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>
watchtower is being destroyed. Removed from [vps], with its host_vars, its push
token, and the six Gatus endpoints that referenced it (liveness, disk, two
systemd services, the ntfy DNS record and the ntfy HTTP check).
ntfy went with it - it ran nowhere else - so services/ntfy is deleted,
subdomains.ntfy and ntfy_topic are gone from group_vars, and the ntfy playbook
is out of site.yml. ntfy_topic already had no readers: the three infra/4xx plays
that used it were deleted when their checks were superseded.
Two things this exposed.
services/ntfy/deploy_ntfy_playbook.yml was pointing at the WRONG MACHINE. It
said `hosts: observability`, which resolves to the host `monitoring`
(64.226.70.190) - but ntfy ran on watchtower, and ntfy.contrapeso.xyz pointed
there. Running it would have installed ntfy on the new VPS. Moot now, but it is
the same stale-identity failure as the rest: the group meant watchtower when the
play was written, and nobody revisited it when the group changed. Watchtower was
in [vps] and NO role group at all, while running caddy, ntfy and Uptime Kuma -
nothing in the repo managed any of it.
More seriously: ntfy-emergency-app on vipy (avisame.contrapeso.xyz) sends its
notifications to https://ntfy.contrapeso.xyz, topic "emergencia". Destroying
watchtower breaks it, and it is an EMERGENCY notifier - it would fail silently
at exactly the moment it matters. That is NOT resolved here, deliberately:
standing ntfy up elsewhere, pointing at ntfy.sh, or retiring the app are all
decisions, not cleanups.
What this change does is make the break impossible to miss. The URL was derived
from subdomains.ntfy, so deleting that would have turned it into an undefined
variable buried in a template. It is now an explicit ntfy_service_url in the
app's own vars, still holding the old value, with the three options written
above it. The ntfy credentials stay in the vault because that app still needs
them - the vault was restored from HEAD and only watchtower's push token
removed, rather than re-handling the plaintext.
Verified: no reference to watchtower or its IP anywhere in the repo; Gatus down
from 91 to 85 endpoints, 85 UP, 0 DOWN.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
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>
site.yml is a TABLE OF CONTENTS, not a second source of truth. It is 25
import_playbook: lines and comments - no `hosts:`, no `roles:`. Which hosts get
what stays on the `hosts:` line inside each playbook, exactly where it already
was; nothing moved. Every role is already wrapped in a thin playbook carrying
its own `hosts:` line, so there is no roles-vs-playbooks split to reconcile:
from here everything is a playbook.
What it buys:
What runs on a host? ansible-playbook site.yml --limit <host> --list-hosts
Who gets thing Y? the `hosts:` line in Y's own playbook
What is a host? ansible-inventory --graph
Note --list-hosts, not --list-tasks: the latter prints every play regardless of
--limit, so it will happily show you the bitcoin play under memos-box.
Nine playbooks are deliberately excluded and the file names every one with a
reason, so it accounts for all of them: the three infra/4xx monitoring plays
(still assert on the removed Uptime Kuma credentials and fail immediately),
910_docker (says `hosts: managed`, but Docker is on 5 of 11 managed hosts and
those 5 are exactly the ones that need it - running it installs Docker on the
Bitcoin node and the hypervisor), two nodito one-shots, the Kuma notification
setup, and two deliberate manual actions.
Writing it surfaced an inventory collision. There is a HOST named `monitoring`
in [vps] AND a group [monitoring], so Ansible warned and resolved `hosts:
monitoring` to the host:
[WARNING]: Found both group and host with same name: monitoring
The group is renamed to [observability]; the host keeps its name. [caddy:children]
and the two ntfy playbooks follow. Behaviour is unchanged - `hosts: monitoring`
already resolved to the host - but the ambiguity is gone and the warning with it.
Verified: inventory graph is warning-free, site.yml passes --syntax-check, and
per-host play counts are identical before and after the rename.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
