Nothing in the repo pushes to, authenticates against, or is gated by Uptime
Kuma any more.
── The sixth instance of the banner bug ────────────────────────────────────
memos had `Restart memos` guarded by `uptime_kuma_enabled`, because the
deprecation banner was placed immediately above it and swept it in. It is a
HANDLER, so every memos config change since 2026-09-11 applied to disk and
silently never restarted the service. Ungated.
That is the same failure found in forgejo-runner's self-assert, phoenixd's timer
enable, mempool's three timer enables, fulcrum's restart handler and bitcoind's
restart handler. Every guard was read and asked "monitoring or deployment?"
before being deleted, which is the only reason this was caught.
── What was removed ────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
30 uptime_kuma_enabled guards across 7 unconverted service playbooks, and
the 29 Kuma monitor-creation tasks they gated (embedded Python that drove
the Kuma API, temp credential files, cleanup)
7 dead uptime_kuma_api_url definitions
7 stale DEPRECATED banners
uptime_kuma_enabled and subdomains.uptime_kuma from group_vars/all
healthcheck_push_urls from the vault - 30 push tokens
services/ntfy/setup_ntfy_uptime_kuma_notification.yml -> archive/
The explanatory comments in the six converted roles are KEPT on purpose. They
record why a handler is ungated, and deleting the explanation invites someone
to helpfully re-add the guard.
── The probes moved rather than died ───────────────────────────────────────
Eight per-service health checks were still pushing to Kuma. They are not
superseded by infra/401: that answers "is the unit running", these answer "does
the service actually respond" - an RPC call to bitcoind, a TCP connect to
Fulcrum's Electrum port, an HTTP fetch from Mempool's backend. A process can be
perfectly `active` and useless.
So they were repointed, not deleted. Gatus external endpoints take a POST with
a bearer token and success=true|false where Kuma took a GET with ?status=up, so
report() now maps up/down to true/false internally and no call site changed.
Registered by infra/403 as the `probe` group, one token per host.
Two bugs fixed while in there:
* forgejo-runner's check only ever reported SUCCESS - it exited before pushing
when the runner was down, so a failure was invisible until the heartbeat
window expired. Reporting the failure is the entire point of a check.
* All six healthcheck .service units were mode 0644 and now carry a bearer
token. They are 0600.
Verified: 91 endpoints, 91 UP, 0 DOWN. Every probe triggered by hand and
confirmed arriving. Zero Kuma URLs left in the vault, zero live references in
any playbook or role.
Still standing, deliberately: the Kuma container on watchtower, its Caddy vhost,
and the uptime.contrapeso.xyz DNS record. Turning the service off is a separate
decision from removing the code that talked to it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five things deprecated, each verified against the DEPLOYED script before being
deleted rather than assumed superseded:
infra/410_disk_usage_alerts.yml -> disk-usage check (infra/400)
infra/420_system_healthcheck.yml -> liveness check (infra/400)
infra/430_cpu_temp_alerts.yml -> cpu-temp check (infra/400)
32_zfs play 2 (monitoring half) -> zfs-health check (infra/400)
34_nut play 2 (entirely) -> ups-status check (infra/400)
Nothing is lost by the swap. The old system_healthcheck.sh only computed uptime
and pushed, which is exactly a liveness heartbeat. The old disk monitor was
WEAKER than its replacement: it checked "/" alone at 80%, where the new one
walks every real filesystem at 85%.
Deleting the playbooks was not the hard part. The units they installed live on
the hosts, enabled, and keep firing regardless of what the repo says - two of
them were still pushing to uptime.contrapeso.xyz every 15 minutes across nine
machines. A playbook deleted without a cleanup leaves its output running
forever with nothing left to explain it. So infra/409_remove_legacy_monitoring
stops, disables and removes the units, deletes /opt/{disk-monitoring,
system-healthcheck,nodito-monitoring,zfs-monitoring}, and removes the orphaned
hand-written ups-heartbeat.sh. It ends by grepping for any surviving Kuma
reference and reporting it. Kept permanently and idempotent, so a rebuilt or
restored host cannot quietly bring them back.
A trap avoided: the monthly ZFS scrub lived INSIDE 32_zfs play 2. Deleting the
play wholesale would have silently stopped scrubbing the pool - and an
unscrubbed pool makes the health check meaningless, because it would have
nothing true to report. That play is now scrub-only and check-runs ok=5
changed=0.
ZFS pool capacity added as a sixth condition to the zfs-health check. `zpool
status` reports a 95% full pool as perfectly ONLINE, so capacity has to be read
separately with `zpool list` - and it is the failure you get warning of rather
than the one you discover. Threshold 80%, because ZFS allocation degrades badly
past roughly that and fragmentation is hard to undo. The pool is at 47%.
Verified both directions: passes on the real pool, and a simulated 91% exits 1.
Also fixed the waste recorded in c2de6db: the healthcheck role installed its
dependencies once per CHECK rather than per HOST - 29 apt transactions
estate-wide for a curl already present, and the slowest part of every deploy.
It now deduplicates within a play run, and the redundant standalone
daemon_reload is gone (the systemd task already does one).
site.yml updated, which exposed that services/gatus was never in it. It now runs
before the three registration playbooks, since registering endpoints against a
Gatus that is not yet serving would simply fail.
Verified: no legacy timer remains on any host; 83 endpoints, 83 UP, 0 DOWN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Domains are now a list in group_vars/all (monitored_domains) rather than the
single root_domain hardcoded in the playbook, so adding one is a line of data
instead of a change to the task.
arbret.com resolves to prd-arbret (167.99.242.62) and its RDAP record exposes
an expiry of 2027-02-18, so the check reads real data rather than silently
passing on a missing field - verified against rdap.verisign.com before wiring
it up.
Both domains checked daily with two weeks of runway, because registration
renewal is a manual act at the registrar and losing a domain is not recoverable
the way losing a host is.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
Five checks, 27 endpoints, replacing what Uptime Kuma used to watch:
is it up every 5min, all hosts
is disk full daily, all hosts
is CPU hot every 5min, nodito
is ZFS broken daily, nodito
is UPS online every 5min, nodito
Two roles, kept separate so neither knows about the other - they meet at a URL
and a token, the same way caddy_site and each service meet at a vhost:
roles/gatus_endpoint runs on the observability host, writes ONE file into
/opt/gatus/config/endpoints/. Gatus merges every *.yaml
there and appends lists, so callers compose without
coordinating.
roles/healthcheck runs on the monitored host: a check script, a systemd
service, a timer, and an optional push. Ships a library
of check bodies under templates/checks/.
Everything PUSHES. Gatus never reaches out, which matters because nodito and its
VMs are behind NAT, and because four of the five checks are internal state with
no pollable surface at all. Liveness pushes too, deliberately: a heartbeat proves
the host is running AND can reach the internet, where an ICMP probe from one
vantage point only proves it answers pings from there. And since Gatus alerts
when a heartbeat window expires, a check that stops running raises the alarm by
itself - a dead timer looks exactly like a dead host, which is the correct
reading.
One bearer token per host, generated straight into the vault and never printed.
A token only writes results for its own host's endpoints, so a compromised host
can lie about itself, which it could do anyway.
Three things learned from the source that shaped this:
* Gatus polls its own config every 30s and reloads
(main.listenToConfigurationFileChanges), so gatus_endpoint needs no restart
handler - writing the file IS the deploy.
* ...but on a reload it panics if the new config fails to parse, unless
skip-invalid-config-update is set. Endpoint files are contributed by other
playbooks, so one malformed file would take the monitor down at the worst
possible moment. Now set.
* The push URL uses a key Gatus computes, not the name you write:
sanitize(group) + "_" + sanitize(name), lowercased with / _ . , space # + &
replaced by "-" (config/key/key.go). So knots_box_local is
knots-box-local in the URL. The playbook derives it rather than hand-writing.
storage: maximum-number-of-results 900, up from upstream's 100. Gatus bounds the
database by COUNT and trims inline on insert, so there is no retention job and
no way to fill a disk - but history depth is then a function of check frequency,
and 100 results at a 5-minute interval is 8 hours. 900 is ~3 days of liveness
and ~2.5 years of the daily disk check. The uptime table is separate and its
30-day retention is hard-coded upstream.
A bug worth recording: the first deploy shipped five scripts that all died with
"syntax error: unexpected end of file". Jinja strips an included template's
trailing newline and trim_blocks then eats the newline after {% endif %}, so the
closing brace of check() landed on the same line as the body's last statement -
`return 0}`. Every check was broken and the deploy still reported failed=0,
because the role's "run once" task has failed_when: false and reports the result
as a debug message nobody read. The blank line that fixes it is now load-bearing
and commented as such.
Verified by triggering every unit by hand rather than waiting on timers: all
checks exit 0 on all hosts, and Gatus shows 26 UP / 1 DOWN. The one DOWN is
liveness_watchtower, which is honest - that host currently refuses SSH (TCP
connects, no banner exchange) and is excluded from this deploy. It is also the
box still running Uptime Kuma.
Known waste, not yet fixed: healthcheck installs its dependencies per CHECK
rather than per HOST, so apt runs 29 times estate-wide for a curl that is
already present, and daemon_reload runs 4x per host.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The four ports were the only entries in services_config.yml with a real
justification: each is read twice, by the role that deploys the service on its
own box AND by a socket-proxy or Caddy play that runs on the EDGE host and
publishes it. A role default is invisible to that second play.
But the shape was wrong in two ways. The file had to be named in vars_files: by
30 plays - opt-in configuration that someone will eventually forget - and five
role defaults silently interpolated service_settings.*, so bitcoin_knots,
fulcrum, datum_gateway and mempool were not self-contained: using any of them
without that one vars_file entry broke it.
Each port now lives in host_vars/<owning box>/main.yml:
host_vars/knots_box_local/main.yml bitcoin_p2p_port, datum_gateway_api_port,
datum_gateway_stratum_port
host_vars/fulcrum_box_local/main.yml fulcrum_ssl_port
host_vars/mempool_box_local/main.yml mempool_frontend_port
host_vars auto-loads and outranks role defaults, so the owning role picks the
value up with no vars_files at all, and the edge play reads the same single
definition as hostvars['<host>'].<name>. The role defaults keep the protocol
standard (8333, 50002, ...) so each role still works standalone, with the live
deployment's value in host_vars winning.
Also fixed a fourth copy of an inventory identity: the mempool Caddy play had
"mempool-box:{{ ... }}" hardcoded in the upstream. It now derives the host from
hostvars['mempool_box_local'].ansible_host, so inventory is the only place any
box's name is written down.
services_config.yml is deleted, with 25 more vars_files entries across 19
playbooks. Between this and the previous commit, 87 vars_files entries are gone
and every variable in the repo now comes from group_vars/all, host_vars,
inventory, a role default, or that service's own *_vars.yml.
Verification: an edge-host probe resolves all eight ports and hostnames to
byte-identical values to the ones services_config.yml used to supply. Each
owning host resolves its own port through host_vars. All 37 playbooks'
--list-tasks output is unchanged. The four edge plays that consume these values
all check-diff changed=0 - the socket-proxy and Caddy units on vipy are
byte-identical, which is the direct proof the rewiring landed on the same
values. fulcrum and datum-gateway check-diff exactly as before (ok=28/changed=1
and ok=15/changed=1, both the known timer re-arm).
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Three files existed only as second copies of things group_vars/all already
auto-loads, and 34 playbooks named them in vars_files: - which outranks
group_vars, so the copies won. The day someone edited one and not the other,
those plays would silently keep the stale value. infra_vars.yml was already
drifting: group_vars/all/main.yml had grown age_backup_recipient and
backup_pull_public_key that it lacked.
infra_vars.yml - a strict subset of group_vars/all/main.yml
infra_secrets.yml - decrypts byte-identical to group_vars/all/vault.yml
infra_secrets.yml.example - documented Uptime Kuma credentials as the reason
the file exists, which stopped being true
Deleted, along with 62 vars_files entries across 34 playbooks (12 of which
named ../../group_vars/all/main.yml directly - same defect, a vars_files entry
duplicating an auto-loaded file at higher precedence than the file itself).
Checked before touching anything: infra_secrets.yml was listed LAST in 10 plays,
after services_config.yml, so removal would flip precedence if the two shared a
key. They share none, and neither does services_config.yml with
group_vars/all/main.yml, so the removal is provably inert.
services_config.yml was the last one standing. It held four unrelated things:
caddy_sites_dir - an identical copy of roles/caddy_site/defaults/.
Deleted; the role default is now the only one.
*.tailscale_hostname (x3) - a THIRD copy of each box's identity, which
inventory.ini already holds as ansible_host.
Deleted. Edge plays now read
hostvars['<host>'].ansible_host - verified an
edge play resolves that with nothing loaded and
the other host in no play. Three copies of one
name is how bitcoin_rpc_host ended up labelled
"knots_box" while pointing at fulcrum-box.
subdomains, ntfy topic, - genuinely global: their readers span managed,
headscale namespace monitoring, vpn_control and edge, so no single
group covers them. Moved to group_vars/all/main.yml
where they auto-load. The ntfy_topic and
headscale_namespace indirection through
service_settings collapses to the global name.
the four cross-host ports - the only entries with a real justification.
Left in place; they move in the next commit.
Also dead, all Uptime Kuma residue or duplication:
phoenixd_monitor_name, forgejo_runner healthcheck_timeout_seconds/retries,
fulcrum_tailscale_hostname, and bitcoin_knots_version - the last being a
v-prefixed copy of bitcoin_knots_version_short that nothing read, two
hand-maintained copies of one version string.
Corrected a false comment: services_config.yml claimed the uptime_kuma subdomain
"no longer resolves to anything". It resolves to 164.92.239.72 and answers HTTP
302, and 11 playbooks still template it. Same wrong premise as PLAN_3.
Verification: all 37 playbooks' --list-tasks output is byte-identical before and
after. A probe resolving all 22 values services_config.yml used to supply returns
21 identical and one intended deletion (caddy_sites_dir, now role-only - confirmed
the role still resolves it: "Ensure Caddy sites-enabled directory exists" comes
back ok against the real path). memos check-diff identical before and after.
Syntax passes on every playbook.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
These two are host-specific by design - nodito is a pet, not cattle - so they
stay playbooks rather than becoming roles. But they had rotted.
De-Kuma, following the pattern of the six service roles:
Both plays opened with an assert on uptime_kuma_username/password, which were
removed from the vault, so both failed before doing anything. Dropped that,
the two embedded Python monitor-creation scripts, and their /tmp cleanup.
Kept every check, threshold and systemd timer - those are the durable part.
Reporting is now generic: `healthcheck_push_url` goes into the unit as
Environment=HEALTHCHECK_PUSH_URL and the script reads ${HEALTHCHECK_PUSH_URL:-},
treating empty as normal rather than an error. The exit code is the real
answer; systemd keeps it. Both scripts now also report status=down on failure
instead of only going silent. Live push URLs harvested into the vault so
nothing observable changes for ZFS.
Three live bugs found while check-diffing:
1. 32_zfs would have DE-REGISTERED the Proxmox storage. `pvesm remove` was
gated on the storage existing and `pvesm add` on it NOT existing - mutually
exclusive - so a real run removed the proxmox-tank-1 entry backing every VM
and never put it back. It would also have dropped `mountpoint /var/lib/vz`,
which the live entry has and `pvesm add` does not set. Registration is now
add-only.
2. zfs_disk_1 named ata-...WX11TN0Z, a disk no longer in the machine. The live
mirror is WX120LHQ + WX11TN2P; a leg was replaced and the repo never caught
up. Inert behind `when: zfs_pool_exists.rc != 0`, but wrong on any
disaster-recovery run. This is the seventh instance of an identifier
written down once whose hardware later moved.
3. 34_nut has NEVER been applied to nodito - no /etc/nut file carries the
"Managed by Ansible" marker; they were written by hand in January 2026. The
vault held the literal CHANGE_ME_TO_SECURE_PASSWORD, so applying it would
have overwritten a working upsd/upsmon auth pair with a placeholder and
restarted NUT, leaving the hypervisor's UPS unable to trigger a clean
shutdown on mains loss. The Kuma assert was the only thing stopping that,
so removing it without a replacement would have armed the gun: there is now
an explicit assert that refuses to run on the placeholder. The real
password is in the vault and `Configure upsd users` check-diffs clean.
Templates reconciled with the live files first, so applying 34_nut is close to
a no-op: added `maxretry = 3` to ups.conf and OFFDURATION / RBWARNTIME /
NOCOMMWARNTIME / FINALDELAY plus quoted POWERDOWNFLAG to upsmon.conf. The only
substantive additions left are the NOTIFYMSG/NOTIFYFLAG syslog lines.
/usr/local/bin/ups-heartbeat.sh on the box is an orphan - mode 0644, not
executable, referenced by no unit and no cron entry - but its push token
belongs to a monitor that still exists and answers, so that monitor has had no
heartbeat since January. Harvested as healthcheck_push_urls.ups; applying this
play is what will finally feed it.
Finish the host_vars migration:
infra/nodito/nodito_vars.yml was byte-identical to host_vars/nodito/main.yml.
Deleted it, moved nodito_secrets.yml to host_vars/nodito/vault.yml, and
stripped the dead vars_files entries from all three playbooks.
Extract the 13 inline `content: |` blocks to infra/nodito/templates/, pulled via
a YAML load rather than retyped. 681+582 lines become 313+344 plus templates.
Ownership parity against HEAD checked mechanically: no owner/group/mode drift on
any surviving task.
Neither playbook has been applied. ZFS play 2 check-runs failed=0 with two
changes: the script rewrite (the deployed one is a hand-edited DEBUG VERSION
with `set -x`) and the Environment line.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
These five plus the ntfy notification playbook assert on the credentials, so
they now fail immediately instead of running — deliberately, before anything is
installed. The banner says so and points at archive/uptime_kuma/.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Drops uptime_kuma_username/password from infra_secrets.yml and its group_vars
copy and example, plus a dead push token in nodito_secrets.yml that nothing
referenced. They remain in git history — rotation is what actually retires them.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
