infra-ops and infra-hermes act as the same OS identity and dockerd does not
log exec per caller, so host-side changes carry no fingerprint. Git cannot
close the gap either: every commit here is attributed to Vuong Hoang by
convention, which is correct for authorship and useless for attribution.
On 2026-09-18 a second session edited the searxng stack mid-deploy, crash-
looping fleet search for ~4 minutes, and the author was unidentifiable.
scripts/ops-log records one line per host-changing action and holds a
lightweight claim so two agents do not deploy the same stack at once.
Four design questions, settled:
* Central on nh3-dev, not per-host and not the post office. Both agents
run as the same unix user there, so one file is shared with zero
provisioning. Per-host needs a writable path on ~25 heterogeneous boxes
and stores "we changed host Y" on host Y. journald looked free but shows
an unprivileged reader only their own _UID, which would have split the
log silently between the infra-ops and lkraven halves of the fleet.
* The claim is advisory and enforced in the tooling. deploy-stack.sh
refuses a foreign claim across the diff, the prompt and the apply -- the
whole review window, which is where the collision happened. Acquire is
mkdir, so it is atomic rather than probably-fine. Stale claims auto-break
and the break is recorded.
* Writers are automatic. deploy-stack.sh and elway record themselves; a log
that depends on remembering is the same class of instrument as a health
check that passes in both states.
* There is a detector. `ops-log audit` asks each host what changed on disk
and compares it to the newest log line for that stack, covering the
manual ssh-and-edit path the automatic writers structurally cannot.
ops-log being absent or broken never blocks a deploy; only a live foreign
claim does. `ops-log baseline` marks the 136 stacks that predate the
instrument so the detector starts from today rather than reporting the whole
fleet forever and training us to ignore it.
An unreachable host reports INCOMPLETE and exit 5, never clean.
docs/
Navigation map for the documentation tree. New session? Read
orientation.md first — it's the narrative overview
of the fleet, backup architecture, governing principles, and gotchas,
and it points at everything else.
Tree
docs/
├── orientation.md # start here — fleet overview + where-to-look guide
├── runbooks/ # ops runbooks (recovery, deployment phases)
│ ├── disaster-recovery.md
│ ├── nh3-prune-ritual.md
│ └── pbs-deployment.md
└── pfi/ # PFI-specific reference (services, models, VMs)
├── docker-stack.md
├── model-list.md
├── proxmox-vms.md
├── recommended-model-settings.md
├── vm-102-matrix-appservice.md
└── vm-102-matrix-synapse.md
What goes where
runbooks/— step-by-step ops procedures. Anything you'd reach for during an incident or while standing up new infrastructure. Examples: disaster recovery (blast-radius tiers + restoration steps), PBS deployment (9-phase rollout). New runbook → new file here.pfi/— PFI-specific reference material that's too narrow for the top-level CLAUDE.md but doesn't change incident response. AI model inventory, recommended inference settings, Matrix bridge config, Proxmox VM map. New stable reference → new file here.- Top-level (
docs/orientation.md,docs/README.md) — narrative guides about the workspace itself, not about specific infra.
Cross-references
- Fleet topology + servers table: top-level
CLAUDE.md. - Open work + recent milestones: top-level
STATUS.md. - Durable cross-session facts:
~/.claude/projects/-home-lkraven-development-eshpfi-management/memory/.
Conventions
- Markdown, GitHub-flavored. CommonMark renders fine in most viewers.
- File names are lowercase-kebab-case, descriptive. No dates in filenames — git history covers that.
- One topic per file. If a file grows past ~500 lines, look for a natural split before adding more.
- No checked-in binaries or checksums. Build/release artifacts belong
in a build pipeline or
tools/, notdocs/.