feat(esh-pve-nas): cut PVE root over to ZFS on the mirrored NVMe
Root is now nvme/ROOT/pve-1. The USB DOM keeps the ESP and /boot but is out of the runtime I/O path, so a bus reset can no longer drop root from under a running hypervisor. All five guests healthy, three pools ONLINE, system running, ext4 pve-root intact and unmounted as the rollback with its own kernel and initrd. zfs-import-cache is now the active import path -- the all-three-pools cachefile fix doing its job. The window cost an unplanned outage, and the cause was this repo's own tooling rather than the migration. The staging chroot ran `mount --rbind /dev` and /sys with no --make-rslave. On systemd `/` has shared propagation, so the cutover's `umount -R` propagated back into the live host and removed the real /sys/fs/cgroup, /dev/pts and /dev/shm. With cgroup2 gone systemd-logind could not create a session: ping fine, TCP fine, SSH authentication succeeded, resident daemons kept serving -- and every new exec hung, including /sbin/reboot, so the reboot never ran at all. It impersonates failing root-disk I/O almost perfectly, and I called it as the DOM dying. That was wrong. dmesg had the answer throughout: the DOM attached cleanly with no errors, and the last log timestamp was 12114881s -- 140 days -- meaning this was still the original boot. A down-detector had also never reported the host down, which I read as a fast reboot rather than as no reboot. Fixes and guards: - --make-rslave after every rbind, plus a guard that refuses to proceed while any chroot bind still reports shared propagation. - Confirm a reboot by observing the host DOWN, not by watching for it to come back. Those two states are indistinguishable otherwise. - Blast radius now measured from the server: `ss` inside CT 103 found five NFS clients, not the two documented. The new one that mattered is esh-vm-db, hard-mounted and unreachable by ssh. Left mounted on purpose and it came through read-write. - grub-reboot's one-shot does NOT work here: grubenv sits on an LVM LV which GRUB reads but cannot write, so next_entry survived the boot that consumed it. Steady state is saved_entry=pve-zfs-root with no next_entry. There is no auto-fallback on this host and no IPMI. Recovery needed no console: an idempotent cgroup2/devpts/shm remount landed in the brief windows where exec succeeded. No data was lost, and neither the DOM nor any pool was ever at risk.
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@@ -133,7 +133,10 @@ _As of 2026-08-18 — **gen seat SWAPPED to `absolute-heresy` and operator-confi
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- **⏳ WATCHING: DavidAU's HERETIC build of Qwen3.8-27B — the one worth waiting for.** `DavidAU/Qwen3.8-27B-Cold-Fusion-GAIN-V1.1` examined 2026-08-17 and **NOT adopted**: it is a capability/efficiency finetune of **stock** Qwen3.8 and every bench row on its card is labelled **`[non heretic]`** — adopting it would reintroduce base refusals the current seat does not have. ⚠ **Easy to misread as uncensored** (operator did, and it is a fair mistake): DavidAU's back catalog is almost all `Uncensored-Heretic` builds — Fable-Fusion 711, Qwen3.5-9B Cold-Fusion — so the naming pattern implies it. This one simply has not had that stage run yet; the card's roadmap says the HERETIC version is **IN PROGRESS from base**. **That** is the release to watch, not this one. What makes it worth watching: third-party benches (Nightmedia, mxfp8) beat stock Qwen3.8 by **+0.064 arc/c, +0.056 arc/e, +0.056 obkqa**; claimed **MTP acceptance 55.7% (record 59.9%)** vs our measured 47.2%; **thinking tokens cut to 1/10–1/2**; PPL *dropped* vs base. Same GAIN/Cold-Fusion pipeline that produced Fable-Fusion 711, which we already serve on `char-rp-reasoning` — proven in-fleet, not just claimed. Structurally clean (1199 tensors, 15 mtp in shard 18, 333 visual). ⚠ MTP/speed figures are **GGUF/llama.cpp on a 5090, not vLLM** — may not transfer; and because its MTP head was likely *trained*, the free CPU-hash shortcut would NOT apply (it won't match base) so a real acceptance gate would be needed.
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- **🟢 esh-pve-nas — migration STAGED 2026-08-18; ONLY THE REBOOT WINDOW REMAINS.** PVE root ran off a **NORELSYS USB Disk-on-Module** (`sdq`). Wear was NOT the driver (a DOM is SLC/pSLC — operator corrected my first read); the drivers are the **USB bus** (a reset drops root under a running hypervisor), no headroom, no mirror, and **blocked patching: 225 packages, 161 with `deb12uN`/security bumps**, stuck on PVE 8.4.11 vs esh-pve's 8.4.14. Mitigated 2026-08-17 (90% → 76%); **staged 2026-08-18 via two rerunnable elway playbooks** (`esh-pve-nas-stage-zfs-root.yaml`, `esh-pve-nas-stage-bootloader.yaml`), 0 failed, 17/17 verify green.
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- **🟢 esh-pve-nas — MIGRATION DONE 2026-08-18. Root is `nvme/ROOT/pve-1` on mirrored NVMe; the USB DOM is out of the runtime I/O path.** All five guests healthy, three pools ONLINE, system `running`, ext4 `pve-root` intact+unmounted as rollback with its own kernel. Boot config: `saved_entry=pve-zfs-root`, no `next_entry`; if grubenv were unreadable GRUB falls to entry 0 which the `/etc/default/grub.d/zfs-root.cfg` drop-in also points at ZFS. **`zfs-import-cache.service` is now the active import path** (the all-three-pools cachefile fix working as intended); vestigial `zfs-import@nvme.service` disabled — it failed every boot as redundant. ⚠ **Device letters shift across reboots** (DOM was `sdq`, now `sdl`) — never key anything to a bare `sdX` here. ⚠ **NO auto-fallback on a failed boot, and no IPMI/BMC/serial** — grubenv on LVM is readable but not writable by GRUB, so `grub-reboot`'s one-shot degrades to a sticky default (verified: `next_entry` survived the boot that consumed it). Recovery = pick the ROLLBACK entry at the console. **⏳ REMAINING: second reboot to prove repeatability (needs another quiesce window), refresh the DOM image since `/boot` changed, then patch the 225 pending packages — the whole point of the migration.**
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⚠⚠ **THE WINDOW COST AN UNPLANNED OUTAGE, caused by our own tooling, not the migration.** The staging chroot did `mount --rbind /dev` + `/sys` with **no `--make-rslave`**; on systemd `/` is *shared*, so the cutover's `umount -R` **propagated back into the live host** and stripped the real `/sys/fs/cgroup`, `/dev/pts`, `/dev/shm`. logind could then create no sessions: ping fine, TCP fine, **SSH authenticates**, resident daemons keep serving (pveproxy returned clean 401s) — and **every new exec hangs, including `/sbin/reboot`**, so the reboot never ran. **It is a near-perfect impostor of failing root-disk I/O**, and I misdiagnosed it as the USB DOM dying and told the operator to walk to the machine. **Operator caught it** — the DOM had been fine for years and the wedge began right after a change. The settling evidence was in `dmesg` all along: `[16.00] [sdq] Attached SCSI removable disk` (clean, no errors) and a last-line timestamp of **`[12114881]` = 140 days = the ORIGINAL boot** — the machine had never rebooted. My down-detector never once reported the host down and I read that as a fast reboot rather than *no* reboot. Recovered with **no console access** by hammering an idempotent cgroup2/devpts/shm remount into the brief windows where exec succeeded. Zero data loss. **RULES: (1) always `--make-rslave` after `--rbind` (playbook now guards on `PROPAGATION != shared`); (2) a reboot is not confirmed until the host is observed DOWN — poll for disappearance, not reappearance; (3) before blaming hardware for a wedge that started right after a change, get `dmesg` and check the boot timestamp.**
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⚠ **Blast radius was more than DOUBLE what the runbook said** — `ss -tn '( sport = :2049 )'` in CT 103 found **five** NFS clients, not two: +**esh-vm-db `10.0.50.60`** (`/mnt/backup`, **hard**, no ssh — reach via `qm guest exec 101` on esh-pve), +vm-esh-nas (is VM 104 on the host itself), +nh3-dev (soft,ro — safe). **Ask the server who its clients are; a documented dependent list rots.** esh-vm-db was deliberately left mounted (backup target, timers ~19h out) and **came through read-write** — a `hard` mount with no active user blocks and resumes, which is what `hard` is for.
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_(historical, pre-cutover context below)_ **migration STAGED 2026-08-18.** PVE root ran off a **NORELSYS USB Disk-on-Module** (`sdq`). Wear was NOT the driver (a DOM is SLC/pSLC — operator corrected my first read); the drivers are the **USB bus** (a reset drops root under a running hypervisor), no headroom, no mirror, and **blocked patching: 225 packages, 161 with `deb12uN`/security bumps**, stuck on PVE 8.4.11 vs esh-pve's 8.4.14. Mitigated 2026-08-17 (90% → 76%); **staged 2026-08-18 via two rerunnable elway playbooks** (`esh-pve-nas-stage-zfs-root.yaml`, `esh-pve-nas-stage-bootloader.yaml`), 0 failed, 17/17 verify green.
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**Host is still on ext4 and its boot path is byte-identical to the last 140 days** — `grub-install` is deliberately held back to the window, so an unplanned reboot mid-staging is a non-event. **CUTOVER = quiesce NFS clients → stop guests → `grub-install` → `grub-reboot pve-zfs-root` → `zfs set mountpoint=/ nvme/ROOT/pve-1` → reboot.**
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⚠⚠ **THE POOL-NAME BUG — the near-miss worth remembering.** `update-grub` silently emits `root=ZFS=/ROOT/pve-1` with **the pool name missing** → boots to an initramfs prompt. Cause: Debian's `10_linux` builds `${rpool}${bootfs}` where `rpool = grub-probe --target=fs_label`, and **GRUB's ZFS reader cannot open a pool with `encryption`/`large_dnode`/`zstd_compress`** — so it returns empty and the failure is swallowed by `2>/dev/null || true`. The *same* feature set that forced `/boot` to stay ext4 also corrupts the kernel cmdline, which the design did not anticipate. Fixed with a `/etc/default/grub.d/zfs-root.cfg` drop-in (last `root=` wins) plus explicit `pve-zfs-root` / `pve-ext4-rollback` entries with stable ids. **Durable lesson: assert the EFFECTIVE value, not the presence of a substring** — the original verify grepped for the right string *appearing somewhere* and would have passed with every menu entry still broken.
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⚠ **Never set the ZFS cachefile on one pool.** The runbook's `zpool set cachefile=… nvme` was a trap: populating a cache flips the host from import-by-scan to import-by-cache, so a cache holding only `nvme` leaves `ssd`+`tank` unimported and empties every CT 103 export. Set on all three 2026-08-18, verified in the 11,976-byte cache.
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