Both ends are back on autoneg at 1000 Mbps and stable; UDM SFP+2 restored to
autoneg True / setting_preference auto from the payload staged before the
original change. ~50 s of renegotiation, nothing rebooted.
The force failed progressively and I called it too early. Errors on the
ESH-Media side went 200 at link-up, 221 at 42 minutes, 416 by four hours, with
flapping the operator noticed before my soak had accumulated enough to raise
it. I read a two-minute flat window as a plateau and said so; a marginal link
declares itself over hours, not minutes.
Do not re-force this port. The cable is being replaced at the weekend and a
correctly-coded DAC negotiates 10G on its own.
Operator is keeping the override rather than reverting: he has a replacement
cable and will run it at the weekend. Recorded as a held position so a later
session does not revert it as an oversight or re-run the diagnosis.
Also corrects a claim this runbook made an hour earlier. I wrote that the
zero-error 1G link ruled out a marginal cable. It did not — it only proved the
cable was clean at 1G. The two-hour soak shows errors climbing monotonically at
10G (200 to 221 rx, ~1 per 23 MB) plus one self-recovering link drop, so the
autoneg fallback had a real basis and the fix is the cable, not the config.
The OEM SFP-H10GB-CU3M between ESH-Media SFP+1 and UDM SFP+2 linked cleanly
at 1000 with zero errors on both ends, which rules out a damaged cable — a
marginal one links at 10G and throws CRCs rather than dropping a rate. The
switch reported sfp_compliance "Unknown": it reads the EEPROM but cannot
parse the compliance codes on a third-party cable wearing Cisco coding, so
autoneg falls back to the safe rate.
A TP-Link TL-SM5220 DAC on the adjacent UDM port runs at 10000 with the same
speed_caps and autoneg on, which exonerated the port, the firmware and
autoneg before anything was changed.
Forced autoneg off / 10000 / full duplex on the UDM end only. ESH-Media's
end followed to 10000 on its own, which is the proof the cable was always
capable and only the negotiation was wrong. Both ends now 10000.
The UDM end was chosen because it is the recoverable one: ESH-Media reaches
the controller through this link, so a failed force there would strand the
switch. The path to the UDM was traceroute-verified not to cross the link,
and the revert payload was written before the forward one was sent.
Cost ~60 s of link renegotiation. ESH-Media, the E7-ESH-Media AP and the
USW Flex XG ESH-Office-Vuong all returned at uplink_speed 10000 with uptimes
unbroken; the Zigbee coordinator and HA's path to it were re-verified.
⚠ The port is now pinned: a non-10G module will not link there. Documented,
along with the ~200 link-up errors that then went flat and the fact that
steadily climbing errors would mean the cable genuinely cannot do 10G.
I described ea:f6:0a:ca:f5:b4 as "locally administered, no OUI" and treated
it as the class of MAC that may regenerate at boot. ha-dev corrected it and
the correction verifies: the device advertises e8:f6:0a:ca:f5:b4 over mDNS,
which differs in exactly the locally-administered bit, and E8:F6:0A is
registered to Espressif Inc. in the IEEE registry while EA:F6:0A resolves to
nothing. That is the standard ESP32 pattern — one factory base MAC in eFuse,
sibling interface MACs derived deterministically — so the reservation is
keyed correctly and cannot drift on its own.
The PoE-cycle test still stands and is now corroborating evidence rather than
the only evidence. The residual risk narrows to a firmware change to the
derivation scheme.
Also from ha-dev: tcp/7638 is open alongside 6638; mDNS crosses the VLAN
boundary so HA rediscovers without help; and HA's pending smlight config flow
is keyed on the mDNS service name, which did not change, so a stale flow may
still hold the dead 10.0.10.58 and should be dismissed rather than confirmed.
ha-dev declined the dns: resolver fix on their stack — configuring by IP
costs them nothing and the entry would couple HA name resolution to AdGuard
uptime for no present benefit.
The coordinator arrived on esh-userland (VLAN 10) at a DHCP-assigned
10.0.10.58. It now sits on esh-iot (VLAN 90) at 10.0.90.10, reserved on
the UDM and named slzb-mr1u.esh.internal.
Address on the network side, not the device — the pfi-gx10 ruling: a
reservation moves with the hardware, a device-side static goes stale.
10.0.90.10 is below the 10.0.90.40-250 pool so it cannot be handed out.
The MAC is locally administered (ea:f6:0a:ca:f5:b4, no OUI), which is
exactly the case where a reservation can silently stop matching. The
PoE power-cycle that makes the device re-DHCP is also the stability
test, so it cost nothing: it rebooted and came back on exactly
10.0.90.10, which only happens if the MAC held.
ESH-Media carried 8 port_overrides and that PUT is a whole-array
replace, so the array was diffed to prove exactly one field on one port
changed before sending, and read back after.
Inter-VLAN reachability needed no firewall work and was proven from
inside the HA container before the move, against existing IoT devices.
Testing from the Docker host would have proven the wrong thing — HA
runs on a macvlan address, 10.0.50.46, not the host's 10.0.50.45.
Documented but NOT fixed: the HA container cannot resolve any
.internal name (its resolver is Docker's 127.0.0.11, upstream excludes
the fleet AdGuard). Pre-existing, verified against names that predate
this change. HA should be configured with the IP; changing the DNS of
a live home-automation stack is ha-dev's call.
Rehome run 3c from ana-ml2 to pfi-gx10 unchanged: same corpus, base,
recipe and hyperparameters, different host. Slower (~13.3 h vs ~2.5 h)
and correct — an Anaheim breaker trip costs a 40-minute drive each way
and 13 hosts down, three of them SureFire client machines, while the
GX10 is a ~240 W appliance at NH3 that can take nothing else down.
Verified rather than assumed, because ana-ml2 ran transformers 5.15.1
on x86-64 and this box runs 5.16.1 on aarch64 — the silent
backend-delta class that has already voided conclusions here:
- both 49 GB base shards sha256-match ana-ml2's (size equality is a
weaker claim and was already true)
- a full encode was run into a throwaway dir and the encoded corpus
compared byte-for-byte: 197,360,233 B, sha256 c08bb1fe2ecb0be3,
identical. Every aggregate matched too. That verified artifact is
what the run will train on — it is seeded into run-03c/encode-cache
- the harness's own suite: 122 passed on aarch64
- the config generator asserts key-by-key that no non-path value
differs from run-03c.json
The encode-cache filename differs by design (base_model_path is part of
the key) — an input hash, not an output hash. Documented so it is not
misread as drift, or "fixed" by faking /tank on this box.
Corpus is copied to local NVMe; the box mounts no NFS. nh3-nas is now on
the same subnet, which makes mounting it tempting and still wrong under
a 13 h unattended run.
The launcher refuses on a live pidfile rather than a pgrep: `pgrep -f
erp_sft_harness` invoked over ssh matches the invoking shell's own argv.
That self-match cost a shell during staging.
Not launched. 13.3 h is the operator's call.
pfi-gx10 moved from desk Wi-Fi (10.100.10.226, VLAN 10) to the rack on
10.100.50.60 (nh3-servers, VLAN 50), reachable as pfi-gx10.nh3.internal.
The address is a DHCP RESERVATION on the UDM, not a host static. Operator
ruling during the move, and the better design: a host-side static works
until the box moves and is then a stale netplan file on a machine whose
address you no longer know. The pre-written playbook wrote a host static;
it is kept for its safety ordering and annotated as retired.
The port arrived on the native VLAN, not the server VLAN, so switch port 22
was repointed first. port_overrides is a whole-array PUT — two unrelated
overrides on ports 21 and 23 were read, preserved and written back, with the
original array backed up to a file before the change.
Wi-Fi stayed up as the escape hatch until the wired path was proven from
outside, and was downed last as its own step. The step worth keeping: while
Wi-Fi was up, traffic to nh3-dev still preferred wlP9s9 because that
interface sits directly on the userland subnet, so reachability proved
nothing about the wired path. `ping -I enP7s7` across the VLAN boundary is
what actually settled it before the hatch came down.
Operator-approved after last night's stall. Proxmox's own man vzdump names
both the mechanism and the remedy: without fleecing, guest writes block on
the backup target's speed; with it, pre-write copies land in a local image
instead.
Verified by behaviour rather than by config read-back, on a live backup that
was still crawling at the same 1.4 MiB/s that caused the outage:
io pressure full avg10 96.5% -> 0.01%
in-flight writes 45, completing none -> 0 0
D-state processes 11 -> 0
32 MiB dsync write never completed -> 0.24s (133 MB/s)
The backup is exactly as slow as before and the guest no longer cares. That
is the point, and also the limit: this contains the blast radius and does
not explain why a cross-site backup that once ran at 941 MiB/s now runs at
1.4, with the link up and pbs-ana answering in 11 ms.
Job config backed up to /root/jobs.cfg.bak-* on nh3-pve before the change.
hamr-dev reported /dev/sda stalled on nh3-dev: 45 writes in flight
completing zero, jbd2 and flush kworkers in D state for 33 minutes, io
pressure full at 96%, load 26. Every symptom pointed at a dying disk.
It was a vzdump to pbs-ana that collapsed from 64 MiB/s to 1.4 MiB/s and
sat there. Proxmox interposes a copy-before-write filter during a backup,
so every guest write must copy the original block to the target first — the
guest was throttled to the speed of a stalled cross-site backup.
Three things distinguished it, all cheap: there were no device errors
anywhere (a failing disk says so); Dirty was 3.8 MB while 45 requests were
in flight, so the writes were submitted and not completing rather than
backed up in page cache; and the hypervisor was idle at 0.00 io pressure,
which means the writes were not reaching it at all.
Cancelling the task detached the filter: inflight 45 -> 0, D-states gone,
191 MB/s dsync restored. Tonight's incremental is lost and re-runs cheaply,
which is the standing trade in "prefer no backup over one that can crash
the service".
Recurs nightly at 21:00 until changed, and the job has fleecing disabled —
which is why a slow TARGET can stall a GUEST at all.
Three Macs and six accounts were done by hand, and the fourth would have
repeated every mistake the first three taught. This script carries them.
Each guard is something a hand-run got wrong first:
- an account may not own its own home. A `sudo mkdir` before sysadminctl
leaves /Users/<account> root-owned; the account then authenticates, gets a
shell, has a correct $HOME and cannot write to it. Surfaced on the Studio
as a bare "Permission denied" hours after the account looked fine.
- `sudo -u` keeps the CALLER's $HOME. Without -H the install's rm -rf aims at
the wrong account — it did, at a working install, and only permissions
stopped it. The remote half refuses to run unless $HOME matches the target.
- the provider ships a hard-coded model catalog that the web GUI reads
INDEPENDENTLY of agent-default-model, so a correct default still showed
DeepSeek models in the picker. `models:` replaces it.
- reasoningEffort / maxTokens / defaultContextWindow are all measured against
the seat; the harness defaults fail on every one.
- the key is scoped per machine and the scope is VERIFIED (200 on
gen-reasoning, 403 on gen), not trusted from the mint.
The first run found two more: it named the vault item after the IP
(`mac-10-0-10-10/`, unreadable beside esh-mac-studio) and its config check
used grep -A3 where the block needs -A4, so it printed an empty model and
passed anyway. Both fixed, and verification now asserts the model rather
than only the answer token — a check that cannot fail is not a check.
Run twice against the same account to confirm idempotence, then against
vhpfi. docs/runbooks/mac-provisioning.md carries the operator-run stage and
the traps that are not the script's to solve.
My smoke test used a refused port on a live host and presented it as the
check for the 2 s budget. Measured: it returns in 79 ms, because a refused
port answers instantly with an RST. It verifies the glyph and nothing about
the deadline. An address that black-holes — an unrouted LAN host — takes
2.065 s and is the one that exercises it. Both are now in the page with what
each actually proves, because letting the fast case imply the slow one is how
a status line that hangs the prompt ships with a green test beside it.
Found by forseti in their own copy of the same probe and confirmed here
rather than adopted.
The smoke test also moves from expected-values-in-trailing-comments to
printing `got [x] wanted [y]` on one line. The comment form is the shape that
produced the false pass that caught two agents inside an hour, and the
expected-value column is what caught it — so the page should use the thing it
recommends.
I wrote that Claude Code runs the status line in a bare shell. What I
actually measured was that a HAND-RUN from an interactive session inherits
that session's exported ALTHING_HANDLE; Claude Code's own invocation is a
different execution and was not observed. forseti caught it before the
sentence had been read by anyone else.
The evidence points the other way: this box's Claude Code process carries
ALTHING_HANDLE and ALTHING_POST_OFFICE in its own environ, inherited from
the dev-launch shell, and a spawned child would normally inherit both —
observed independently on two seats. Whether Claude Code scrubs before
spawning was not observed either.
Nothing depends on the answer, which is why the page now says "do not depend
on the environment being present" instead of asserting its absence, and
records it as an open question with both sides. The smoke test still strips
the variables, because that is the harder case and the one whose false pass
caught two agents inside an hour.
althing 3.4.0 ships the segment as a console script on PATH, so the twelve
lines that existed in three hand-maintained copies now exist in one. A
script, unlike a document, has somewhere to be installed, and installing it
makes drift impossible rather than merely visible.
Two real defects left this file with the block, both silent: the handle was
resolved as the most recent launch in a directory, so a directory hosting a
claude and a codex seat reports the codex handle's unread count to a Claude
session as soon as the codex pane relaunches last; and the post-office
address was hardcoded, which survives until the post office moves and then
reports an outage that is really a stale constant.
Taken from the live path rather than pushed to it. ~/.claude/statusline-
command.sh had been migrated directly and was AHEAD of this tracked copy,
with a better `command -v` guard; a reflexive cp from the repo would have
destroyed it. Repo and live are now byte-identical.
The deploy instructions and the v3-cutover history move from the file header
into docs/runbooks/althing-deploy.md, where they cannot drift against the
script they describe, along with the diff-before-you-copy-in-both-directions
warning that this near-miss earned.
Eight of seventeen live seats were still on fifo after the 3.3.1 deploy,
because a SessionStart hook cannot reach a session that was already running.
Operator's call: leave them. They are reachable, mail is held at the post
office regardless, and each self-corrects at its next session start; the
residual is that a reaped fifo waiter goes silent until restart, which costs
timeliness and never mail.
Recorded with the no-unsolicited-fleet-notification directive next to it,
since the tempting action here is precisely the prohibited one — audit,
report the count, let the operator decide.
Claude Code holds an inbound cross-session message unless the sender's
permission-mode class matches the receiver's, and holds any sender that
asserts no class. The herald is a daemon and asserts none, so on a
default-configured seat every cc poke is held at first contact and the
notice goes to whoever is watching the pane rather than to the session.
The seat still reports declared, reachable and healthy throughout — the
same failure shape as the SessionStart hook that was never deployed, where
every check was green and nothing arrived. That is what makes it worth a
surface of its own rather than a footnote.
deploy-althing.sh now reads crossSessionInbound from ~/.claude/settings.json
and reports it on every run and on --check. It deliberately does NOT set it:
that file is the operator's permission configuration, and a deploy script
that edits it is a deploy script granting itself trust.
Also records surface 5 (the per-seat route declare), which had been implicit,
and why no attestation exists for the herald to send instead — CC reads a
sender's live runtime permission mode from the session registry, which a
daemon does not appear in.
The 3.3.0 deploy exposed a false green. `claude plugin update` matches on
the version in plugin.json and declines when it has not moved, so a release
that edits hook or script content without a version bump leaves the Claude
Code cache stale while every version check in this script reports success.
Marketplace and live cache both read 0.1.1, update said "already at the
latest version", and pane-route.sh + README differed.
That particular delta was documentation-only, so nothing was actually
broken — but the script had no way to say so, which is the defect. It now
diffs the marketplace tree against the live cache dir on every run and on
--check, ignoring orphaned version dirs, and says what to do about drift
(bump upstream; never hand-edit Claude Code's bookkeeping).
The 2026-09-01 lesson was "compare the hook list, not the version string".
This is that lesson one turn deeper: the hook list was identical too.
Also documents the cc channel as a deliberately-taken undocumented
interface — expected to break on some future Claude Code release, failing
to pull-only with a logged reason rather than losing mail — and the
herald-before-declare ordering constraint that the script already honours.
The cross-reference loop filtered live waiters on `kill -0 "$pid"`. A lock
file left by a reaped listener names a pid the kernel is free to reissue,
so the loop would report an unrelated process as a live waiter — and a
phantom waiter is how a false "your seat is unreachable" notice reaches a
seat that is fine, with nothing in the output to falsify it.
`session_listener.sh --stop` already refuses this standard: it walks
/proc/<pid>/cmdline for the `--_route=<handle>` segment before signalling,
on the grounds that a live pid proves existence and not identity. The audit
now asserts the same thing and prints STRANGER on a mismatch.
Verified against the live box: six waiters, all identity-confirmed, all
reporting push.
A version number cannot tell you what a stale plugin cost. 0.0.1 and
0.1.1 differ by two hooks and a script, so the runbook now carries a
check that compares hook lists across cached versions and looks for
pane-route.sh directly.
Also records why this hid for five days, which is the more transferable
half. A missing deploy surface does not present as an error -- it presents
as "the migration needs manual work", and there was a ready explanation
for that, because four of five seats were non-Claude and genuinely did
need hand-holding. The seat that falsified the story was our own: a Claude
Code seat that should have self-declared and did not, and it looked
exactly like the other four. Nobody asked why the automatic path had not
fired on the one seat it was built for.
So: when a migration needs manual intervention, verify the automatic path
was actually deployed before concluding it does not apply to your case.
Deploying althing touches four independent surfaces on nh3-dev. Three
were known. The fourth -- the plugin -- had no step in any runbook and
drifted for five days before anyone noticed.
The plugin chain is repo plugin/ to the marketplace directory to Claude
Code's cache, and neither hop was automated. The marketplace directory
was a frozen copy from Aug 28 carrying only the UserPromptSubmit hook,
with no SessionStart, no SessionEnd and no pane-route.sh at all. So the
claim that CC seats re-declare their pane route automatically at session
start was never true on this box, which is why every seat had to be
hand-declared with a pid measured by hand.
The script backs up the marketplace directory before syncing, re-stamps
its marketplace.json from the repo's plugin.json, and uses `claude plugin
update` for the cache rather than hand-editing installed_plugins.json --
that is Claude Code's own bookkeeping and a subtle mistake there breaks
the plugin in a way that looks like an upstream bug.
The runbook also carries the two things most likely to waste someone's
afternoon: `uv tool install .` without --force is a silent no-op that
exits 0 having done nothing, and a live waiter reporting mode:pull is a
seat that will never be poked, with the audit loop for finding them.
Sibling to model-quantization-playbook.md, and it exists for the same
reason that one does: hard-won lessons were dying inside per-host
runbooks where nobody finds them until after repeating the mistake.
Six entries seeded from the esh-pve-nas migration, all of which would
bite identically on any other host:
1. mount --rbind into a chroot needs --make-rslave, and losing cgroup2
impersonates failing root-disk I/O closely enough that it was
misdiagnosed as exactly that.
2. A reboot is not confirmed until the host is observed DOWN; "never
rebooted" and "rebooted fast" are indistinguishable otherwise.
3. Assert the effective value, not the presence of a substring. Grep
proves presence; only evaluation proves effect.
4. Ask the server who its clients are -- documented dependent lists rot.
Plus the corollary that an idle hard NFS mount blocks and resumes, so
quiescing means stopping consumers, not always unmounting.
5. The scoped-looking command can be the dangerous one; setting a ZFS
cachefile on one pool of three would have stopped the other two from
importing at boot.
6. Long uptime hides breakage, and a forced look is worth more than it
appears -- one migration surfaced an 82-day-dead pvestatd, a 126-day
hung vzdump, a VM in prelaunch for four months, and an undocumented
cluster, none of them caused by the work.
Carries a superseded-claims table so corrections are dated rather than
silently edited, same discipline as the quantization playbook. The ESH
runbook now links here so the general rules are reachable from the
specific story and vice versa.
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.
The operator-visible symptom is that PVE cannot be updated on this box for lack
of room. Measured: 225 packages pending, 161 carrying deb12uN/Debian-Security
bumps including ssh, against esh-pve's 8.4.14 versus this host's 8.4.11 and 20
weeks of uptime.
Records the ordering explicitly -- migrate first, upgrade after. The pending set
includes proxmox-kernel-6.8.12-42-pve-signed, roughly 250 MB of kernel plus
initramfs landing in /boot which is on root with 1.3 GB free. Unpacking 225
packages including dpkg and perl into that headroom risks filling the disk
mid-transaction and wedging dpkg on a hypervisor running five guests.
Notes the apt archive-dir redirect as a partial escape hatch if patching cannot
wait, and that zfs-initramfs 2.2.8 is fully capable of root-on-ZFS so there is
no need to upgrade ZFS before migrating.
Operator's proposal, and it is strictly better than the reinstall plan.
Boot and root do not have to share a device. Keep the ESP and /boot on the DOM
as ext4 -- so GRUB never has to read ZFS, which matters because the nvme pool
has encryption, large_dnode and zstd_compress enabled and GRUB cannot read
those -- and move root to nvme/ROOT/pve-1. The initramfs imports the pool and
pivots.
What this buys over the reinstall: the nvme pool survives, so no guest
migration, no export/import of ssd and tank, no reinstall. Downtime is one
reboot rather than half a day. Rollback is a GRUB menu entry, because the ext4
root stays on the DOM untouched. And it retires the actual top risk -- with
root on NVMe, a USB bus reset mid-run no longer takes the running system down;
the DOM becomes read-mostly, written only on kernel updates.
Preconditions verified and already met: UEFI with grub-efi, zfs-initramfs
2.2.8-pve1 installed with 76 ZFS files already in the running initrd, root only
4.3 GB to copy, swap negligible against 125 GB RAM.
Two traps recorded: canmount=noauto on the root dataset or ZFS tries to mount
over the running root; and cachefile is currently none with a 0-byte
zpool.cache, so the pool imports by scan today and must be given a cachefile
before the initramfs is rebuilt.
The reinstall plan is retained as the fallback.
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.
Quants are hard-fought and we keep re-paying for the same lessons. A survey
found quant knowledge scattered across 18 files in four trees, with three
documents having independently discovered and recorded overlapping
"landmines" sections — and one of them now actively misleading.
Adds docs/pfi/model-quantization-playbook.md as the single home for the
TRANSFERABLE lessons, with per-model artifacts demoted to worked examples
that link up to it. Contents:
- scheme decision table, incl. that a literal "W4A8" NVFP4 checkpoint is
unservable on vLLM (two legal activation settings, FP8 is not one)
- the reference mixed-precision recipe and the three parts of it that are
load-bearing and easy to drop
- the recurring landmines, ordered by cost: the loader-class trap
(rediscovered THREE times), the three separate ways to lose the MTP head,
toolchain deadlocks, vision configs, memory/device placement
- pipeline shape: prove targets before spending GPU time; mandatory
post-steps that verify rather than assume
- the acceptance gate, and the three ways measurement has lied to us —
prefix caching faking both speed metrics, prompt_logprobs going uniform
under speculative decoding, and a 0600 .env making compose silently no-op
- hardware/co-residency, including that a SMALLER model can starve its
neighbour because gpu-memory-utilization is a fraction of the whole card
- a superseded-claims table, and measured negatives not to re-chase
The superseded table earns its place immediately: the heretic2 runbook tells
readers to use modelopt because "compressed-tensors can't load the BF16 MTP
head, 0% acceptance". That symptom was real but the cause was not the format
-- it was the missing re:^mtp.* ignore entry. compressed-tensors gives
47.7-83.2% acceptance in production. A fresh session following that doc would
be sent down the modelopt path that current memory calls dependency hell, so
the runbook now carries a stale-warning header pointing here.
Wires discovery: an orientation.md "Where to look for what" row, pointers
from the gen-seat / heretic2 / mistral artifacts, and a CLAUDE.md maintenance
rule so the playbook gets fed instead of going stale -- model-agnostic
lessons land in the playbook, model-specific ones stay put, and a wrong
claim earns a dated superseded row rather than a silent edit.
Motivated by Qwen3.8 having just released: the next model swap will need a
requant, and this is what that session should read first.
The fast char-rp-reasoning seat works: ~77 tok/s (vs GGUF ~59.5, base NVFP4 ~53),
MTP draft-acceptance 32-40%, mean acceptance length 2.19. Same Heretic2/NEO-CODE
model, NVFP4 + native qwen3_5_mtp spec-decode.
Full end-to-end recipe + the four landmines in docs/runbooks/heretic2-nvfp4-mtp-seat.md:
(1) load as AutoModelForImageTextToText not AutoModelForCausalLM (namespace/gibberish);
(2) modelopt format not compressed-tensors (compressed-tensors MTP = 0% accept);
(3) modelopt 0.45 <-> transformers 5.12.1 FusedMoE crash (guarded in quant_modelopt.py);
(4) vLLM 0.24.0 does NOT propagate modelopt exclude_modules to the spec-decode draft
model -> BF16 mtp head gets quantized -> shape crash; no checkpoint config fixes it
(is_layer_skipped is exact-membership not glob) -> fix is a mounted sitecustomize that
force-skips mtp.* in is_layer_skipped (upstream vLLM bug to report).
Scripts: quant_modelopt.py (FusedMoE guard + single-shard export + multimodal load),
finalize_modelopt_mtp.py (splice bf16 mtp), serve_modelopt_mtp.sh, run_quant_modelopt.sh,
sitecustomize-mtp-workaround.py.
The ufw fix (prior commit) was necessary but insufficient. The DECISIVE blocker
was gitea webhook.ALLOWED_HOST_LIST = 'external, 10.100.0.0/16' (NH3 only) —
corviduo-dev is 10.250.50.152 (Anaheim), so gitea refused to deliver ('deny
10.250.50.152') and never opened the TCP connection. Fixed to 'external,
10.0.0.0/8' (whole fleet, matches the ufw choice) + gitea restart.
Listener now logs every delivery (source-IP/hmac_ok/ref/action) — the old
log_message=pass silence hid the whole failure. Proven end-to-end: real gitea
delivery -> hmac_ok=True, ref=main, 202 deploying -> green deploy.
The auto-deploy silently never worked: corviduo-dev's ufw is default-deny and
port 9010 was never allowed, so gitea's webhook deliveries timed out (DROP).
v0.3.6 was a manual deploy; v0.3.7-v0.3.13 never auto-deployed. The setup-time
'test-delivery 204' was gitea queuing, not the listener receiving. Fixed by
'ufw allow from 10.0.0.0/8' (operator-directed). Confirmed end-to-end.
soong-dev found the studio serving a stale web/ (52015 vs 55025 bytes — missing the
01-Role section, favicon, thinking-status): the deploy rsynced backend/ but never web/,
so SOONG_LAB_WEB_DIR stayed pinned to the initial manual copy while the backend updated.
Deploy now rsyncs BOTH backend/->studio AND web/->SOONG_LAB_WEB_DIR (read from the env)
on every green run. Verified: served frontend now 55025 bytes, current.
Per operator call (no gitea write token on the Worldtree-team VM): a 2-min systemd
--user timer on nh3-dev polls corviduo's last-deploy.json and pings soong-dev via
althing on a NEW red deploy (green stays silent). Delivers soong-dev's red-run
visibility without a credential on corviduo. Tested (red detect+format DRY, green quiet).
Adds the rsync --link-dest hourly snapshot job (nh3-dev:~/development ->
nh3-nas, 48-snapshot retention, secrets/build-dirs excluded) that closes the
no-off-box-backup gap exposed by the 2026-07-12 working-dir clobber. Script
mirrors the live ~/.config/dev-backup/dev-backup.sh; runbook covers restore.
Auto-deploy on push to main: gitea webhook → HMAC-validated listener on irv-ml1:9008
→ git fetch/reset + docker compose up -d --build. Documents the gitea-server
ALLOWED_HOST_LIST anti-SSRF relaxation (scoped to the WG net), the irv-ml1 components
(deploy key, git-clone deploy dir preserving the proxy override/secrets, listener +
user service), and verify/debug steps.
YouTube (and a growing set of services) hard-flag datacenter IPs, bot-gating
even public content regardless of cookies/PO-tokens. Origin case: yt-voice-clipper
on irv-ml1 (Irvine colo) — every yt-dlp fetch returned LOGIN_REQUIRED. Confirmed
pure IP reputation: the same public video fetches cleanly (no cookies) once routed
through nh3-dev's residential egress (70.230.226.88).
- scripts/setup-nh3-egress-proxy.sh: idempotent dante (SOCKS5) install + config.
Internal-only ACL (10.100.0.0/16), bound to the WG interface, systemd-managed.
- docs/runbooks/nh3-egress-proxy.md: purpose, usage, security model, caveats.
Reusable fleet egress, not yt-voice-clipper-specific.
Two related changes shipped together. The stack rename is independent
but adding `vllm-reward` to the existing `vllm-qwen3` would have made
that name actively misleading.
**Rename:** `stacks/vllm-qwen3/ → stacks/vllm/`. Updated all in-repo
references (README.md root, servers/ana-ml2/, stacks/llama-swap/,
configs/restic/ana-ml2/, docs/runbooks/disaster-recovery.md). Two
intentional history mentions retained (servers/ana-ml2 + stacks/vllm
README).
**Add `vllm-reward` service:** serves Skywork-Reward-V2-Llama-3.1-8B-AWQ
on port 8003. The AWQ output is a locally-quantized model (not from HF),
so bind-mounts `/tank/aimodels/llm:/local-models:ro` rather than the
shared HF cache. Model config.json declares LlamaForSequenceClassification
which vLLM's pooling runner picks up automatically — produces a single
reward score per input via /classify.
**Flag note:** the user's spec listed `--task classify`, but vLLM 0.19.1
deprecated --task in favor of --runner pooling (model architecture in
config.json drives the classification head). Compose uses --runner
pooling with a comment explaining the substitution.
**GPU memory:** no rebalance needed — production had already tuned
EMBED/RERANK down from 0.40 to 0.20 each (canonical .env.example now
matches reality). Adding REWARD at 0.30 totals 0.70, leaving ~14 GB
headroom on the 48 GB Ada.
**Server-side:** brought existing vllm-qwen3 down, mv'd
/opt/docker/compose/vllm-qwen3 → /opt/docker/compose/vllm, appended
REWARD_* lines to existing .env (preserving API_KEY/HF_TOKEN), deployed
new compose via scripts/deploy-stack.sh, brought all 3 services up.
**Smoke tests:**
- /health on 8001/8002/8003 → 200
- /v1/models on 8003 → lists Skywork/Skywork-Reward-V2-Llama-3.1-8B-AWQ
with max_model_len 16384
- /classify with a sample conversation → returns LABEL_0 with prob 0.9999
(single-output regression-style reward score, expected shape for a
reward model)
New runbook captures the three-phase process:
Phase 1 — Drop --append-only via DSM Container Manager web UI
Phase 2 — sudo resticprofile forget --prune --verbose on each of
nh3-docker, nh3-dev, irv-ml1 (interactive sudo per host)
Phase 3 — Restore --append-only via DSM
Why each phase looks the way it does, what to expect (largely no-op
runs for the first 6 months while no snapshots have aged out of the
keep window), how to verify each phase non-destructively (curl 401
on the rest-server root proves the container's up + serving), what
to do if Phase 2 fails with `repository is configured as append-only`
(skipped Phase 1 / DSM didn't apply), and the path to future
automation (find docker bin path on DSM, NOPASSWD-lock syncuser to
the specific recreate command).
Includes a "last run history" table seeded with today's first
post-pipeline run (no-op, irv-ml1 only had 3 snapshots due to the
04-25→27 CUDA stall).
Cross-referenced from docs/README.md (runbook tree), docs/
orientation.md (where-to-look table), and STATUS.md item 9 (which
now points at the runbook + records the next-round date 2026-07-27).
Bundles the post-2026-04-21 work that built out the two-layer backup
architecture (PBS for VM images + restic for file/DB), plus the cross-
site mirror and the disaster-recovery runbook.
- configs/restic/esh-docker-vm/profiles.yaml: drop the obsolete
*_offen_backup_data exclude (offen sidecars retired fleet-wide
2026-04-23; restic now covers the equivalent scope directly).
- configs/restic/esh-vm-db/: new profile for the dedicated DB VM
(10.0.50.60), with pre-backup pg_dumpall + mongodump hooks.
- configs/rsync/: ana-nas → nh3-nas (04:00 daily, runs as lkraven)
and nh3-nas → ana-nas (05:00 daily, runs as root because DSM
rest-server-nh3 writes mode-400 files only root can read).
- docs/runbooks/pbs-deployment.md: 9-phase PBS rollout runbook,
refined during the 2026-04-22 deployment with per-hypervisor
namespaces, NFSv3 + ZFS-case-insensitivity workaround, and the
Synology syno_acl flatten step.
- docs/runbooks/disaster-recovery.md: blast-radius runbook ordered
Tier 0 → 5 (ana-nas → hypervisors → Docker hosts → VMs → specialty);
references incident memory + recovery-step playbooks per consumer.
VMIDs aren't globally unique across PVE hosts (esh-pve and sfsrv-ana
both have VM 100, etc.). Without namespaces, per-hypervisor backups
collide under the same /vm/<vmid>/ path in the shared datastore.
Changes:
- New Phase 1.4b: create one namespace per hypervisor up front
(pfi-pve, nh3-pve, esh-pve, esh-pve-nas, sfsrv-ana).
- Phase 2.1 storage-entry template now lists Namespace as a required
field, set to the hypervisor's own name.
- Critical-note explaining the collision risk so future deployers
don't skip this step.
ACL grants remain at the datastore level; they apply across all child
namespaces so the existing fleet-vzdump token continues to work. Sync
job (Phase 6) preserves namespace tree to PBS-NH3 automatically.
Discovered during Phase 1.3 (mount NAS datastore). The Debian NAS's
/mnt/backup is on ZFS with casesensitivity=insensitive; NFSv4 writes
fail with EACCES even for root with no_root_squash. Known-bad
combination at the ZFS-on-Linux + NFSv4 layer.
Workaround: mount the NFS share with vers=3. PBS's chunk-based
access pattern works fine over NFSv3.
Added a section 0.5 to Phase 0 documenting the issue + both fixes
(quick: use NFSv3; cleaner: create case-sensitive child dataset).
Future deployments against this NAS won't rediscover the same wall.
Current NFS exports on the Debian NAS (10.250.50.50) use root_squash,
which blocks PBS from writing its datastore metadata (chunks, locks,
GC state — all root-owned operations). Rest-server-ana worked around
this by running its container as UID 1000, but PBS's service model
doesn't accommodate that pattern cleanly.
Solution baked into Phase 0: create a dedicated NFS export for the
PBS-ANA datastore subtree, scoped to only the PBS-ANA VM's IP, with
no_root_squash. Bounded exposure (single client), kept in a separate
.exports file so Cockpit's File Sharing module doesn't clobber it.
Flag world-scoped export on /mnt/pve-VMStorage as a non-blocking
hygiene item for a later Cockpit pass.
End-to-end runbook for standing up Proxmox Backup Server across the
fleet. Path A architecture: single primary at ANA, one-way sync to NH3
for disaster recovery. All 5 hypervisors (pfi-pve, nh3-pve, esh-pve,
esh-pve-nas, sfsrv-ana) migrate from local-dump vzdump to PBS-ANA.
Key decisions captured in the runbook:
- PBS in a Debian VM (not LXC) for clean capability model.
- PBS-ANA on pfi-pve, datastore via NFS from 10.250.50.50 —
separates backup data from hypervisor boot disk.
- PBS-NH3 on nh3-pve with local storage (independent failure
domain from ANA).
- Dedicated fleet-vzdump API token; read-only sync token for
PBS-NH3's pull job.
- sfsrv-ana specifically goes from zero backup coverage to full
vzdump coverage in Phase 3.
9 phases, each self-contained with a done-state and rollback
posture. User can stop between phases without leaving the fleet in a
bad state.
STATUS.md: added item 6b tracking this deployment. Original item 6
(cross-site rsync) now scoped to restic-only since PBS handles the
VM-image cross-site redundancy directly.
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