Two findings from chasing node `pve` showing dark in the UI.
esh-pve and esh-pve-nas are a 2-node cluster (esh-pve-cluster, expected
votes 2, quorum 2, no qdevice). This was undocumented, and last night's
migration rebooted one of the members without accounting for it. Nothing
broke -- quorum is intact and both nodes report the same ring id -- but
that was luck. Rebooting either node drops the survivor below quorum and
makes its /etc/pve read-only until the partner returns. It matters for
the pending confirmation reboot and the 225-package upgrade, both of
which take a node down.
The dark tile itself was NOT last night's doing. pvestatd SEGV'd on
2026-05-28 and had been dead 82 days; the journal has nothing between
that crash and the restart today. It is only the reporting daemon, so
the node stayed quorate and healthy with all services active and all
three guests running the whole time -- the UI simply had nothing telling
it the node was alive. Fourth SEGV in that unit's history, so treat a
recurrence as expected and consider a watchdog: nothing alerts on it,
and the sole symptom is cosmetic enough to go unnoticed for months.
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.
Everything but the reboot. Two rerunnable elway playbooks; the host is
still running from the ext4 root and its boot path is byte-identical to
the last 140 days, because grub-install is deliberately held back to the
cutover window.
Phase 1 (esh-pve-nas-stage-zfs-root.yaml): carve a 512 MB /boot LV out
of the 768 MB swap LV, populate it, rsync the 4.3 GB ext4 root into
nvme/ROOT/pve-1, write the copy's fstab.
Phase 2 (esh-pve-nas-stage-bootloader.yaml): ZFS initramfs, grub.cfg,
explicit pve-zfs-root and pve-ext4-rollback entries with stable ids,
grubenv pinned to the rollback so cutover's grub-reboot is a one-shot.
Three landmines the plan did not predict, all caught by verify steps
asserting effective state rather than by reading the plan:
- The /boot LV had nowhere to live. VG pve had 4 MB free and mounted
ext4 cannot shrink; freeing space from root needs a rescue boot, which
costs the one-reboot property. Space came from swap (768M -> 256M).
- The runbook's `zpool set cachefile=... nvme` would have broken the
NAS. Populating a cachefile flips the host from import-by-scan to
import-by-cache, so a one-pool cache leaves ssd and tank unimported --
and CT 103 esh-nas has twelve bind mounts spanning all three pools.
Set on all three instead, verified in the resulting cache.
- update-grub silently emitted a pool-less root=ZFS=/ROOT/pve-1, which
boots to an initramfs prompt. Debian's 10_linux builds ${rpool}${bootfs}
and rpool comes from grub-probe --target=fs_label, which returns empty
because GRUB's ZFS reader cannot open a pool with encryption,
large_dnode and zstd_compress -- the same feature set that forced /boot
to stay ext4. The probe failure is swallowed by `2>/dev/null || true`.
Fixed with a /etc/default/grub.d drop-in plus explicit menu entries.
The transferable lesson: the original verify grepped for the correct
root= string appearing somewhere in grub.cfg, which passes while every
menu entry is still broken. Assert the effective value, not the presence
of a substring.
PVE root on esh-pve-nas is a USB Disk-on-Module: 6 GB ext4 with the host's only
ESP. A DOM is SLC/pSLC so wear is not the driver -- the problems are that it is
on the USB bus (a reset drops root under a running hypervisor), has no headroom,
and is unmirrored while 928 GB of mirrored NVMe sits 96% empty.
Runbook targets a fresh PVE install to ZFS RAID1 across both NVMes. In-place
conversion is unsupported, and adding an ESP to the existing NVMes is impossible
-- both are whole-disk ZFS members with 1.7 MiB free and proxmox-boot-tool
manages nothing today.
The headline risk is not on the host being rebuilt: CT 103 esh-nas IS the NAS
at 10.0.50.50, and both esh-docker-vm and esh-pve mount it hard. Taking this box
down stalls esh-pve's storage layer and wedges esh-docker-vm into the D-state
whose only remedy is a host reboot -- the incident shape already on record.
Quiescing those clients is step one of the window, and the README now warns
against casual reboots.
Config snapshot captured off-box to nh3-dev (0600) with /etc/pve, network and
fstab config plus zpool/zfs/disk-by-id/guest state; the newest on-disk copy
before this was June 2024.
Parallel to refresh-server-info.sh but pipes proxmox_inspect.sh and writes
to servers/<host>/proxmox-details.txt. Same discovery / ssh-target /
validate-only / dry-run behavior.
Fleet-wide `all` matches dir names containing `-pve` (covers *-pve and
*-pve-* so esh-pve-nas is included alongside pfi-pve / nh3-pve / esh-pve).
Explicit names are never filtered — useful for one-off PVE hosts with
non-matching names.
Validation checks the captured snapshot for: truncation, missing PVE
version line, non-Proxmox target, and surfaces backup-coverage "NO"
verdict counts so gaps show up in the validate-only output.
Initial fleet snapshot refreshed.
Read-only companion to server_inspect.sh. Runs over ssh via stdin the
same way:
ssh root@pfi-pve 'bash -s' < scripts/proxmox_inspect.sh \\
> servers/pfi-pve/proxmox-details.txt
Captures what the generic inspect misses on PVE nodes:
- Cluster + node resources (pvesh get /cluster/resources)
- VM list + per-vmid config highlights (qm list, qm config)
- LXC list + per-ctid config highlights (pct list, pct config)
- Storage pools (pvesm status, zpool, storage.cfg, NFS mounts)
- Backup jobs table parsed from /etc/pve/jobs.cfg (no jq needed)
- Per-guest backup coverage verdict: YES/NO with reason
- Most-recent actual backup per VMID on each local dump storage
- PBS targets, replication jobs, listening ports, subscription status
Coverage analysis surfaces the real gap: on pfi-pve, VMIDs 106, 107,
109, 112, 113 have no scheduled backup; VMID 106 (PFI-Tailscale) has
not been backed up since 2024-05-31. nh3-pve uses "all" job and covers
everything. esh-pve + esh-pve-nas share the tank-vmbu dump storage via
NFS; coverage splits cleanly across the two nodes.
First snapshots committed for each PVE host.
pfi-pve (Anaheim), nh3-pve (NH), esh-pve + esh-pve-nas (ESH home lab) now
have servers/<host>/ entries with ssh-target files, README stubs, and
first snapshots. Register all four via add-host.sh + ssh-copy-id; SSH
auth is root@<name> with key-based access.
Fix a resolver bug in the three workspace scripts: previously, when a
hostname resolved via /etc/hosts, resolve_target returned the bare name
and ssh dropped the user prefix stored in ssh-target (connecting as the
wrong user). Now ssh-target wins whenever it's present, since it can
carry user@ or port info that /etc/hosts + ssh_config cannot. Falls back
to the dir name only when no ssh-target file exists.
CLAUDE.md and README.md split the fleet table into Docker hosts vs
hypervisors with an explicit placement rule: don't deploy Docker stacks
on PVE hosts; capture host-level detail with server_inspect.sh, use
Proxmox-native tooling (qm list, pvesh, zpool) for VM/storage audits.
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