ok=4 changed=0 failed=0
install-heating-can ok=18 changed=4 failed=0
Three of four are fully idempotent. heating-can's four are the known open3e
pip churn plus the E3onCAN venv, which reports changed only under check mode
(it was ok in the real apply) -- and their two restart handlers.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review on #476 found a real regression plus three things worth fixing before
this reaches edge-1.
Blocking: edge_open3e_devices.vx3.dpList still pointed at the old host path
/opt/edge-host/open3e/vx3plus.py. The compose file mounts that overlay at
/config/vx3plus.py and nothing mounts anything under /opt/edge-host inside
the container, so open3e would have looked for it at a path that does not
exist -- silently falling back to the stock vx3 datapoint list and dropping
the battery-module DIDs (vx3.1577-1582 and friends) the overlay exists to
add. Now /config/vx3plus.py.
Worth noting the build-time self-test could not have caught this: it proves
the binaries execute, not that devices.json resolves against the mounted
files at runtime.
Writable working directory. WORKDIR was /opt, which the COPY layers create
root-owned, while the process runs as open3e. udsoncan writes its log file
into the CWD -- the native install gave open3e's directory `owner: open3e`
for exactly that reason, and I dropped that when containerising. Now a
dedicated /var/lib/open3e, owned by the service user.
Secret mode. MQTT_PASSWORD was inline in docker-compose.yml, which is
rendered 0644. The env file this replaced was 0600, and the sibling roles on
this host keep secrets in a 0600 file beside a world-readable compose file.
Restored: credentials move to heating-can.env at 0600, referenced via
env_file.
edge_e3oncan_mqtt_format had become dead -- both services were fed
MQTT_FORMAT from edge_open3e_mqtt_format. The two default to the same string
so behaviour was unchanged, but overriding it did nothing. Wired through as
E3ONCAN_MQTT_FORMAT, which supervisord passes to e3oncan only.
Also from review: dropped the registered-but-unread heating_can_native_stopped,
and the migration now removes the emptied {{ edge_base_dir }}/open3e and
/e3oncan directories rather than leaving them behind.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The smoke-test step I added errored the whole pipeline before any step ran.
It used the freshly built image as its own step image, but the Gitea registry
is private: the build steps authenticate kaniko for PUSH, nothing gives the
runner credentials to PULL. So the step could never have worked.
Moved into the Containerfile as a build-time RUN, which is better anyway --
it needs no registry credentials, and a broken image is never published
rather than published and then flagged.
It asserts what the previous revision got wrong: both services actually
execute, and supervisord's config carries both programs. That is exactly the
failure that shipped green -- supervisord pointed at
/opt/e3oncan/src/E3onCANcollect.py, which does not exist (the file is at the
repo root), so the image would have run open3e while e3oncan crash-looped
and the E380 meter went silently missing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The image shipped a path that does not exist. supervisord ran
`python /opt/e3oncan/src/E3onCANcollect.py`, but that file is at the repo
ROOT -- there is no src/ directory. The `src` came from the old Ansible task,
which cloned into `{{ edge_base_dir }}/e3oncan/src`; that was the clone
DESTINATION, not part of the upstream layout, and I carried it into the
Containerfile without checking. Confirmed against the upstream tree at the
pinned commit: E3onCANcollect.py sits at the root alongside requirements.txt,
which is why the build succeeded while the runtime path was wrong.
So the image built green and would have started open3e and failed e3oncan on
every restart -- the E380 meter silently absent, with supervisord retrying
forever.
Nothing caught that, because nothing ran the image. Now CI does: a smoke-test
step uses the freshly built image as its own step image and asserts both
services execute and supervisord's config carries both programs.
It cannot exercise the CAN bus or the broker, neither of which exists on a
runner, so it verifies exactly what is verifiable without hardware. That is
still the difference between "built" and "works" -- and it belongs on a
throwaway runner, not on the production edge host, which is where I wrongly
went looking for this the first time.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reverts my own reinterpretation. The instruction was to put both in one
container because they belong together; I argued against it on crash-isolation
grounds, then read the correction "two services, one image" as agreement with
my version rather than as a restatement of the original. It was not.
A container runs one PID 1. With two processes that PID 1 is a supervisor,
which is how a container handles multiple services. supervisord now runs both
readers: it restarts either on its own if it dies, reaps children and forwards
shutdown -- none of which a bare process as PID 1 can do for a sibling, which
was the actual answer to the concern I raised.
Also gone: the dispatch entrypoint and the argv in the compose file. Both were
the same mistake in different places -- the invocation living outside the
artifact. open3e's and E3onCAN's command lines are an implementation detail of
this image now; supervisord builds them from environment variables it expands
itself. Nothing outside the image knows either CLI, so an upstream flag rename
cannot break the compose file or an Ansible template.
The compose file supplies configuration and nothing else: one service, one
container, environment only. The credential env file is dropped -- the
credentials are environment already.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Nothing is installed on the host any more. The image is built in CI with
both sources pinned, published to the registry, and edge-1 pulls and runs
it. That is the whole point of building it -- installation happens at build
time, once, not on every converge.
Removed from the node: both venvs, the E3onCAN checkout, and the two systemd
units. Kept and still rendered: devices.json, the vx3 datapoint overlay and
the broker credentials, now bind-mounted into the containers rather than
read from a venv working directory.
Two services from one image, as before: open3e drives the Vitocal/VX3 over
UDS, e3oncan listens passively for the E380 meter. Separate containers so
either can crash and restart without a supervisor as PID 1.
The migration stops AND masks the old units before the containers start.
Masked rather than disabled because two open3e instances issuing UDS
requests on one CAN bus is the failure mode to avoid, and a stray
`systemctl start` or leftover dependency should not be able to bring the
native one back alongside the container.
No missing-device tolerance here, unlike the zwave and meter roles: can0 is
this host's purpose. If it is absent the heating telemetry is down and the
run should say so rather than pass quietly.
heating_can_image replaces edge_open3e_pkg / edge_e3oncan_repo /
edge_e3oncan_version. The source pins move into the Containerfile, so what
is deployed here is a tag -- and `docker compose up -d` on an unchanged tag
is a genuine no-op, which is what removes the restart-per-converge that
pinning the pip URL could not.
Verification is limited and worth stating: plays/install-heating-can.yml
lives in #475 and is not on this branch, so only the master-side play
syntax-checks here. A --check run cannot exercise this at all -- command
tasks are skipped under check mode, so neither the pull nor the compose up
would run. It cannot be meaningfully verified until the image has been built
and #475 is merged.
Depends on #475 (the capability-split playbooks, and the MQTT contract
moving to group_vars). This branch is cut from master, so heating-can's
defaults will conflict there; #475 should merge first and this be rebased
onto it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The image had no ENTRYPOINT and no CMD, with a comment claiming that was
deliberate because the commands are rendered by Ansible. That was
rationalising a defect.
An image with nothing runnable is not a self-contained artifact. The
knowledge of how to START each service leaked into Ansible, and the two were
not even symmetric: open3e installs a console script via pip, while E3onCAN
is an unpackaged script in a checkout, so the compose file would have had to
carry `python /opt/e3oncan/src/E3onCANcollect.py` -- an implementation detail
of this image's internal layout, in a file that has no business knowing it.
Move the checkout and every caller breaks.
E3onCAN now gets a wrapper on PATH, so both services are invoked the same
way and `docker run <image> e3oncan --help` works.
CMD prints what the image provides and exits 64 (EX_USAGE) rather than
silently doing nothing, so `docker run <image>` is self-describing. Which
service to run, and its arguments, stays the caller's choice -- the compose
file renders those, because the datapoint list and broker settings live
there.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Builds one image containing open3e (Vitocal heat pump, Vitocharge VX3) and
E3onCAN (E380 grid energy meter), both pinned in the Containerfile.
Why: both were pip-installed into venvs on edge-1, open3e straight from an
unpinned git URL. pip cannot compare an installed VCS dist against a
requested one without fetching it, so `pip install` re-cloned and rebuilt on
every Ansible converge -- reporting changed, firing the restart handler, and
putting a gap in heating telemetry each time. Pinning the SHA does not fix
that; verified directly on the host that pip still clones and rebuilds a
pinned VCS requirement. A tagged image does: `docker compose up -d` on an
unchanged tag is a genuine no-op.
It also gives the weekly update-audit a normal artifact instead of two
awkward special cases. open3e publishes no tags at all, and E3onCAN is
pinned to an untagged commit sitting between its newest tag and HEAD -- both
of which the audit currently has to be told about in prose.
One image, two services. They read the same physical installation over the
same bus and are versioned together, so they are one artifact; but they will
run as two containers from it, so either can crash and restart on its own
without a supervisor as PID 1.
Fixes a long-standing blind spot in passing: e3oncan.service set
PYTHONUNBUFFERED=1 and open3e.service did not, so open3e's stdout was
block-buffered and effectively never reached the journal or Loki. The image
sets it for both.
Build follows the existing kaniko pattern exactly -- path-scoped `when:` so
only this image rebuilds, date tag plus latest, pushed to the Gitea registry
alongside the ci-* images.
Deliberately artifact-only. The heating-can role still deploys venvs and
systemd units; moving it to a compose project is a separate change, once
this image exists and has been pulled and run once. Rewriting the role that
drives the heat pump against an image that has never been built would be the
wrong order.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review on #474 caught that the previous commit put the daemon.json task in
docker-install, which is shared by ten plays: install-netbird-server,
install-netbird-proxy, install-n8n, install-authentik-ha, install-owncloud,
install-gatus, install-ical-proxy, install-grist and
install-music-assistant.
None of those hosts has an /etc/docker/daemon.json today -- the template and
the default were both new here -- so the next routine run of any of those
plays would have created one, reported changed, fired the Restart docker
handler, and bounced every container on that host. Unannounced restarts
across authentik, n8n, owncloud, grist, netbird, gatus, music-assistant and
ical-proxy, from a change about edge-host bootstrapping.
The --check verification could not have caught it: it only ever exercised
install-edge-host.yml, and the damage was in the other nine plays.
The comment I wrote there was the tell. It said "the services that use this
host run with network_mode: host" -- true of edge-1, false of most consumers
of that role. A justification that only held for the one host I was looking
at, written into a shared file.
Moved to edge-flash-wear, which is edge-host-only and already owns this
rationale: routing container stdout to the journal is flash-wear handling,
not generic docker setup. The networking aside is dropped -- in a flash-wear
role the only thing worth saying about daemon.json is why logging goes to
the journal.
docker-install is now byte-identical to master (git diff origin/master --
roles/docker-install/ is empty).
Two details the move needed: /etc/docker is created explicitly, because
edge-flash-wear runs before docker-install on a first bootstrap and the
directory will not exist yet; and the Restart docker handler fires at
end-of-play, by which time docker is installed.
Verified: ok=67 changed=25. The changed count is unchanged from before the
move, and no docker task appears in it -- daemon.json renders byte-identical
to what the old role produced, so it reports ok and the handler never fires
on edge-1.
Also from review: noted on the play that heating-can, zwave-gateway and
power-meter-sml each declare edge_base_dir in their own defaults so they
stay usable standalone, that play vars win, and that the two must be kept in
step.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review on #474 found two blocking defects, both in exactly the place the
--check verification is blind: command and shell tasks are skipped, not
simulated, under check mode. So "verified with --check --diff" covered
everything except the two things that would actually have broken.
1. Ordering: a real run would have aborted.
The legacy-project teardown lived in power-meter-sml, which the play runs
last. zwave-gateway runs before it and does `docker compose up -d` for a
container named zwave-js -- while the old shared project still owns that
name. Docker enforces container names globally, not per project, so the
command fails with "Conflict: container name already in use". That is not
the missing-USB-device string the task tolerates, so the task fails and
the play aborts before ever reaching the cleanup.
Moved to pre_tasks, which is its correct home anyway: it is a migration
step for both services, and putting it inside either one meant whichever
ran first hit the conflict.
The play now also declares edge_base_dir and edge_legacy_compose in its
own vars rather than borrowing them from a role's defaults, since
pre_tasks must not depend on role default resolution. And it removes the
now-orphaned zwavejs.env left at the old shared project root.
2. Dangling handler.
The libeatmydata task still notified "Restart edge compose services", a
handler that was deleted with the old role. Masked today only because
`creates:` makes the task report ok -- but the role's own comment says to
delete that .so when the Alpine base bumps, and the next time it does,
Ansible would fatally error with "handler not found". Now notifies
"Restart zwave-js".
Swept every notify in the new roles against every defined handler; that
was the only unresolved one.
Also from review: kubernetes/bootstrap.sh referenced the deleted role.
Repointed to ansible/docs/edge-host.md.
Re-verified: ok=66 changed=25. The teardown moved from the power-meter-sml
group into pre_tasks and gained the orphaned-env removal, so the count goes
5 + 5 + 14 -> 5 pre-existing + 6 migration + 14 header repointing. Nothing
else moved.
The limit is worth stating plainly: this re-run still cannot prove the
teardown works, for the same reason it missed the bug. The first real apply
is the test.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
edge-host was a single role doing eight unrelated jobs: flash-wear
mitigation, log shipping, VLAN networking, an MQTT bridge, a CAN interface,
the heating CAN services, a Z-Wave gateway and a power-meter reader.
That is not just untidy. It is what blocked a second thin client from
joining as an NTP peer: the host-generic work (journald to RAM, Alloy, the
VLAN sub-interface) could not be applied without also handing the box a
Z-Wave radio and a CAN bus it does not have. The role bound its services to
specific USB device paths, so a second host would have tried to start
containers for hardware that is not there.
Now:
edge-flash-wear journald -> RAM, noatime/lazytime, TRIM, eMMC health
edge-log-shipper Alloy: journal -> Loki
edge-vlan tagged VLAN sub-interface
mqtt-bridge loopback mosquitto -> cluster broker over TLS
socketcan can0 only
heating-can open3e (Vitocal/VX3) + e3oncan (E380 meter)
zwave-gateway zwave-js-ui, own compose project
power-meter-sml sml2mqtt, own compose project
The E380 reader lives with open3e rather than in its own role: it is part
of the same heating installation -- it feeds the heat pump's own energy
management -- not a separate system that happens to share a bus. can0 does
stay separate, because an interface is not the same concern as the services
consuming it.
Each role installs its own packages, so it stands alone. An edge host with
no peripherals takes the first five and none of the rest.
docker-daemon.json moves to docker-install with its own docker_log_driver
variable and Restart docker handler, since configuring the docker daemon was
never an edge-host concern. Handlers split ten ways; defaults split per
role; all sixteen templates and files moved with git mv.
Two deliberate behaviour changes on the node, both accepted:
1. Compose split. zwave-js and sml2mqtt shared a compose file, so touching
either recreated both. They are now separate projects in their own
directories. container_name is fixed, so the old project must release the
names first -- a guarded one-time task downs it and removes the file.
First apply costs a brief down/up on both. Data paths are unchanged; the
zwave store is not migrated.
2. Header repointing. Templates and scripts carried "Managed by
roles/edge-host" headers, which render onto the host -- they would have
sent an operator to a role that no longer exists. Updating them changes
file content, so it restarts the services that consume those files.
Verified by --check --diff against the live host. 24 changed items, and
every one is accounted for:
5 pre-existing, unchanged from the baseline before this work:
common timesyncd; open3e venv; E3onCAN venv; and the open3e /
e3oncan restart handlers. The venv tasks install from a git URL,
which pip cannot verify, so they report changed on every run --
a separate defect, not introduced here.
5 the compose split: zwave env + compose and sml compose to their
new paths, plus the two legacy-project retirement tasks.
14 the header repointing: journald conf, eMMC health script, alloy
config, mosquitto bridge config, 80-can0.network, open3e overlay /
env / unit, e3oncan unit, zwave backup script + env, sml2mqtt
config -- and the resulting restarts of journald, alloy, mosquitto,
open3e and e3oncan.
Nothing changed outside those three groups.
One consequence check mode cannot show: 80-can0.network.j2 changed, so the
"Reload networkd" handler fires on a real run and reconfigures can0,
briefly dropping the bus under open3e and e3oncan. It is absent from the
check-mode output only because shell handlers are skipped there. The VLAN
templates did NOT change, so the riskier reconfigure of the parent uplink
on this headless host is not triggered.
Also fixed in passing: the keepalived-ntp guard told operators to recover
with `--limit <host> --tags vlan40`, and referred to the edge-host role.
Both corrected. The role README becomes ansible/docs/edge-host.md -- it
documents the host, not any single role now.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Bot <claude-bot@renner.uno>
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review on #474 caught that the previous commit fixed the procedure in
ansible/roles/edge-host/README.md and left the same two defects in the two
places an operator actually reads them first.
That happened because my grep for the stale patterns ran with the working
directory set to ansible/, so `images/edge-host-iso/README.md` was a path
that did not exist. grep returned nothing and I read that as clean. A false
negative from a bad path, not a clean sweep.
Fixed now, verified from the repository root:
airootfs/usr/local/bin/edge-install
Printed the superseded two-command sequence at the console immediately
after imaging -- the very first instructions anyone sees, telling them
to run common.yml with -l edge_host. Now prints the single unrestricted
run, plus the two steps that precede it (confirm the host resolves by
name, add it to [edge_host]).
README.md
Described the image as being for `edge-1.srv.renner.uno`, a name that
does not resolve, and repeated the same two-command bootstrap. Both
replaced. This file is the link target of step 2 in the ansible-side
README, so following the procedure end to end landed straight back on
the defect #474 claims to close.
Also corrected while there: the ISO README called the target "the bare-metal
N100". edge-1 is a Wyse 3040 (Atom x5-Z8350), and the installer text further
down already says it "covers the Wyse 3040". Rewritten to describe the image
as not tied to one box or model, since the installer autodetects the target
disk -- which is what makes it usable for the second thin client.
Also from review: a comment on why `become: true` is set when the connection
is already root. Not taken -- ignore_unreachable, which common.yml sets. The
review's own reasoning applies: Ansible already skips an unreachable host and
continues with the others, so it adds nothing here.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The documented base-install procedure had three defects, two of which are
standing house rules and one of which simply does not work.
1. It required a DHCP reservation.
"Add the DHCP reservation/DNS entry for <host> on the UDM" was step 3 --
a reservation as a documented precondition. Reservations are off the
table here. The UDM registers DHCP leases in DNS on its own, so the
record appears without one, and the host is identified by name
everywhere: inventory, plays, README. Its address is never recorded.
2. It required --limit, because the plays were split wrong.
Step 4 was:
ansible-playbook plays/common.yml -l edge_host
ansible-playbook plays/install-edge-host.yml
The --limit was load-bearing, not sloppiness: common.yml is
`hosts: all:!...`, so running it unrestricted while bootstrapping a
single new box would reconfigure the entire fleet. The split left no
other option. But --limit narrows the target list rather than staging
anything, and leaves every other host outside convergence with no report
that they were skipped.
Fixed structurally rather than by deleting the flag: install-edge-host.yml
now carries `certificates` and `common` itself -- the parts of common.yml
that apply to an edge host -- so the bootstrap is one unrestricted run
over the edge_host group. No second command, no limit.
Not carried over: qemu-guest-agent (these are bare metal, not VMs) and
monitoring-agent (Debian-oriented; edge hosts ship logs via edge-alloy).
common.yml's loki/prometheus vars go with monitoring-agent and are not
needed -- verified that the common role does not reference them.
3. It named a host that does not exist.
The README said `edge-1.srv.renner.uno` in both the base-install steps
and the Z-Wave cutover checklist. The host is `edge-1.iot.renner.uno`;
the .srv name does not resolve, so anyone following the runbook hits a
dead name at step 3.
Verified idempotent against the live host before committing:
`ansible-playbook plays/install-edge-host.yml --check --diff` over the whole
edge_host group -> ok=53 changed=5 failed=0, with all five changes inside
the edge-host role (open3e venv, E3onCAN checkout/venv), which was already
in this play. certificates and common contributed no changes at all.
Also checked the common role branches only on Debian/RedHat os_family, so
its OS-specific tasks skip cleanly on Arch.
Prompted by preparing a second Wyse 3040 as an NTP peer -- this is the
procedure that would have been followed to build it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Follow-up to #472, which changed the inventory but left the same three IPv4
literals in the monitoring config and a runbook. Raised in review there.
prometheus.yml.j2:
- pve job targets -> FQDNs
- chrony job targets -> FQDNs, and restructured to one static_config per
host so each carries its own hostname label
The chrony restructure is the substantive part. The previous form listed all
three targets together and recovered the hostname in relabel_configs by
regex-matching __address__ against each node's IP:
- source_labels: [__address__]
regex: '10\.2\.40\.201:.*'
target_label: hostname
replacement: 'jupiter'
That silently coupled the labels to the addressing. Swapping a target for a
name would have left every regex unmatched and the hostname label simply
absent, with the scrape still succeeding and nothing failing -- a
find-and-replace on the addresses alone would have broken the labels
quietly. Per-host static_configs remove the coupling entirely.
nodes.yml.j2: targets -> FQDNs. Already one entry per host with an explicit
hostname label, so nothing else to change.
claude-workstation/RUNBOOK.md: the kubeconfig command pointed --server at
https://10.2.40.201:6443. That is jupiter, a Proxmox host, not a control
plane node -- stale from when k8s ran as VMs on it. The cluster's endpoint
is https://k8s.renner.uno:6443 (kubernetes/talos/patches/cluster.yaml), and
the name is also what the API server certificate carries as a SAN, so an
address there fails TLS verification even when reachable. The documented
command was very likely broken as written.
Deliberately NOT changed: kubernetes/apps/pve/endpointslice.yaml. An
EndpointSlice takes literal addresses; hostnames are not valid in that
field, so those three are correct as they are.
Note this changes the `instance` label on the pve job from an address to a
name, since the relabel chain feeds __address__ into __param_target and on
to instance. Anything selecting on the old value needs updating.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
jupiter, neptune and saturn were the last entries in pve_hosts.yml still
reached via ansible_host=<IPv4 literal>. Every other host here --
authentik, netbird, proxy, nas-1, grafana, edge-1 -- has always used its
FQDN, so these three were the outlier rather than the convention.
An address in an inventory is allocator state standing in for identity, and
it pins access to the legacy family: the names resolve IPv6-first, which is
the primary path on this network. DNS is authoritative for where a host is;
the inventory should say which host.
The short inventory_hostname is kept deliberately -- plays key on it
(ntp_servers[inventory_hostname] in install-ntp-ha.yml, node names in
opentofu, the prometheus targets) -- so only ansible_host changes.
No claim that this fixes the connection stalls seen while applying the NTP
work on 2026-08-07. Those were the IPS reacting to the connection pattern I
was generating (a port sweep, then rapid repeated SSH across hosts
interleaved with Ansible's own churn), not an address-family problem. This
change stands on convention and on not encoding a lease as identity.
claude-ws is left alone: its comment documents that obg.renner.uno is
split-horizon and resolves to the public proxy from home. That explains why
that particular name is unusable, not why a literal is right -- a name that
resolves to the wrong target calls for one that resolves correctly. Out of
scope here, and I do not know whether such a record exists.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
chrony_allowed_networks contained only 10.2.0.0/16, so the rendered
chrony.conf permitted IPv4 clients and nothing else. IPv6 is the primary
address family here: ntp.srv.renner.uno resolves to fd40::123, so an
IPv4-only allow list refuses every client that uses the documented name.
This was live but invisible. The hosts carried `allow fd00::/8` in
chrony.conf for a long time without it ever being in this repository.
Applying the role on 2026-08-07 rendered the template over the live config
and dropped the line on all four NTP servers at once, taking internal NTP
down over IPv6 until it was added here.
Same class of untracked host state as the anycast service address, and the
same failure: config that exists only on the box survives right up until
something re-renders it. Reading the drifted file is not enough -- the rest
of it has to be diffed against what the template would produce.
The outage was not caught by the play, which reported the v6 master as
"serving ntp.srv.renner.uno" throughout. It was caught by querying the
service:
chronyd -Q "server ntp.srv.renner.uno iburst"
-> No suitable source for synchronisation
and after the fix:
chronyd -Q "server ntp.srv.renner.uno iburst"
-> System clock wrong by 0.001999 seconds (ignored)
with a control query against ptbtime1.ptb.de to confirm the method rather
than the target was sound.
fe80::/10 is included as well: a client on the same segment may source its
query from a link-local address, and without it chrony drops the request,
which presents as the server being unreachable rather than as a policy
refusal.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Applying #469 to edge-1 exposed two defects that only show up on real
hardware.
1. The VRRP address was unusable.
keepalived took MASTER and assigned fd40::123, but the kernel left it:
inet6 fd40::123/128 scope global dadfailed deprecated tentative
proto keepalived
valid_lft forever preferred_lft 0sec
`-nodad` did not take effect -- no nodad flag on the address, and
net.ipv6.conf.enp1s0/40.accept_dad = 1 -- so DAD ran and found a real
duplicate: jupiter, saturn and neptune still held the address statically.
edge-1 believed it was the v6 master while serving nothing.
The flag is dropped rather than fixed. It was inherited from the previous
design, where every NTP server carried the address at once and duplicate
detection had to be suppressed for that to work. Under single-master VRRP
the opposite holds: exactly one host should have it, so a duplicate is a
genuine fault and detecting it is the point.
What that costs is that the migration can no longer be done host by host.
A static copy anywhere and a VRRP copy elsewhere cannot coexist, and the
dadfailed state is sticky -- the kernel does not retry. install-ntp-ha.yml
is therefore split in two: a first play withdraws every static assignment
across the whole group, then the second hands the address to keepalived.
Deliberately not serial, since it must finish everywhere before any host
claims the address. There is a gap between the phases where nobody holds
it, bounded by one play's run time; clients retry.
The withdrawal tasks move to roles/keepalived-ntp/tasks/withdraw-static.yml
for the first play to include. main.yml keeps the detect-and-assert guards,
which still run every time and fail loudly if any static assignment
survives.
2. keepalived warned:
(NTP_VIP6) the first IPv6 VIP address should be link local
RFC 5798 gives an IPv6 virtual router a link-local primary. keepalived
carried on regardless, but the instance was sourcing VRRPv3 from something
the protocol does not expect. fe80::123 is now the first
virtual_ipaddress: it mirrors the service address and cannot collide with
a NIC's EUI-64 link-local.
ntp_vip6 and ntp_vip6_linklocal move to group_vars/ntp_cluster.yml so both
plays read one definition rather than duplicating a service address.
Verified: `keepalived -t` on edge-1 (keepalived 2.4.1) parses the two-address
form clean, and the playbook passes --syntax-check.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review on #469 found the Debian path still fails open, and was right that
my previous commit message was wrong to claim otherwise.
The whole Debian chain -- detect, withdraw, confirm, assert -- was gated on
`keepalived_ntp_static6_removed.changed`, which is only true when the
lineinfile regex matches exactly, prefix length included. The hook it
targets is hand-written and was never in version control, so any deviation
(a different mask, unusual whitespace, a second assignment elsewhere)
leaves .changed false and silently skips every following task. The static
assignment then coexists with the VRRP-managed one, which is the
double-assignment failure this PR exists to prevent -- just relocated from
edge-1 to a PVE host.
Same fail-open class as the Arch grep fixed in 5e01e2f1. The argument in
that commit message -- that the Debian path was safe because
`ip -6 addr show ... to <prefix>` matches by range -- is true of the runtime
checks but says nothing about the lineinfile text match, which is a
different mechanism and was exactly as fragile as the pre-fix Arch grep.
Fixed by checking the CONFIG FILE unconditionally, prefix-agnostic and
\b-anchored, mirroring the networkd check.
Note this is deliberately not the fix the review proposed. It suggested
running the runtime `ip -6 addr show ... to <addr>` check and its assert
unconditionally. That would break the PR: after migration the address is
legitimately present on whichever host is the elected v6 master, so an
unconditional "must be absent" assert fails on the master on every run. The
config file is the right thing to check every time precisely because
keepalived never writes there -- anything found is by definition static,
whereas the live address is expected on the master. The runtime withdrawal
stays gated on .changed, which remains correct for it.
Verified on jupiter:
grep -rlE 'fd40::123\b' /etc/network/interfaces /etc/network/interfaces.d/
-> /etc/network/interfaces
Sequencing holds: on the migration run the lineinfile removes the hook
first, so the grep finds nothing and the assert passes; if the regex does
not match, the grep finds it and the assert fails loudly instead of
skipping.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The Arch guard added in the previous commit grepped for the literal
"fd40::123/128" -- the full address/prefixlen from ntp_vip6. A hand-written
[Address] using any other mask (/64, say) would not have matched, the
assert would have passed, and keepalived would have been handed an address
networkd was still assigning.
That fails open, which is the wrong direction for this particular check.
It is detect-only: there is no delete afterwards whose result gets
re-verified, so a miss is silent, and the outcome is the dual-ownership
state the guard exists to prevent.
The Debian path does not share the problem. `ip -6 addr show ... to
<prefix>` matches by range regardless of the prefix length the address was
actually assigned with, and its `ip addr del` -- which IS prefix-sensitive
-- is re-verified by a following assert, so a mismatch there fails loudly.
Now matches the bare address, anchored with \b so it cannot instead hit a
longer address sharing the prefix. Verified both directions:
grep -rlE 'fd40::123\b' /etc/systemd/network/ on edge-1
-> /etc/systemd/network/10-enp1s0.40.network (still detected)
grep -cE 'fd40::123\b' against 'Address=fd40::1234/64'
-> 0 (no false positive)
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Second review round on #469 found two ways the migration could silently
leave the address outside VRRP control -- both of which would defeat the
health gating while the play reported success.
1. The one-shot migration had no verification.
Gating the withdrawal on `keepalived_ntp_static6_removed.changed` is what
makes it idempotent, but it also means it gets exactly one attempt and
never retries. Combined with `failed_when: false` on the delete, a
mismatch would pass silently: `ip addr del` matches on address AND prefix
length, so a host whose static assignment used a different mask or
interface than ntp_vip6 / keepalived_ntp_interface would see the delete
no-op, keep the address permanently outside VRRP control, and still
report success.
The idempotency fix from the previous commit created this: making the
task run once removed the retry that would otherwise have masked it.
Now asserted explicitly after the delete, with a message naming the
likely cause and the commands to inspect it.
2. edge-1 -- the host the incident actually happened on -- was not covered.
The removal tasks are gated to Debian, so they never touch edge-1 (Arch).
Its static [Address] block belongs to the edge-host role, and
install-edge-host.yml is a separate play with no ordering relationship to
this one. Nothing guaranteed it had been re-applied.
edge_host already sets ntp_keepalived_enabled: true, so the next run of
install-ntp-ha.yml gives edge-1 the NTP_VIP6 instance immediately. With
the [Address] block still present it would hold fd40::123 statically AND
run VRRP for it: keepalived would believe it had withdrawn the address
while networkd kept it assigned, and the host would go on answering NTP
with a clock check_ntp had already rejected. That is the failure of
2026-08-04, on the same host.
This is not hypothetical -- edge-1 still has the block right now:
grep -rl fd40::123/128 /etc/systemd/network/
-> /etc/systemd/network/10-enp1s0.40.network
The role now detects this and fails fast, naming the play to run first,
rather than proceeding into a split-ownership state.
Also documents why the post-deploy presence check is meaningful: presence
alone cannot distinguish a VRRP-held address from a static leftover, and
only means what it claims because the role asserts no static assignment
survives on either distro.
Not taken: narrowing serial: 1 so routine runs are not serialised through
the chrony settle pause. Real cost, but correctness of the address handover
comes first at four hosts.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Review on #469 caught a real defect. The withdrawal task used
ansible.builtin.command with no changed_when, so it reported changed and
fired `notify: restart keepalived` on every run where the address was
present.
That is fine exactly once. After this lands, fd40::123 is legitimately
present on whichever host is the elected v6 master, put there by keepalived
-- and an ungated delete cannot tell that apart from a static assignment,
because the address looks identical either way. So every later run of this
play (adding a host, changing a priority, plain re-convergence) would have
deleted the master's address and restarted keepalived, dropping the service
address and forcing a re-election each time. That is precisely the flapping
this change exists to prevent.
Both the check and the delete are now gated on the ifupdown hook having just
been removed, so they run once during the migration off static config and
never again. Steady-state runs leave the master's address alone.
Also from review:
- failed_when: false on the delete. The desired end state is "address
absent". If check_ntp fails in the window between the check and the
delete, keepalived withdraws the address first and `ip addr del` errors
on an address that is already gone -- the outcome the task wants, and no
reason to abort the play for that host.
- The play's post-deploy verification only ever checked the IPv4 VIP. The
v6 address is the path clients actually use, so a broken v6 rollout --
address never claimed, or -nodad not behaving as expected on a given
kernel -- would not have surfaced in the play at all. It now gets the
same check, and the message points at check_ntp and the health log for
the case where no host holds it.
Not taken: the suggestion to narrow serial: 1 so it does not also serialise
chrony. With four hosts it costs nothing, and scoping it per-role would mean
splitting the play. Worth revisiting if the cluster grows.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Without this the health gating is defeated on three of the four NTP
servers. fd40::123 was assigned statically on every one of them, by hand
and in two different ways, none of it in version control:
PVE nodes `up ip -6 addr replace fd40::123/128 dev vmbr1.40 nodad`
in /etc/network/interfaces
edge-1 an [Address] block in /etc/systemd/network/
A statically assigned copy does not disappear when keepalived decides the
host is unfit to serve time. Leaving it in place means the host keeps
answering NTP on an address VRRP believes it has withdrawn -- exactly the
failure this whole change exists to prevent, with the added confusion of
keepalived reporting the address as released.
The ifupdown hook is removed here. edge-1 needs nothing: the edge-host
networkd template has never carried the address, so applying that role
drops it.
The live address is deleted as well, because removing the config line alone
does not take effect until the next network reload, and a reload on a PVE
node interrupts guest connectivity including the Talos VM and its Ceph OSD.
Deleting it is safe where keepalived already holds it: the deletion
notifies a keepalived restart, and the elected master re-adds it on the way
back up. Doing it unconditionally avoids having to tell "assigned
statically" from "assigned by keepalived", which the address alone does not
reveal.
The play now runs serial: 1. Withdrawing the address and restarting
keepalived on every NTP server at once would leave the fleet with nobody
holding fd40::123 until the elections settle; serialised, the remaining
members answer throughout.
Verified against the live hosts rather than assumed:
- all three PVE nodes carry the identical hook (jupiter:54, saturn:55,
neptune:56), so one task covers them
- the removal regexp matches exactly one line per host
- `ip -6 addr show dev <if> to <addr>` prints the matching address when
present and nothing at all when absent, so the guard condition is sound
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The previous commit set keepalived_ntp_vip6 in group_vars/edge_host, which
would have given the v6 VRRP instance to edge-1 alone. The other NTP
servers would have rendered no NTP_VIP6 instance at all and stayed silently
outside the election -- so the address could never fail over to them, and
the health gating would have amounted to "edge-1 withdraws and nobody takes
over".
Moves it alongside ntp_vip in plays/install-ntp-ha.yml, which is already
where the service-wide address lives, and passes it to the role for every
host in ntp_cluster.
Verified that edge-1 is currently BACKUP and does not hold the IPv4 VIP: a
VRRP BACKUP receiving no advertisements promotes itself to MASTER, so the
other members are alive and one of them holds it. They are real
participants, not retired hosts.
Not verified: whether the other members also carry fd40::123 statically, as
edge-1 did. They have no DNS records -- jupiter/saturn/neptune resolve only
through the *.renner.uno wildcard to the proxy -- so there is no hostname
path to them to check. If they do carry it statically, that address must be
removed at the same time this lands, or two hosts will hold it outside VRRP
control.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
ntp.srv.renner.uno resolves to fd40::123 (IPv6) and to the keepalived VIP
(IPv4, legacy). IPv6 is the primary family here, so the v6 address is the
path clients actually use -- and it was the one with no health gating at
all.
It was assigned statically in /etc/systemd/network/ on edge-1, so networkd
carried it unconditionally from boot. That is how the host answered NTP
queries on 2026-08-04 while its clock was ~16 days in the past: chronyd was
running, udp/123 was listening, the address was up, and nothing anywhere
was checking whether the clock was right. Fixing the keepalived health
check does not help, because keepalived was not holding that address.
This moves it into keepalived as a second VRRP instance tracking the same
check_ntp script, so the address exists only while the host is fit to serve
time.
Three details that are load-bearing rather than stylistic:
- A separate vrrp_instance is mandatory. keepalived requires that "all
addresses in virtual_ipaddress must be of the same family", so the v6
address cannot join NTP_VIP.
- No authentication block. VRRPv3 removed authentication (RFC 5798) and
keepalived always uses version 3 for IPv6 instances.
- track_script uses `weight 0`, overriding the script's -20. A non-zero
weight only subtracts from priority on failure, so the last remaining
host -- having nobody to lose the election to -- would stay MASTER and
keep serving a clock it had already reported as wrong. Weight 0
transitions the instance to FAULT instead, releasing the address
unconditionally. That is the required behaviour: a host unfit to serve
time must stop answering whether or not a replacement exists.
Semantic change, deliberate and worth stating: VRRP is a single-master
unicast VIP, not anycast. Previously every NTP server carried fd40::123 and
clients reached whichever answered neighbour discovery first. Now exactly
one host holds it. For NTP this is the better trade -- query volume makes
load spreading pointless, and on failover keepalived sends unsolicited
Neighbour Advertisements so client neighbour caches update in seconds,
where the static address had no withdrawal signal at all and clients kept
using a dead holder until their own neighbour unreachability detection
expired. True routed anycast with health withdrawal would mean announcing
the /128 via an IGP, which the gateway would have to speak.
The edge-host role is deliberately untouched: its template already has no
[Address] block, so applying it removes the hand-placed address, and
keepalived then adds it back under health control. The service address is
NTP-role configuration and now lives there.
Validated with `keepalived -t` against keepalived 2.4.1 on edge-1 using the
config as it renders for that host; parses clean apart from the pre-existing
auth_pass truncation warning on the IPv4 instance.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The NTP health check asked "is chronyd alive", never "is this host safe to
take time from". Those came apart on 2026-08-04.
edge-1's CMOS battery is dead. After a power loss its clock came up ~16
days in the past and, with no makestep directive, chronyd never corrected
it. All three health checks passed continuously for ~18h:
- chronyd was active
- `chronyc tracking` responded
- udp/123 was listening
and `local stratum 10` meant chronyd advertised itself to clients as a
valid reference the whole time. keepalived would have kept the VIP on a
host ready to serve a clock from July.
The sharpest part: check 2 ran `chronyc tracking >/dev/null 2>&1` and
discarded the output. The one command that knew the answer was executed
and its answer thrown away. During the incident that output read:
System time : 1376235.375000000 seconds slow of NTP time
This captures the output and adds two assertions:
- offset above keepalived_ntp_max_offset (default 1.0s) fails, so a host
that knows its clock is wrong drops the VIP
- no upstream source selected in `chronyc sources` fails, because with
`local stratum N` chronyd advertises itself as a usable reference even
when it has never synchronised to anything -- upstream chrony docs are
explicit that the local reference activates immediately in that case
Both predicates were validated against live output from edge-1 rather than
assumed: the offset comparison against the real incident value, and the
`chronyc sources` selected-source column against a real run.
Failing the check costs the configured weight (-20). When the WAN is down
every host fails together and loses the same weight, so relative priority
is unchanged and the VIP stays put -- the local-reference fallback still
works. What this prevents is one host with a broken clock winning.
Scope: this hardens the keepalived path, which is legacy. It does not
address the documented end state in plays/install-ntp-ha.yml, where edge-1
becomes the SOLE NTP server -- there, a failing check means no host serves
time at all, converting "serves the wrong time" into "serves no time".
That needs an architectural answer, not a better health check.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
# gs_usb is an in-tree module and autoloads when the adapter enumerates;
# networkd then matches the interface and applies bitrate + up. Separate from
# the services that consume the bus (heating-can, e380-can-meter) because the
# interface is host network state shared by both.
- name:Configure can0 via systemd-networkd
ansible.builtin.template:
src:80-can0.network.j2
dest:/etc/systemd/network/80-can0.network
mode:"0644"
notify:Reload networkd
- name:Enable systemd-networkd
ansible.builtin.service:
name:systemd-networkd
state:started
enabled:true
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claude-botandClaude Opus 5
k.renner
security-bot