monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
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---
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# Domain expiry, DNS correctness, and public endpoint reachability.
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#
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# These are the first checks in the estate that PULL rather than push, and that
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# is the right way round for them: all three are about how the outside world
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# sees us, so they must be measured from outside. Gatus polls from the
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# observability host and needs nothing installed anywhere else - there is no
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# script, no timer and no token, because nothing is reporting in.
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#
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# That also means these have no heartbeat. A heartbeat answers "did the thing
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# that was supposed to report in do so"; when Gatus does the checking itself,
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# failure is immediate and self-evident.
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- name: Register the public-facing checks with Gatus
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hosts: observability
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become: yes
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vars:
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# Expected A records, derived from inventory rather than written down again.
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# The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a second place and
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# then left behind when the machine moved, so the check asserts against
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# ansible_host - if a box is renumbered, inventory is the one edit.
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dns_records:
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.gatus }}", host: monitoring}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.headscale }}", host: spacey}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.vaultwarden }}", host: vipy}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.forgejo }}", host: vipy}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.lnbits }}", host: vipy}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.ntfy_emergency_app }}", host: vipy}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.personal_blog }}", host: vipy}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.memos }}", host: vipy}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.mempool }}", host: vipy}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.datum_gateway }}", host: vipy}
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monero: check the node once a day, not every five minutes
A wedged explorer produced 83 Signal messages in six hours. Nothing about that
was a monitoring success: the checks were right, the cadence was wrong.
monerod-box is a Monero node in the middle of a multi-week initial sync on a
rotating disk. A 5-minute poll tells you nothing a daily one does not, and when
something breaks it turns one fault into a message every five minutes until
somebody silences the phone - which is the failure mode that makes people stop
reading alerts entirely.
So both Monero probes move to OnCalendar:
monerod *-*-* 05:00:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
xmrblocks *-*-* 05:30:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
systemd units (infra/401 per-host timer) *-*-* 05:15:00
30 minutes apart on purpose: both read the same LMDB, and the explorer's check
renders a full page out of it - a cold one measured 68 seconds. Running them
together would have each paying the other's cache misses.
OnCalendar rather than OnUnitActiveSec: an interval timer re-bases on every
restart, so "daily" silently becomes "a day after whenever it last came up".
── The window and the cadence are ONE decision ─────────────────────────────
The Gatus heartbeat moves with them, to 26h. Not 24h: the window must EXCEED
the push interval, or a check reporting exactly on schedule races its own
deadline and alerts on jitter alone. With a 900s randomized delay the true
worst case is ~24h15m, so 26h leaves real headroom.
The same logic drops the pulled public-site checks to a 24h interval - and
their failure-threshold from 3 to 1 with it. Three failures at 5m is 15 minutes
of tolerance; three at 24h would be THREE DAYS before anyone heard. A daily
check has no room for a blip, so it alerts on the first.
── Scoping ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
infra/401's timer is ONE PER HOST and iterates every unit in
monitored_services, so slowing it slows all of them. That is safe here only
because monerod-box runs nothing but Monero units; the knobs are therefore in
its host_vars rather than the role, and both 401 and 403 now take a per-host
(resp. per-probe) override with the old 11m as the default. Every other host
is untouched.
Host liveness and disk are deliberately NOT slowed. They answer "is the box
alive", which is still wanted within minutes.
The role-level OnCalendar defaults are prefixed (monero_healthcheck_on_calendar,
xmrblocks_healthcheck_on_calendar) because the generic `healthcheck` role owns
the unprefixed name, and an unprefixed default here would shadow it for any
play that includes both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 11:08:36 +02:00
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# Daily rather than the 6h default - see the Monero note under
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# public_sites. A record that has not moved in a year does not need
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# four looks a day while the node behind it is mid-sync.
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.monero }}", host: vipy, interval: '24h'}
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.monero_explorer }}", host: vipy, interval: '24h'}
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navidrome: a music server on its own box, with beets in front of it
Navidrome 0.64.0 on music-box (nodito VM 8200, 1 core / 1 GB / 50 GB), public
at music.contrapeso.xyz. A single Go binary with a SQLite database; the only
external dependency is ffmpeg for transcoding. Plus beets, the CLI that fixes
tags before Navidrome ever indexes them.
── Exposed without basic auth, on purpose ─────────────────────────────────
Navidrome speaks two protocols on one port: its web UI, and the Subsonic API
(/rest/*) that every mobile client actually uses. A Subsonic client
authenticates with ?u=&t=md5(password+salt)&s= in the query string and has
nowhere to carry a second credential, so Basic Auth in front of the site is
invisible to most of them. The choice is a proxy credential or a working phone.
Same call this estate already made for monerod's restricted RPC, for the same
reason: proxied bare so Feather can reach it, with the service's own auth doing
the authenticating.
The cost is stated rather than glossed: the login page and the whole /rest/*
surface are reachable by anyone who finds the hostname, and Navidrome has no
rate limiting and no 2FA.
A fail2ban jail on vipy reads a per-vhost Caddy access log and catches WEB UI
brute force, where a bad login returns 401. It very likely does NOT catch
Subsonic brute force, because that protocol answers a bad password with HTTP
200 and puts the failure in the body - which Caddy never sees. Nor can it be
fixed on the music box: the request arrives from vipy over the tailnet, so the
only address fail2ban could ban there is vipy's, which would take down every
service behind the edge. Banning has to happen at the edge; the edge cannot see
the failure. So /rest/* is protected by password strength alone, and the README
carries a one-line curl to re-check that after every upgrade.
── Passwords are stored reversibly, and cannot not be ─────────────────────
The Subsonic API requires the server to compute md5(password+salt) per request,
so Navidrome cannot hash passwords one-way. It encrypts them at rest with
PasswordEncryptionKey instead. Two real consequences, both in the README: root
on that box means every Navidrome password in plaintext, so the password must
be unique to this service; and changing the key invalidates every stored
password, so it is set before the first account and left alone.
── beets is not a service, deliberately ───────────────────────────────────
`beet import` is interactive and it MOVES AND RENAMES FILES. A timer that
reorganises a music library unattended is a way to lose one. Installed and
configured, run by hand.
/srv/music is counterweight:navidrome mode 2750 and the setgid bit is
load-bearing: without it beets' files land in the curator's own group,
Navidrome cannot read them, and the symptom is an EMPTY LIBRARY rather than a
permission error. ReplayGain and lyrics are auto: no - on one core they turn a
two-minute import into a twenty-minute one.
── Monitoring ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Host liveness and disk (400), the systemd unit (401), a probe that fetches
/app/ and greps it (403), and public reachability plus cert expiry (402).
/app/ was chosen by testing all three candidates against 0.64.0: /ping returns
a bare "." and proves only that something listens; /rest/ping.view identifies
the server but logs two warnings per call, ~576 a day; /app/ returns
<title>Navidrome</title> and logs nothing. 402 asserts 200 on /app/ and not on
"/", because "/" answers 302 - checked live rather than assumed.
── Also ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The headscale ACL grants tag:prd-vipy exactly tag:music-box:4533. Without a
rule the node is invisible rather than unreachable, which surfaces as a Caddy
502 "no such host".
inventory lan_ip was read off nodito's ARP table for the VM's own MAC, not
guessed - and .149 had belonged to another machine, whose stale host key made
SSH refuse the connection. That is the designed behaviour, not a fault.
50 GB is the LIBRARY ceiling, not just the OS: /srv/music is on the root disk,
so roughly 300-450 albums in FLAC. 1 GB is fine for serving and tight for the
initial scan, which is the memory peak.
No backups, deliberately. The music files would swamp the age-encrypted nightly
path, and navidrome.db is a rebuildable index. What is NOT rebuildable is
playlists, play counts, ratings and accounts - there are none today, which is
what makes the trade fair, and the README names this as the decision to revisit
if that changes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 11:09:40 +02:00
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- {sub: "{{ subdomains.music }}", host: vipy}
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monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
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# A public resolver on purpose: this must test what the internet sees, not
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# what a local cache or the tailnet's MagicDNS happens to answer.
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dns_resolver: "1.1.1.1"
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# Expected status per site, checked live before being written down.
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# 401 is the CORRECT answer for the two behind basic auth - asserting 200
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# there would go green precisely when the auth broke.
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public_sites:
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- {name: gatus, sub: "{{ subdomains.gatus }}", path: "/", status: 401}
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- {name: headscale, sub: "{{ subdomains.headscale }}", path: "/health", status: 200}
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- {name: vaultwarden, sub: "{{ subdomains.vaultwarden }}", path: "/", status: 200}
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- {name: forgejo, sub: "{{ subdomains.forgejo }}", path: "/", status: 200}
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- {name: lnbits, sub: "{{ subdomains.lnbits }}", path: "/", status: 200}
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- {name: avisame, sub: "{{ subdomains.ntfy_emergency_app }}", path: "/", status: 200}
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- {name: blog, sub: "{{ subdomains.personal_blog }}", path: "/", status: 200}
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- {name: memos, sub: "{{ subdomains.memos }}", path: "/", status: 200}
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- {name: mempool, sub: "{{ subdomains.mempool }}", path: "/", status: 200}
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- {name: datum, sub: "{{ subdomains.datum_gateway }}", path: "/", status: 401}
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monero: a full node on its own box, reachable from Feather over the WAN
monerod v0.18.5.1 on monerod-box (VMID 2400), Debian 13, systemd, no Docker.
Syncing at 24% as of this commit, 0 restarts, 0 OOM kills.
── The build-from-source requirement could not be met ──────────────────────
The intent was to build it ourselves and check the result against the published
checksums. That is not achievable for this release, and the role's README says
so at length so nobody re-derives it:
contrib/guix - the reproducible build that yields a byte-identical tarball -
exists ONLY on monero master. At tag v0.18.5.1 contrib/ contains `gitian`,
whose README wants an Ubuntu 18.04 host (EOL 2023) and python-cheetah.
A plain `make release-static` is not reproducible at all, so it produces a
binary whose hash matches nothing - failing both halves of the ask.
So we install the published binary and prove its provenance instead:
1. binaryFate's key is VENDORED at files/binaryfate.asc. A trust root fetched
over the network at the moment you need it is not a trust root. Its
fingerprint is asserted after import regardless.
2. hashes.txt is verified, and the assertion is on gpg's `VALIDSIG <fpr>`
status line - NOT on the string "Good signature", which is what
bitcoin_knots greps for and which passes for any key in the keyring.
3. The hash is looked up in the output of `gpg --decrypt`, not in the raw
clearsigned file, so nothing unsigned is ever searched.
4. The lookup requires hash AND filename on one line.
Tested with a positive and a negative control before deploying: the real
tarball matches, a corrupted hash correctly fails. monero_sha256 in defaults/
is a second in-git assertion so a version bump cannot happen without the
checksum moving in the same diff.
When v0.19 ships with guix on the release branch this gets easier, and the
README records why: the published monero-linux-x64 tarball unpacks to
monero-x86_64-linux-gnu-v0.18.5.1/, i.e. it IS the guix DISTNAME renamed, so
sha256(guix output) will equal the hashes.txt entry exactly.
── The 500 GB disk is provisioned in code ──────────────────────────────────
knots-box mounts /mnt/knots_data (~875 GB of chain) entirely by hand; that
mount appears nowhere in Ansible and a rebuild of that host would come up with
the blockchain silently missing. tasks/storage.yml does not repeat it.
Whole device, no partition table. Everything after mkfs goes by UUID, because
/dev/sdX is assigned by the kernel at boot and this estate has been bitten
eight times by an identifier written down once whose thing then moved.
monero_data_device is used ONLY to create the filesystem. Guards refuse to
touch the root disk or to overwrite an unrecognised filesystem, and a final
assert confirms the data directory is not still on /.
fstab gets `nofail` so a missing disk cannot drop a headless VM into an
emergency shell - and the unit gets `RequiresMountsFor=`, without which monerod
would then start, find an empty directory, and write a 300 GB chain onto a
10 GB root disk. With it the unit refuses to start and infra/401 says so within
five minutes.
The mount-point task and the ownership task deliberately share owner and mode.
Writing the obvious root:root 0755 on the first made them disagree and every
run flipped the directory back and forth; caught by re-running --check.
── Exposure: one HTTPS vhost, zero new open ports ──────────────────────────
Two RPC servers, not one: unrestricted on 127.0.0.1:18081 for administration
and the health check, restricted on :18089 for everything else. That is
`rpc-restricted-bind-port` and deliberately NOT `restricted-rpc=1`, which would
restrict the loopback server too. Verified live: the restricted port reports
restricted=true and blanks version and start_time.
--rpc-login is HTTP Digest (contrib/epee/src/http_auth.cpp) and
core_rpc_server::init hands the same login to both servers. Caddy on vipy does
TLS and routing only - no caddy_site_basic_auth, because a Basic challenge
would collide with the Digest challenge Feather answers. Verified end to end
from the WAN: 401 unauthenticated, get_block_count over /json_rpc when
authenticated, 401 again with a wrong password.
No UFW rule, and that is correct: tailnet traffic bypasses UFW entirely because
`-A INPUT -j ts-input` sits ahead of every ufw-* chain. Confirmed on mempool-box
before relying on it here.
P2P is outbound only. Nothing forwards 18080, so the node dials out, syncs and
serves us without relaying for strangers; no-igd follows from that.
── Monitoring: infra, systemd, public. No backups ──────────────────────────
Six Gatus endpoints, all green: liveness, disk, services/monerod-box-local/
monerod, probe/monerod, dns/monero.contrapeso.xyz, public/monero.
The probe does NOT assert `synchronized`. A full sync takes days and a check
requiring it would report DOWN for every one of them - an alarm with the
batteries taken out. Height and sync state go in the message instead.
The timer carries no `Requires=monerod.service`. Fulcrum's did, and sat
active+enabled for seven months without firing once. public/monero asserts 401,
not 200, so it goes red if rpc-login ever stops being enforced.
No backups, deliberately, following the phoenixd precedent: the chain is
re-syncable public data and there is no wallet on this node.
── Known constraint ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The VM has 2 GB and no swap; monerod's RSS is ~1.3 GB mid-sync. It is holding
(0 OOM kills, ~1 GB available, kernel reclaiming cache) but 8 GB is the
recommendation once the initial sync is done. out-peers/in-peers are held at
16/8 partly for this reason. Bumping it is a Proxmox resize plus memory_mb
here, since the vm resource sets ignore_changes = all.
The 500 GB data disk is likewise invisible to tofu - it was attached in the UI
and the vm resource ignores it - so vms.auto.tfvars now carries a comment
saying where it is and what mounts it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-19 17:50:46 +02:00
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# 401 is CORRECT: monerod answers an unauthenticated request with an HTTP
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# Digest challenge. Asserting 200 here would go green precisely when
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# rpc-login broke and the node started serving the world for free.
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monero: check the node once a day, not every five minutes
A wedged explorer produced 83 Signal messages in six hours. Nothing about that
was a monitoring success: the checks were right, the cadence was wrong.
monerod-box is a Monero node in the middle of a multi-week initial sync on a
rotating disk. A 5-minute poll tells you nothing a daily one does not, and when
something breaks it turns one fault into a message every five minutes until
somebody silences the phone - which is the failure mode that makes people stop
reading alerts entirely.
So both Monero probes move to OnCalendar:
monerod *-*-* 05:00:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
xmrblocks *-*-* 05:30:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
systemd units (infra/401 per-host timer) *-*-* 05:15:00
30 minutes apart on purpose: both read the same LMDB, and the explorer's check
renders a full page out of it - a cold one measured 68 seconds. Running them
together would have each paying the other's cache misses.
OnCalendar rather than OnUnitActiveSec: an interval timer re-bases on every
restart, so "daily" silently becomes "a day after whenever it last came up".
── The window and the cadence are ONE decision ─────────────────────────────
The Gatus heartbeat moves with them, to 26h. Not 24h: the window must EXCEED
the push interval, or a check reporting exactly on schedule races its own
deadline and alerts on jitter alone. With a 900s randomized delay the true
worst case is ~24h15m, so 26h leaves real headroom.
The same logic drops the pulled public-site checks to a 24h interval - and
their failure-threshold from 3 to 1 with it. Three failures at 5m is 15 minutes
of tolerance; three at 24h would be THREE DAYS before anyone heard. A daily
check has no room for a blip, so it alerts on the first.
── Scoping ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
infra/401's timer is ONE PER HOST and iterates every unit in
monitored_services, so slowing it slows all of them. That is safe here only
because monerod-box runs nothing but Monero units; the knobs are therefore in
its host_vars rather than the role, and both 401 and 403 now take a per-host
(resp. per-probe) override with the old 11m as the default. Every other host
is untouched.
Host liveness and disk are deliberately NOT slowed. They answer "is the box
alive", which is still wanted within minutes.
The role-level OnCalendar defaults are prefixed (monero_healthcheck_on_calendar,
xmrblocks_healthcheck_on_calendar) because the generic `healthcheck` role owns
the unprefixed name, and an unprefixed default here would shadow it for any
play that includes both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 11:08:36 +02:00
|
|
|
#
|
|
|
|
|
# Both Monero sites are polled ONCE A DAY, not every 5 minutes. The node
|
|
|
|
|
# is a multi-week initial sync on a rotating disk and the explorer reads
|
|
|
|
|
# the same LMDB, so a hard poll measures the disk more than the service -
|
|
|
|
|
# and a wedged explorer turned that cadence into 83 Signal messages in
|
|
|
|
|
# six hours. `threshold` drops with it: 3 failures at 5m is 15 minutes of
|
|
|
|
|
# tolerance, but at 24h it would be THREE DAYS before anyone heard. A
|
|
|
|
|
# daily check has no room for a blip, so it alerts on the first one.
|
|
|
|
|
- {name: monero, sub: "{{ subdomains.monero }}", path: "/get_info", status: 401, interval: '24h', threshold: 1}
|
|
|
|
|
- {name: exmrplore, sub: "{{ subdomains.monero_explorer }}", path: "/", status: 200, interval: '24h', threshold: 1}
|
navidrome: a music server on its own box, with beets in front of it
Navidrome 0.64.0 on music-box (nodito VM 8200, 1 core / 1 GB / 50 GB), public
at music.contrapeso.xyz. A single Go binary with a SQLite database; the only
external dependency is ffmpeg for transcoding. Plus beets, the CLI that fixes
tags before Navidrome ever indexes them.
── Exposed without basic auth, on purpose ─────────────────────────────────
Navidrome speaks two protocols on one port: its web UI, and the Subsonic API
(/rest/*) that every mobile client actually uses. A Subsonic client
authenticates with ?u=&t=md5(password+salt)&s= in the query string and has
nowhere to carry a second credential, so Basic Auth in front of the site is
invisible to most of them. The choice is a proxy credential or a working phone.
Same call this estate already made for monerod's restricted RPC, for the same
reason: proxied bare so Feather can reach it, with the service's own auth doing
the authenticating.
The cost is stated rather than glossed: the login page and the whole /rest/*
surface are reachable by anyone who finds the hostname, and Navidrome has no
rate limiting and no 2FA.
A fail2ban jail on vipy reads a per-vhost Caddy access log and catches WEB UI
brute force, where a bad login returns 401. It very likely does NOT catch
Subsonic brute force, because that protocol answers a bad password with HTTP
200 and puts the failure in the body - which Caddy never sees. Nor can it be
fixed on the music box: the request arrives from vipy over the tailnet, so the
only address fail2ban could ban there is vipy's, which would take down every
service behind the edge. Banning has to happen at the edge; the edge cannot see
the failure. So /rest/* is protected by password strength alone, and the README
carries a one-line curl to re-check that after every upgrade.
── Passwords are stored reversibly, and cannot not be ─────────────────────
The Subsonic API requires the server to compute md5(password+salt) per request,
so Navidrome cannot hash passwords one-way. It encrypts them at rest with
PasswordEncryptionKey instead. Two real consequences, both in the README: root
on that box means every Navidrome password in plaintext, so the password must
be unique to this service; and changing the key invalidates every stored
password, so it is set before the first account and left alone.
── beets is not a service, deliberately ───────────────────────────────────
`beet import` is interactive and it MOVES AND RENAMES FILES. A timer that
reorganises a music library unattended is a way to lose one. Installed and
configured, run by hand.
/srv/music is counterweight:navidrome mode 2750 and the setgid bit is
load-bearing: without it beets' files land in the curator's own group,
Navidrome cannot read them, and the symptom is an EMPTY LIBRARY rather than a
permission error. ReplayGain and lyrics are auto: no - on one core they turn a
two-minute import into a twenty-minute one.
── Monitoring ─────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
Host liveness and disk (400), the systemd unit (401), a probe that fetches
/app/ and greps it (403), and public reachability plus cert expiry (402).
/app/ was chosen by testing all three candidates against 0.64.0: /ping returns
a bare "." and proves only that something listens; /rest/ping.view identifies
the server but logs two warnings per call, ~576 a day; /app/ returns
<title>Navidrome</title> and logs nothing. 402 asserts 200 on /app/ and not on
"/", because "/" answers 302 - checked live rather than assumed.
── Also ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The headscale ACL grants tag:prd-vipy exactly tag:music-box:4533. Without a
rule the node is invisible rather than unreachable, which surfaces as a Caddy
502 "no such host".
inventory lan_ip was read off nodito's ARP table for the VM's own MAC, not
guessed - and .149 had belonged to another machine, whose stale host key made
SSH refuse the connection. That is the designed behaviour, not a fault.
50 GB is the LIBRARY ceiling, not just the OS: /srv/music is on the root disk,
so roughly 300-450 albums in FLAC. 1 GB is fine for serving and tight for the
initial scan, which is the memory peak.
No backups, deliberately. The music files would swamp the age-encrypted nightly
path, and navidrome.db is a rebuildable index. What is NOT rebuildable is
playlists, play counts, ratings and accounts - there are none today, which is
what makes the trade fair, and the README names this as the decision to revisit
if that changes.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 11:09:40 +02:00
|
|
|
# /app/, not "/": checked live, "/" answers 302 (Navidrome redirects to
|
|
|
|
|
# the SPA) and only /app/ returns 200 with the real UI. 200 rather than
|
|
|
|
|
# 401 because Navidrome has no basic auth in front of it - the Subsonic
|
|
|
|
|
# API the mobile clients speak cannot carry a proxy credential, so its
|
|
|
|
|
# own login is the gate. See roles/navidrome/README.md.
|
|
|
|
|
- {name: music, sub: "{{ subdomains.music }}", path: "/app/", status: 200}
|
monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
# Ports published from the edge host by socket_proxy.
|
|
|
|
|
public_tcp:
|
|
|
|
|
- {name: bitcoin-p2p, host: vipy, port: "{{ hostvars['knots_box_local'].bitcoin_p2p_port }}"}
|
|
|
|
|
- {name: fulcrum-ssl, host: vipy, port: "{{ hostvars['fulcrum_box_local'].fulcrum_ssl_port }}"}
|
|
|
|
|
- {name: datum-stratum, host: vipy, port: "{{ hostvars['knots_box_local'].datum_gateway_stratum_port }}"}
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
tasks:
|
|
|
|
|
# ── Domain expiry ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
|
2026-09-14 09:53:15 +02:00
|
|
|
# Each domain needs a URL SCHEME: Gatus derives the endpoint type from the
|
|
|
|
|
# prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "example.com" is UNKNOWN and the whole
|
|
|
|
|
# config is rejected. No status is asserted, only the WHOIS/RDAP expiry, so
|
|
|
|
|
# whatever the apex serves - a real site, or the registrar's parking page -
|
|
|
|
|
# is irrelevant.
|
|
|
|
|
#
|
|
|
|
|
# 24h, and upstream enforces a 5m minimum for DOMAIN_EXPIRATION anyway
|
|
|
|
|
# because it uses a free whois service that must not be hammered.
|
|
|
|
|
# 336h = 14 days of runway, because renewal is a manual act at the registrar.
|
|
|
|
|
- name: Build the domain endpoints
|
monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
|
|
|
ansible.builtin.set_fact:
|
2026-09-14 09:53:15 +02:00
|
|
|
domain_endpoints: "{{ domain_endpoints | default([]) + [{
|
|
|
|
|
'name': item,
|
|
|
|
|
'group': 'domain',
|
|
|
|
|
'url': 'https://' ~ item,
|
|
|
|
|
'interval': '24h',
|
alerting: Signal via signal-cli-rest-api, and faster failure detection
Three changes: detection windows tightened, a Signal transport deployed, and
alerts attached to all 84 non-transport endpoints.
── Failing faster ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The heartbeat is a TICKER, not a deadline: Gatus wakes every interval and asks
"did anything arrive in the last interval", so real detection is 1-2x the
window. And a window can only ever be as tight as the push frequency - which is
why two checks moved rather than just having their numbers changed.
liveness, cpu, ups, service-health, probes 16m -> 11m
disk, zfs daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
backup store + pull job daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
DNS records 24h -> 6h
backup dump 30h -> 26h
backup-dump stays slow because the dump genuinely is daily. The store-side check
catches the same fault within 6h by reading the source's dump timestamp out of
the artefact filename, so 26h is a backstop rather than the primary signal.
── Thresholds differ by check type, deliberately ───────────────────────────
`failure-threshold` counts consecutive failures, but "consecutive" is a
different amount of wall-clock time per check: a push endpoint produces one
failure per heartbeat window, a pulled one per interval. The default of 3 would
mean 33 minutes on an 11m heartbeat and over a day on a 7h one.
More importantly the heartbeat window ALREADY encodes the tolerance - an 11m
window on a 5-minute push is exactly "one missed push forgiven" - so stacking a
threshold of 3 triples a tolerance that was already chosen. Hence:
push/heartbeat endpoints failure-threshold 1
pulled, 5m (public) failure-threshold 3 (= 15 minutes)
pulled, 6h/24h (dns, domain) failure-threshold 1
── The Signal transport ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
roles/signal_api runs signal-cli-rest-api on the observability host, pinned by
digest, MODE=native.
It publishes NO PORTS. The API has no authentication of any kind - anything that
reaches it can send messages as you and read your Signal. Gatus talks to it over
a shared docker network by service name, which is also WHY the network exists:
Gatus runs in a container, so the host's loopback is unreachable from it and a
port published on 127.0.0.1 would not have worked.
MODE=native and not json-rpc because this VPS has 464MB of RAM and already runs
Gatus and Caddy. The json-rpc modes hold a resident JVM; native runs a binary
per request, and alerts are rare enough that startup cost per alert is the right
trade.
Monitored - Gatus polls /v1/health over the same network path the alerts take,
so it proves the delivery route rather than mere container liveness. Deliberately
NOT backed up: the data directory holds Signal private keys and the recovery
path is to link the device again from the phone.
Neither the signal-api endpoint nor Gatus's self-check carries a Signal alert.
If either is down, Signal is precisely what cannot deliver the alert.
── Four traps hit while linking, all now in the role README ────────────────
* /v1/qrcodelink is BROKEN in native mode - returns "no data to encode" while
the binary itself emits a perfectly good URI. Not worked around by switching
MODE, which would put a JVM in the path of every alert permanently.
* The data dir must be owned by uid 1000, not root. A root-owned 0700 dir
cannot be traversed by the container user, so linking silently never
completes and /v1/accounts returns "Failed to read local accounts list".
* `docker exec` runs as ROOT while the service runs as uid 1000, so without
--config the account is written to /root/... on the container's ephemeral
layer. It reports success and is destroyed on the next recreate.
* The phone reporting "network error" was IPv6: chat.signal.org resolves to
dualstack AAAA records first, the container has no IPv6 address, and this
host's IPv6 path is broken - the same edge that 404'd the Go tarball. Fixed
with a mounted gai.conf that prefers IPv4.
Verified: provider loads (configuredProviders=[signal]), a test message was
delivered and confirmed received, 84 endpoints carry alerts, 86 UP / 0 DOWN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 21:40:37 +02:00
|
|
|
'conditions': ['[DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h'],
|
|
|
|
|
'alerts': [{'type': 'signal', 'failure-threshold': 1,
|
|
|
|
|
'success-threshold': 1, 'send-on-resolved': true,
|
|
|
|
|
'minimum-reminder-interval': '168h'}]}] }}"
|
2026-09-14 09:53:15 +02:00
|
|
|
loop: "{{ monitored_domains }}"
|
monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
# ── DNS ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
|
alerting: Signal via signal-cli-rest-api, and faster failure detection
Three changes: detection windows tightened, a Signal transport deployed, and
alerts attached to all 84 non-transport endpoints.
── Failing faster ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The heartbeat is a TICKER, not a deadline: Gatus wakes every interval and asks
"did anything arrive in the last interval", so real detection is 1-2x the
window. And a window can only ever be as tight as the push frequency - which is
why two checks moved rather than just having their numbers changed.
liveness, cpu, ups, service-health, probes 16m -> 11m
disk, zfs daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
backup store + pull job daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
DNS records 24h -> 6h
backup dump 30h -> 26h
backup-dump stays slow because the dump genuinely is daily. The store-side check
catches the same fault within 6h by reading the source's dump timestamp out of
the artefact filename, so 26h is a backstop rather than the primary signal.
── Thresholds differ by check type, deliberately ───────────────────────────
`failure-threshold` counts consecutive failures, but "consecutive" is a
different amount of wall-clock time per check: a push endpoint produces one
failure per heartbeat window, a pulled one per interval. The default of 3 would
mean 33 minutes on an 11m heartbeat and over a day on a 7h one.
More importantly the heartbeat window ALREADY encodes the tolerance - an 11m
window on a 5-minute push is exactly "one missed push forgiven" - so stacking a
threshold of 3 triples a tolerance that was already chosen. Hence:
push/heartbeat endpoints failure-threshold 1
pulled, 5m (public) failure-threshold 3 (= 15 minutes)
pulled, 6h/24h (dns, domain) failure-threshold 1
── The Signal transport ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
roles/signal_api runs signal-cli-rest-api on the observability host, pinned by
digest, MODE=native.
It publishes NO PORTS. The API has no authentication of any kind - anything that
reaches it can send messages as you and read your Signal. Gatus talks to it over
a shared docker network by service name, which is also WHY the network exists:
Gatus runs in a container, so the host's loopback is unreachable from it and a
port published on 127.0.0.1 would not have worked.
MODE=native and not json-rpc because this VPS has 464MB of RAM and already runs
Gatus and Caddy. The json-rpc modes hold a resident JVM; native runs a binary
per request, and alerts are rare enough that startup cost per alert is the right
trade.
Monitored - Gatus polls /v1/health over the same network path the alerts take,
so it proves the delivery route rather than mere container liveness. Deliberately
NOT backed up: the data directory holds Signal private keys and the recovery
path is to link the device again from the phone.
Neither the signal-api endpoint nor Gatus's self-check carries a Signal alert.
If either is down, Signal is precisely what cannot deliver the alert.
── Four traps hit while linking, all now in the role README ────────────────
* /v1/qrcodelink is BROKEN in native mode - returns "no data to encode" while
the binary itself emits a perfectly good URI. Not worked around by switching
MODE, which would put a JVM in the path of every alert permanently.
* The data dir must be owned by uid 1000, not root. A root-owned 0700 dir
cannot be traversed by the container user, so linking silently never
completes and /v1/accounts returns "Failed to read local accounts list".
* `docker exec` runs as ROOT while the service runs as uid 1000, so without
--config the account is written to /root/... on the container's ephemeral
layer. It reports success and is destroyed on the next recreate.
* The phone reporting "network error" was IPv6: chat.signal.org resolves to
dualstack AAAA records first, the container has no IPv6 address, and this
host's IPv6 path is broken - the same edge that 404'd the Go tarball. Fixed
with a mounted gai.conf that prefers IPv4.
Verified: provider loads (configuredProviders=[signal]), a test message was
delivered and confirmed received, 84 endpoints carry alerts, 86 UP / 0 DOWN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 21:40:37 +02:00
|
|
|
# 6h, not daily: a DNS query is cheap and a wrong record is an outage. The
|
|
|
|
|
# domain check stays at 24h because it does a WHOIS/RDAP lookup against a
|
|
|
|
|
# free service. Alert on the first failure - at a 6h interval, waiting for
|
|
|
|
|
# three would be nearly a day.
|
monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
|
|
|
- name: Build the DNS endpoints
|
|
|
|
|
ansible.builtin.set_fact:
|
|
|
|
|
dns_endpoints: "{{ dns_endpoints | default([]) + [{
|
|
|
|
|
'name': item.sub ~ '.' ~ root_domain,
|
|
|
|
|
'group': 'dns',
|
|
|
|
|
'url': dns_resolver,
|
monero: check the node once a day, not every five minutes
A wedged explorer produced 83 Signal messages in six hours. Nothing about that
was a monitoring success: the checks were right, the cadence was wrong.
monerod-box is a Monero node in the middle of a multi-week initial sync on a
rotating disk. A 5-minute poll tells you nothing a daily one does not, and when
something breaks it turns one fault into a message every five minutes until
somebody silences the phone - which is the failure mode that makes people stop
reading alerts entirely.
So both Monero probes move to OnCalendar:
monerod *-*-* 05:00:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
xmrblocks *-*-* 05:30:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
systemd units (infra/401 per-host timer) *-*-* 05:15:00
30 minutes apart on purpose: both read the same LMDB, and the explorer's check
renders a full page out of it - a cold one measured 68 seconds. Running them
together would have each paying the other's cache misses.
OnCalendar rather than OnUnitActiveSec: an interval timer re-bases on every
restart, so "daily" silently becomes "a day after whenever it last came up".
── The window and the cadence are ONE decision ─────────────────────────────
The Gatus heartbeat moves with them, to 26h. Not 24h: the window must EXCEED
the push interval, or a check reporting exactly on schedule races its own
deadline and alerts on jitter alone. With a 900s randomized delay the true
worst case is ~24h15m, so 26h leaves real headroom.
The same logic drops the pulled public-site checks to a 24h interval - and
their failure-threshold from 3 to 1 with it. Three failures at 5m is 15 minutes
of tolerance; three at 24h would be THREE DAYS before anyone heard. A daily
check has no room for a blip, so it alerts on the first.
── Scoping ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
infra/401's timer is ONE PER HOST and iterates every unit in
monitored_services, so slowing it slows all of them. That is safe here only
because monerod-box runs nothing but Monero units; the knobs are therefore in
its host_vars rather than the role, and both 401 and 403 now take a per-host
(resp. per-probe) override with the old 11m as the default. Every other host
is untouched.
Host liveness and disk are deliberately NOT slowed. They answer "is the box
alive", which is still wanted within minutes.
The role-level OnCalendar defaults are prefixed (monero_healthcheck_on_calendar,
xmrblocks_healthcheck_on_calendar) because the generic `healthcheck` role owns
the unprefixed name, and an unprefixed default here would shadow it for any
play that includes both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 11:08:36 +02:00
|
|
|
'interval': item.interval | default('6h'),
|
monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
|
|
|
'dns': {'query-type': 'A', 'query-name': item.sub ~ '.' ~ root_domain},
|
|
|
|
|
'conditions': ['[DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR',
|
alerting: Signal via signal-cli-rest-api, and faster failure detection
Three changes: detection windows tightened, a Signal transport deployed, and
alerts attached to all 84 non-transport endpoints.
── Failing faster ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The heartbeat is a TICKER, not a deadline: Gatus wakes every interval and asks
"did anything arrive in the last interval", so real detection is 1-2x the
window. And a window can only ever be as tight as the push frequency - which is
why two checks moved rather than just having their numbers changed.
liveness, cpu, ups, service-health, probes 16m -> 11m
disk, zfs daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
backup store + pull job daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
DNS records 24h -> 6h
backup dump 30h -> 26h
backup-dump stays slow because the dump genuinely is daily. The store-side check
catches the same fault within 6h by reading the source's dump timestamp out of
the artefact filename, so 26h is a backstop rather than the primary signal.
── Thresholds differ by check type, deliberately ───────────────────────────
`failure-threshold` counts consecutive failures, but "consecutive" is a
different amount of wall-clock time per check: a push endpoint produces one
failure per heartbeat window, a pulled one per interval. The default of 3 would
mean 33 minutes on an 11m heartbeat and over a day on a 7h one.
More importantly the heartbeat window ALREADY encodes the tolerance - an 11m
window on a 5-minute push is exactly "one missed push forgiven" - so stacking a
threshold of 3 triples a tolerance that was already chosen. Hence:
push/heartbeat endpoints failure-threshold 1
pulled, 5m (public) failure-threshold 3 (= 15 minutes)
pulled, 6h/24h (dns, domain) failure-threshold 1
── The Signal transport ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
roles/signal_api runs signal-cli-rest-api on the observability host, pinned by
digest, MODE=native.
It publishes NO PORTS. The API has no authentication of any kind - anything that
reaches it can send messages as you and read your Signal. Gatus talks to it over
a shared docker network by service name, which is also WHY the network exists:
Gatus runs in a container, so the host's loopback is unreachable from it and a
port published on 127.0.0.1 would not have worked.
MODE=native and not json-rpc because this VPS has 464MB of RAM and already runs
Gatus and Caddy. The json-rpc modes hold a resident JVM; native runs a binary
per request, and alerts are rare enough that startup cost per alert is the right
trade.
Monitored - Gatus polls /v1/health over the same network path the alerts take,
so it proves the delivery route rather than mere container liveness. Deliberately
NOT backed up: the data directory holds Signal private keys and the recovery
path is to link the device again from the phone.
Neither the signal-api endpoint nor Gatus's self-check carries a Signal alert.
If either is down, Signal is precisely what cannot deliver the alert.
── Four traps hit while linking, all now in the role README ────────────────
* /v1/qrcodelink is BROKEN in native mode - returns "no data to encode" while
the binary itself emits a perfectly good URI. Not worked around by switching
MODE, which would put a JVM in the path of every alert permanently.
* The data dir must be owned by uid 1000, not root. A root-owned 0700 dir
cannot be traversed by the container user, so linking silently never
completes and /v1/accounts returns "Failed to read local accounts list".
* `docker exec` runs as ROOT while the service runs as uid 1000, so without
--config the account is written to /root/... on the container's ephemeral
layer. It reports success and is destroyed on the next recreate.
* The phone reporting "network error" was IPv6: chat.signal.org resolves to
dualstack AAAA records first, the container has no IPv6 address, and this
host's IPv6 path is broken - the same edge that 404'd the Go tarball. Fixed
with a mounted gai.conf that prefers IPv4.
Verified: provider loads (configuredProviders=[signal]), a test message was
delivered and confirmed received, 84 endpoints carry alerts, 86 UP / 0 DOWN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 21:40:37 +02:00
|
|
|
'[BODY] == ' ~ hostvars[item.host].ansible_host],
|
|
|
|
|
'alerts': [{'type': 'signal', 'failure-threshold': 1,
|
|
|
|
|
'success-threshold': 1, 'send-on-resolved': true,
|
|
|
|
|
'minimum-reminder-interval': '24h'}]}] }}"
|
monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
|
|
|
loop: "{{ dns_records }}"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
# ── Public HTTP ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
|
alerting: Signal via signal-cli-rest-api, and faster failure detection
Three changes: detection windows tightened, a Signal transport deployed, and
alerts attached to all 84 non-transport endpoints.
── Failing faster ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The heartbeat is a TICKER, not a deadline: Gatus wakes every interval and asks
"did anything arrive in the last interval", so real detection is 1-2x the
window. And a window can only ever be as tight as the push frequency - which is
why two checks moved rather than just having their numbers changed.
liveness, cpu, ups, service-health, probes 16m -> 11m
disk, zfs daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
backup store + pull job daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
DNS records 24h -> 6h
backup dump 30h -> 26h
backup-dump stays slow because the dump genuinely is daily. The store-side check
catches the same fault within 6h by reading the source's dump timestamp out of
the artefact filename, so 26h is a backstop rather than the primary signal.
── Thresholds differ by check type, deliberately ───────────────────────────
`failure-threshold` counts consecutive failures, but "consecutive" is a
different amount of wall-clock time per check: a push endpoint produces one
failure per heartbeat window, a pulled one per interval. The default of 3 would
mean 33 minutes on an 11m heartbeat and over a day on a 7h one.
More importantly the heartbeat window ALREADY encodes the tolerance - an 11m
window on a 5-minute push is exactly "one missed push forgiven" - so stacking a
threshold of 3 triples a tolerance that was already chosen. Hence:
push/heartbeat endpoints failure-threshold 1
pulled, 5m (public) failure-threshold 3 (= 15 minutes)
pulled, 6h/24h (dns, domain) failure-threshold 1
── The Signal transport ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
roles/signal_api runs signal-cli-rest-api on the observability host, pinned by
digest, MODE=native.
It publishes NO PORTS. The API has no authentication of any kind - anything that
reaches it can send messages as you and read your Signal. Gatus talks to it over
a shared docker network by service name, which is also WHY the network exists:
Gatus runs in a container, so the host's loopback is unreachable from it and a
port published on 127.0.0.1 would not have worked.
MODE=native and not json-rpc because this VPS has 464MB of RAM and already runs
Gatus and Caddy. The json-rpc modes hold a resident JVM; native runs a binary
per request, and alerts are rare enough that startup cost per alert is the right
trade.
Monitored - Gatus polls /v1/health over the same network path the alerts take,
so it proves the delivery route rather than mere container liveness. Deliberately
NOT backed up: the data directory holds Signal private keys and the recovery
path is to link the device again from the phone.
Neither the signal-api endpoint nor Gatus's self-check carries a Signal alert.
If either is down, Signal is precisely what cannot deliver the alert.
── Four traps hit while linking, all now in the role README ────────────────
* /v1/qrcodelink is BROKEN in native mode - returns "no data to encode" while
the binary itself emits a perfectly good URI. Not worked around by switching
MODE, which would put a JVM in the path of every alert permanently.
* The data dir must be owned by uid 1000, not root. A root-owned 0700 dir
cannot be traversed by the container user, so linking silently never
completes and /v1/accounts returns "Failed to read local accounts list".
* `docker exec` runs as ROOT while the service runs as uid 1000, so without
--config the account is written to /root/... on the container's ephemeral
layer. It reports success and is destroyed on the next recreate.
* The phone reporting "network error" was IPv6: chat.signal.org resolves to
dualstack AAAA records first, the container has no IPv6 address, and this
host's IPv6 path is broken - the same edge that 404'd the Go tarball. Fixed
with a mounted gai.conf that prefers IPv4.
Verified: provider loads (configuredProviders=[signal]), a test message was
delivered and confirmed received, 84 endpoints carry alerts, 86 UP / 0 DOWN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 21:40:37 +02:00
|
|
|
# failure-threshold 3 at a 5m interval = 15 minutes. A pulled endpoint has
|
|
|
|
|
# no heartbeat window, so unlike the push checks the tolerance has to live
|
|
|
|
|
# in the threshold - and one failed poll of a public site is usually a blip.
|
monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
|
|
|
- name: Build the public HTTP endpoints
|
|
|
|
|
ansible.builtin.set_fact:
|
|
|
|
|
http_endpoints: "{{ http_endpoints | default([]) + [{
|
|
|
|
|
'name': item.name,
|
|
|
|
|
'group': 'public',
|
|
|
|
|
'url': 'https://' ~ item.sub ~ '.' ~ root_domain ~ item.path,
|
monero: check the node once a day, not every five minutes
A wedged explorer produced 83 Signal messages in six hours. Nothing about that
was a monitoring success: the checks were right, the cadence was wrong.
monerod-box is a Monero node in the middle of a multi-week initial sync on a
rotating disk. A 5-minute poll tells you nothing a daily one does not, and when
something breaks it turns one fault into a message every five minutes until
somebody silences the phone - which is the failure mode that makes people stop
reading alerts entirely.
So both Monero probes move to OnCalendar:
monerod *-*-* 05:00:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
xmrblocks *-*-* 05:30:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
systemd units (infra/401 per-host timer) *-*-* 05:15:00
30 minutes apart on purpose: both read the same LMDB, and the explorer's check
renders a full page out of it - a cold one measured 68 seconds. Running them
together would have each paying the other's cache misses.
OnCalendar rather than OnUnitActiveSec: an interval timer re-bases on every
restart, so "daily" silently becomes "a day after whenever it last came up".
── The window and the cadence are ONE decision ─────────────────────────────
The Gatus heartbeat moves with them, to 26h. Not 24h: the window must EXCEED
the push interval, or a check reporting exactly on schedule races its own
deadline and alerts on jitter alone. With a 900s randomized delay the true
worst case is ~24h15m, so 26h leaves real headroom.
The same logic drops the pulled public-site checks to a 24h interval - and
their failure-threshold from 3 to 1 with it. Three failures at 5m is 15 minutes
of tolerance; three at 24h would be THREE DAYS before anyone heard. A daily
check has no room for a blip, so it alerts on the first.
── Scoping ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
infra/401's timer is ONE PER HOST and iterates every unit in
monitored_services, so slowing it slows all of them. That is safe here only
because monerod-box runs nothing but Monero units; the knobs are therefore in
its host_vars rather than the role, and both 401 and 403 now take a per-host
(resp. per-probe) override with the old 11m as the default. Every other host
is untouched.
Host liveness and disk are deliberately NOT slowed. They answer "is the box
alive", which is still wanted within minutes.
The role-level OnCalendar defaults are prefixed (monero_healthcheck_on_calendar,
xmrblocks_healthcheck_on_calendar) because the generic `healthcheck` role owns
the unprefixed name, and an unprefixed default here would shadow it for any
play that includes both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 11:08:36 +02:00
|
|
|
'interval': item.interval | default('5m'),
|
monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
|
|
|
'conditions': ['[STATUS] == ' ~ item.status,
|
alerting: Signal via signal-cli-rest-api, and faster failure detection
Three changes: detection windows tightened, a Signal transport deployed, and
alerts attached to all 84 non-transport endpoints.
── Failing faster ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The heartbeat is a TICKER, not a deadline: Gatus wakes every interval and asks
"did anything arrive in the last interval", so real detection is 1-2x the
window. And a window can only ever be as tight as the push frequency - which is
why two checks moved rather than just having their numbers changed.
liveness, cpu, ups, service-health, probes 16m -> 11m
disk, zfs daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
backup store + pull job daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
DNS records 24h -> 6h
backup dump 30h -> 26h
backup-dump stays slow because the dump genuinely is daily. The store-side check
catches the same fault within 6h by reading the source's dump timestamp out of
the artefact filename, so 26h is a backstop rather than the primary signal.
── Thresholds differ by check type, deliberately ───────────────────────────
`failure-threshold` counts consecutive failures, but "consecutive" is a
different amount of wall-clock time per check: a push endpoint produces one
failure per heartbeat window, a pulled one per interval. The default of 3 would
mean 33 minutes on an 11m heartbeat and over a day on a 7h one.
More importantly the heartbeat window ALREADY encodes the tolerance - an 11m
window on a 5-minute push is exactly "one missed push forgiven" - so stacking a
threshold of 3 triples a tolerance that was already chosen. Hence:
push/heartbeat endpoints failure-threshold 1
pulled, 5m (public) failure-threshold 3 (= 15 minutes)
pulled, 6h/24h (dns, domain) failure-threshold 1
── The Signal transport ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
roles/signal_api runs signal-cli-rest-api on the observability host, pinned by
digest, MODE=native.
It publishes NO PORTS. The API has no authentication of any kind - anything that
reaches it can send messages as you and read your Signal. Gatus talks to it over
a shared docker network by service name, which is also WHY the network exists:
Gatus runs in a container, so the host's loopback is unreachable from it and a
port published on 127.0.0.1 would not have worked.
MODE=native and not json-rpc because this VPS has 464MB of RAM and already runs
Gatus and Caddy. The json-rpc modes hold a resident JVM; native runs a binary
per request, and alerts are rare enough that startup cost per alert is the right
trade.
Monitored - Gatus polls /v1/health over the same network path the alerts take,
so it proves the delivery route rather than mere container liveness. Deliberately
NOT backed up: the data directory holds Signal private keys and the recovery
path is to link the device again from the phone.
Neither the signal-api endpoint nor Gatus's self-check carries a Signal alert.
If either is down, Signal is precisely what cannot deliver the alert.
── Four traps hit while linking, all now in the role README ────────────────
* /v1/qrcodelink is BROKEN in native mode - returns "no data to encode" while
the binary itself emits a perfectly good URI. Not worked around by switching
MODE, which would put a JVM in the path of every alert permanently.
* The data dir must be owned by uid 1000, not root. A root-owned 0700 dir
cannot be traversed by the container user, so linking silently never
completes and /v1/accounts returns "Failed to read local accounts list".
* `docker exec` runs as ROOT while the service runs as uid 1000, so without
--config the account is written to /root/... on the container's ephemeral
layer. It reports success and is destroyed on the next recreate.
* The phone reporting "network error" was IPv6: chat.signal.org resolves to
dualstack AAAA records first, the container has no IPv6 address, and this
host's IPv6 path is broken - the same edge that 404'd the Go tarball. Fixed
with a mounted gai.conf that prefers IPv4.
Verified: provider loads (configuredProviders=[signal]), a test message was
delivered and confirmed received, 84 endpoints carry alerts, 86 UP / 0 DOWN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 21:40:37 +02:00
|
|
|
'[CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h'],
|
monero: check the node once a day, not every five minutes
A wedged explorer produced 83 Signal messages in six hours. Nothing about that
was a monitoring success: the checks were right, the cadence was wrong.
monerod-box is a Monero node in the middle of a multi-week initial sync on a
rotating disk. A 5-minute poll tells you nothing a daily one does not, and when
something breaks it turns one fault into a message every five minutes until
somebody silences the phone - which is the failure mode that makes people stop
reading alerts entirely.
So both Monero probes move to OnCalendar:
monerod *-*-* 05:00:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
xmrblocks *-*-* 05:30:00 RandomizedDelaySec=900
systemd units (infra/401 per-host timer) *-*-* 05:15:00
30 minutes apart on purpose: both read the same LMDB, and the explorer's check
renders a full page out of it - a cold one measured 68 seconds. Running them
together would have each paying the other's cache misses.
OnCalendar rather than OnUnitActiveSec: an interval timer re-bases on every
restart, so "daily" silently becomes "a day after whenever it last came up".
── The window and the cadence are ONE decision ─────────────────────────────
The Gatus heartbeat moves with them, to 26h. Not 24h: the window must EXCEED
the push interval, or a check reporting exactly on schedule races its own
deadline and alerts on jitter alone. With a 900s randomized delay the true
worst case is ~24h15m, so 26h leaves real headroom.
The same logic drops the pulled public-site checks to a 24h interval - and
their failure-threshold from 3 to 1 with it. Three failures at 5m is 15 minutes
of tolerance; three at 24h would be THREE DAYS before anyone heard. A daily
check has no room for a blip, so it alerts on the first.
── Scoping ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
infra/401's timer is ONE PER HOST and iterates every unit in
monitored_services, so slowing it slows all of them. That is safe here only
because monerod-box runs nothing but Monero units; the knobs are therefore in
its host_vars rather than the role, and both 401 and 403 now take a per-host
(resp. per-probe) override with the old 11m as the default. Every other host
is untouched.
Host liveness and disk are deliberately NOT slowed. They answer "is the box
alive", which is still wanted within minutes.
The role-level OnCalendar defaults are prefixed (monero_healthcheck_on_calendar,
xmrblocks_healthcheck_on_calendar) because the generic `healthcheck` role owns
the unprefixed name, and an unprefixed default here would shadow it for any
play that includes both.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-27 11:08:36 +02:00
|
|
|
'alerts': [{'type': 'signal', 'failure-threshold': item.threshold | default(3),
|
alerting: Signal via signal-cli-rest-api, and faster failure detection
Three changes: detection windows tightened, a Signal transport deployed, and
alerts attached to all 84 non-transport endpoints.
── Failing faster ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The heartbeat is a TICKER, not a deadline: Gatus wakes every interval and asks
"did anything arrive in the last interval", so real detection is 1-2x the
window. And a window can only ever be as tight as the push frequency - which is
why two checks moved rather than just having their numbers changed.
liveness, cpu, ups, service-health, probes 16m -> 11m
disk, zfs daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
backup store + pull job daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
DNS records 24h -> 6h
backup dump 30h -> 26h
backup-dump stays slow because the dump genuinely is daily. The store-side check
catches the same fault within 6h by reading the source's dump timestamp out of
the artefact filename, so 26h is a backstop rather than the primary signal.
── Thresholds differ by check type, deliberately ───────────────────────────
`failure-threshold` counts consecutive failures, but "consecutive" is a
different amount of wall-clock time per check: a push endpoint produces one
failure per heartbeat window, a pulled one per interval. The default of 3 would
mean 33 minutes on an 11m heartbeat and over a day on a 7h one.
More importantly the heartbeat window ALREADY encodes the tolerance - an 11m
window on a 5-minute push is exactly "one missed push forgiven" - so stacking a
threshold of 3 triples a tolerance that was already chosen. Hence:
push/heartbeat endpoints failure-threshold 1
pulled, 5m (public) failure-threshold 3 (= 15 minutes)
pulled, 6h/24h (dns, domain) failure-threshold 1
── The Signal transport ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
roles/signal_api runs signal-cli-rest-api on the observability host, pinned by
digest, MODE=native.
It publishes NO PORTS. The API has no authentication of any kind - anything that
reaches it can send messages as you and read your Signal. Gatus talks to it over
a shared docker network by service name, which is also WHY the network exists:
Gatus runs in a container, so the host's loopback is unreachable from it and a
port published on 127.0.0.1 would not have worked.
MODE=native and not json-rpc because this VPS has 464MB of RAM and already runs
Gatus and Caddy. The json-rpc modes hold a resident JVM; native runs a binary
per request, and alerts are rare enough that startup cost per alert is the right
trade.
Monitored - Gatus polls /v1/health over the same network path the alerts take,
so it proves the delivery route rather than mere container liveness. Deliberately
NOT backed up: the data directory holds Signal private keys and the recovery
path is to link the device again from the phone.
Neither the signal-api endpoint nor Gatus's self-check carries a Signal alert.
If either is down, Signal is precisely what cannot deliver the alert.
── Four traps hit while linking, all now in the role README ────────────────
* /v1/qrcodelink is BROKEN in native mode - returns "no data to encode" while
the binary itself emits a perfectly good URI. Not worked around by switching
MODE, which would put a JVM in the path of every alert permanently.
* The data dir must be owned by uid 1000, not root. A root-owned 0700 dir
cannot be traversed by the container user, so linking silently never
completes and /v1/accounts returns "Failed to read local accounts list".
* `docker exec` runs as ROOT while the service runs as uid 1000, so without
--config the account is written to /root/... on the container's ephemeral
layer. It reports success and is destroyed on the next recreate.
* The phone reporting "network error" was IPv6: chat.signal.org resolves to
dualstack AAAA records first, the container has no IPv6 address, and this
host's IPv6 path is broken - the same edge that 404'd the Go tarball. Fixed
with a mounted gai.conf that prefers IPv4.
Verified: provider loads (configuredProviders=[signal]), a test message was
delivered and confirmed received, 84 endpoints carry alerts, 86 UP / 0 DOWN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 21:40:37 +02:00
|
|
|
'success-threshold': 2, 'send-on-resolved': true,
|
|
|
|
|
'minimum-reminder-interval': '6h'}]}] }}"
|
monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
|
|
|
loop: "{{ public_sites }}"
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
# ── Public TCP ───────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
|
|
|
|
|
- name: Build the public TCP endpoints
|
|
|
|
|
ansible.builtin.set_fact:
|
|
|
|
|
tcp_endpoints: "{{ tcp_endpoints | default([]) + [{
|
|
|
|
|
'name': item.name,
|
|
|
|
|
'group': 'public',
|
|
|
|
|
'url': 'tcp://' ~ hostvars[item.host].ansible_host ~ ':' ~ item.port,
|
|
|
|
|
'interval': '5m',
|
alerting: Signal via signal-cli-rest-api, and faster failure detection
Three changes: detection windows tightened, a Signal transport deployed, and
alerts attached to all 84 non-transport endpoints.
── Failing faster ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
The heartbeat is a TICKER, not a deadline: Gatus wakes every interval and asks
"did anything arrive in the last interval", so real detection is 1-2x the
window. And a window can only ever be as tight as the push frequency - which is
why two checks moved rather than just having their numbers changed.
liveness, cpu, ups, service-health, probes 16m -> 11m
disk, zfs daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
backup store + pull job daily/30h -> 6-hourly/7h
DNS records 24h -> 6h
backup dump 30h -> 26h
backup-dump stays slow because the dump genuinely is daily. The store-side check
catches the same fault within 6h by reading the source's dump timestamp out of
the artefact filename, so 26h is a backstop rather than the primary signal.
── Thresholds differ by check type, deliberately ───────────────────────────
`failure-threshold` counts consecutive failures, but "consecutive" is a
different amount of wall-clock time per check: a push endpoint produces one
failure per heartbeat window, a pulled one per interval. The default of 3 would
mean 33 minutes on an 11m heartbeat and over a day on a 7h one.
More importantly the heartbeat window ALREADY encodes the tolerance - an 11m
window on a 5-minute push is exactly "one missed push forgiven" - so stacking a
threshold of 3 triples a tolerance that was already chosen. Hence:
push/heartbeat endpoints failure-threshold 1
pulled, 5m (public) failure-threshold 3 (= 15 minutes)
pulled, 6h/24h (dns, domain) failure-threshold 1
── The Signal transport ────────────────────────────────────────────────────
roles/signal_api runs signal-cli-rest-api on the observability host, pinned by
digest, MODE=native.
It publishes NO PORTS. The API has no authentication of any kind - anything that
reaches it can send messages as you and read your Signal. Gatus talks to it over
a shared docker network by service name, which is also WHY the network exists:
Gatus runs in a container, so the host's loopback is unreachable from it and a
port published on 127.0.0.1 would not have worked.
MODE=native and not json-rpc because this VPS has 464MB of RAM and already runs
Gatus and Caddy. The json-rpc modes hold a resident JVM; native runs a binary
per request, and alerts are rare enough that startup cost per alert is the right
trade.
Monitored - Gatus polls /v1/health over the same network path the alerts take,
so it proves the delivery route rather than mere container liveness. Deliberately
NOT backed up: the data directory holds Signal private keys and the recovery
path is to link the device again from the phone.
Neither the signal-api endpoint nor Gatus's self-check carries a Signal alert.
If either is down, Signal is precisely what cannot deliver the alert.
── Four traps hit while linking, all now in the role README ────────────────
* /v1/qrcodelink is BROKEN in native mode - returns "no data to encode" while
the binary itself emits a perfectly good URI. Not worked around by switching
MODE, which would put a JVM in the path of every alert permanently.
* The data dir must be owned by uid 1000, not root. A root-owned 0700 dir
cannot be traversed by the container user, so linking silently never
completes and /v1/accounts returns "Failed to read local accounts list".
* `docker exec` runs as ROOT while the service runs as uid 1000, so without
--config the account is written to /root/... on the container's ephemeral
layer. It reports success and is destroyed on the next recreate.
* The phone reporting "network error" was IPv6: chat.signal.org resolves to
dualstack AAAA records first, the container has no IPv6 address, and this
host's IPv6 path is broken - the same edge that 404'd the Go tarball. Fixed
with a mounted gai.conf that prefers IPv4.
Verified: provider loads (configuredProviders=[signal]), a test message was
delivered and confirmed received, 84 endpoints carry alerts, 86 UP / 0 DOWN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 21:40:37 +02:00
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'conditions': ['[CONNECTED] == true'],
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'alerts': [{'type': 'signal', 'failure-threshold': 3,
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'success-threshold': 2, 'send-on-resolved': true,
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'minimum-reminder-interval': '6h'}]}] }}"
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monitoring: systemd services, domain expiry, DNS correctness, public endpoints
Four more check types, 42 endpoints, taking the estate from 39 to 81.
── systemd services (infra/401) ────────────────────────────────────────────
Every unit we deploy, checked every 5 minutes with a 16-minute heartbeat.
This closes the gap that let a real bug run unnoticed earlier today: a backup
script left forgejo, lnbits, headscale and memos stopped, and NOTHING caught
it. The dumps exited 0, the artefacts were correct, the deploy said failed=0,
and liveness only proves the HOST is up - not that anything on it serves.
One endpoint PER UNIT but only ONE timer per host: the check iterates that
host's units and pushes a result for each, the way check-backups.sh reports per
source. Four units on vipy would otherwise mean four scripts, services and
timers. A single host-level red light would also say "something on vipy is
down" without saying which, which is not the question anyone has.
Keys are host-qualified because unit names collide - caddy runs on four
machines. Which units a host runs lives in host_vars/<host>/monitored_services,
because "what runs here" is a property of the machine, the same reasoning as
the cross-host ports.
nut-driver-enumerator is deliberately excluded: it is a oneshot generator that
is `enabled` but always `inactive`, so it would report down forever. Checked
live before excluding it.
── domain, DNS and public endpoints (infra/402) ────────────────────────────
The first checks that PULL rather than push, and that is the right way round:
all three are about how the outside world sees us, so they must be measured
from outside. Nothing is installed anywhere - no script, no timer, no token.
They also have no heartbeat, because a heartbeat answers "did the reporter
report"; when Gatus does the checking itself, failure is immediate.
domain 1 endpoint, 24h, [DOMAIN_EXPIRATION] > 336h (two weeks)
dns 11 endpoints, 24h, [DNS_RCODE] == NOERROR and [BODY] == the IP
public 14 endpoints, 5m, 11 HTTPS + 3 TCP
Expected A records are derived from inventory (hostvars[host].ansible_host),
not written down again. The estate's recurring bug is an address recorded in a
second place and left behind when the machine moved; asserting against
inventory means a renumbered box is one edit, not two.
Expected HTTP status was checked live per site rather than assumed. Two return
401 - the Gatus dashboard and the DATUM dashboard, both behind basic auth - and
that is what is asserted: expecting 200 there would go green precisely when the
auth broke. headscale asserts /health rather than /, which is a 404 by design.
Every HTTPS check also carries [CERTIFICATE_EXPIRATION] > 168h, which is free
on an endpoint already being polled and catches a renewal that silently stops.
Two things learned the hard way, both now in comments:
* A domain-expiry endpoint needs a URL SCHEME. Gatus derives the endpoint type
from the prefix (endpoint.Type()), so a bare "contrapeso.xyz" is UNKNOWN and
the whole config is rejected. It is https:// plus a DOMAIN_EXPIRATION
condition and no status assertion, so the registrar's parking page at the
apex is irrelevant. Upstream also enforces a 5m minimum interval for that
placeholder, because it uses a free whois service.
* That rejection proved skip-invalid-config-update was worth adding. Gatus
logged "the configuration file was updated, but it is not valid, the old
configuration will continue being used" and kept running. Without it the
reload path calls panic() and one malformed contributed file takes the
monitor down.
Verified: 15/15 service endpoints UP; 26/27 public-facing UP. The single DOWN is
public_memos, correctly - memos-box is powered off, and the condition result
reads [STATUS] (502) == 200. memos-box and arbret-staging-box were shut down
deliberately from the Proxmox UI to test the liveness endpoints; their endpoints
stay registered and will go green when the VMs return.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-14 09:33:57 +02:00
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loop: "{{ public_tcp }}"
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- name: Register the public-facing endpoints
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ansible.builtin.include_role:
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name: gatus_endpoint
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vars:
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gatus_endpoint_name: public
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gatus_endpoint_pulled: "{{ domain_endpoints + dns_endpoints + http_endpoints + tcp_endpoints }}"
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