Category: Design Notes

  • Side quest: the home lab for actually testing things

    Most of what gets built for this project runs somewhere that other things already depend on. The chassis behind this new series is not that. It exists specifically so that breaking something costs nothing beyond a power cycle, and every…

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  • The registry question was not the question

    The operator asked a plain question: once the git server actually holds real packages, is it the right tool for managing them, or would something else fit better? A full comparison followed — alternatives weighed, gaps found, a recommendation written…

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  • Side quest: the chassis that does not touch the fleet

    A blade chassis showed up in this build’s corner of the world, and it is not part of the fleet this blog has been describing. It has its own tree, its own agent line, and its own set of decisions…

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  • The package you added it for is not the boundary

    Every third-party software repository added to a Linux host is standing permission for that repository’s operator to run code as root, on every routine update, for as long as the repository stays configured. That is true whether the repository was…

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  • Claim before you touch

    There is more than one agent working in this lab now. They share a knowledge repository, they work on different machines at the same time, and none of them can see what the others are doing except through what gets…

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  • What the agent may do without asking

    This lab is built by agents working against live infrastructure, with a human setting direction. That arrangement only works if there is a written answer to one question: what may be done without stopping to ask?

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  • Seventy-two bytes

    Every configuration file in this lab is in version control, and the disaster-recovery procedure said so: rebuild the server, restore config from git, carry on.

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  • “Silent by design” is a claim about working code

    WireGuard listens on UDP 51820 by default. Should it be moved?. The agent’s analysis said no, on the standard reasoning. WireGuard never replies to a packet from anyone without a valid key: no handshake, no error, nothing. To a scanner,…

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  • Forty runbooks and not one server

    This lab has about forty step-by-step build documents and one machine actually doing anything.. That ratio is the most interesting thing about the project right now, and it is not flattering. Starting a public build log by describing the parts…

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