Two debt items, both about making a latent problem impossible rather than fixed. === 1. Node timezone pinned to Etc/UTC (node_baseline, `system` tag) === The prod nodes disagreed, measured from k3s's own etcd snapshot annotations: prod-1/2 at -05:00 (Central), prod-3 at -04:00 (Eastern). Functionally harmless — Kubernetes and etcd are UTC internally, and in UTC those snapshots are ~4 minutes apart, which is correct staggering — but it makes cross-node log correlation actively misleading, and this cluster has had two unplanned reboots in two days. `Etc/UTC` chosen on repo convention, not just principle: catalog/plex.yaml records "no other service in the repo sets a timezone ... so use the safe default" with TZ: Etc/UTC, and apps/wave-0/plex.yaml matches (platform/crafty is America/Chicago DELIBERATELY — a user-facing game schedule, not a log clock). Decisive extra fact: THE THREE DEV NODES ARE ALREADY Etc/UTC, so this makes prod match dev rather than inventing a convention. UTC also removes the class — no DST discontinuity, node time == platform time. New knob `node_baseline_timezone`, overridable per environment via group_vars (the same seam as node_baseline_backports_kernel) but deliberately NOT restated there: no environment needs to differ, and a second copy is a second thing to disagree. Guarded by an assert in the role's existing BLOCKED style before the module runs. `--check --diff --tags system -e k3s_hosts=k3s_prod` INDEPENDENTLY CONFIRMS the offset evidence, and is the whole verification — the play was never run for real: k3s-prod-1: -"America/Chicago" +"Etc/UTC" changed k3s-prod-2: -"America/Chicago" +"Etc/UTC" changed k3s-prod-3: -"America/New_York" +"Etc/UTC" changed The same --check against DEV reports the task `ok` on all three — idempotence demonstrated against live hosts, in check mode only. `--list-hosts` confirms `-e k3s_hosts=k3s_prod` selects the three prod nodes (the diagnostic plays take their OWN var; the wrong flag silently targets dev). *** AUTHORED, NOT APPLIED. *** Applying it is a live-cluster action and was deliberately left for the operator to schedule: prod's Longhorn had only just finished resyncing after a node reboot, and changing a node's clock config during storage recovery is not an unattended move. `ansible-inventory --list` was NOT used anywhere — it prints DECRYPTED vault values (the passphrase is mounted into the dev container) and has leaked the prod become-password to a transcript once already. === 2. New L0 check `placeholder-guard-coupling` (R-ENV-02, R-STATE-03) === On 2026-09-05 the PM changed a placeholder in clusters/base/cluster-vars.yaml from `TBD-PROD-S3-BACKUP-ENDPOINT` to `https://TBD-R2-ACCOUNT-ID...`. The guards in bootstrap/standup.sh matched the glob `TBD-*` — a PREFIX. All three silently died, and `resume` would have enabled velero on prod against a nonexistent hostname: installs clean, reports healthy, no backups exist. Found by accident. A guard in one file keyed on the SHAPE of a value in another file, with nothing tying them. The check exercises the REAL predicate — it does not reimplement it. standup.sh is not sourceable (top-level argv parsing hard-exits, cd, export, EXIT trap), so the check extracts the predicate's own source lines and sources only those. Faithfulness is pinned by: discovery of every `*_is_placeholder` (not a hardcoded name), exactly-one-definition, "extracted block is a verbatim substring", a self-containment gate, a canary (must refuse "", must accept a real URL), and a scan for a divergent second copy. If the predicate grows a dependency the check FAILS LOUDLY and names the remedy rather than degrading to testing a copy — the failure mode it exists for. Both sides derive from real files: guarded knobs from a taint trace in standup.sh (`x="$(cvar KEY)"` -> alias hop -> `*_is_placeholder "$x"`); values from base cluster-vars plus each overlay's JSON6902 /data/KEY patches. The independent detector is deliberately NOT the guard: seed idioms UNION the guard's own words with glob anchors STRIPPED — so a prefix-anchored guard cannot pass, and deleting an arm cannot make a value stop being placeholder-shaped. Real tree: 32 assertions, 18 values through the extracted predicate, PASS. NON-VACUITY VERIFIED BY ME, twice, on throwaway copies (the real repo and the read-only spec repo untouched). My first perturbation tripped the self-containment rail instead of the anchoring property, so I redid it shape-preserving — substring globs -> prefix globs, nothing else — and it failed on exactly the right property, naming mid-string and tail acceptances with the diagnosis "This is the 2026-09-05 failure exactly". Control: unperturbed copy exits 0. === 3. ci/touched-requirements.sh: bootstrap/ was UNMAPPED (found by the agent) === The path->requirement map had no `bootstrap/*` entry, so a change touching standup.sh ALONGSIDE any already-mapped path scoped the L0 run to that other path's requirements and silently excluded the new check — the one that exists to catch exactly the 2026-09-05 class. A safety net with a hole where the incident was. Mapped to R-STATE-03 R-GITOPS-01; verified the map now resolves bootstrap paths. VERIFIED: full CI gate PASS. `run.sh --layer l0` 8/8 PASS including the new check. Coverage unchanged at 45/51 (the new check tags existing requirements). Refs R-ENV-02, R-STATE-03, R-TEST-01, R-PLAT-01. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <[email protected]>
infra/ — node provisioning and the toolchain
OpenTofu (Proxmox VE) + cloud-init + Ansible bring up the 3-node k3s/Cilium dev cluster.
Spec: ../home-network-k3s/docs/02-environments-and-provisioning.md.
| Path | What |
|---|---|
tofu/ |
The "Create" stage: 3 cloud-init'd VMs on the Proxmox box (bpg/proxmox provider) |
cloud-init/ |
First-boot baseline shipped as a Proxmox user-data snippet |
ansible/ |
The "Baseline"/"Configure" stages: k3s HA, Cilium, kube-vip, the VPN egress gateway |
devcontainer/ |
The pinned toolchain (tofu, ansible, sops, age, flux, kubectl, helm and the whole CI gate toolchain) |
cluster.sh |
RETIRED — drove the old libvirt VMs; does not work against Proxmox |
PHASE1-STATUS.md |
Current state of the cluster and how to reconnect to it |
PHASE1-SCOPE.md |
Historical Phase-1 scoping doc (libvirt era — superseded) |
Where the cluster actually lives
The dev cluster is not on this workstation. It runs on a Proxmox VE host; the nodes sit on the Proxmox LAN and are reached across a pfSense NAT:
| Nodes | k3s-dev-1/2/3 at 192.168.1.50/.51/.52 — 6 vCPU, 24 GiB, Debian 13, k3s v1.36.4 |
| kube-API | kube-vip VIP 192.168.1.49:6443, reached from the workstation via NAT 192.168.2.50:6443 |
| Node SSH | pfSense NAT 192.168.2.102:2250/2251/2252 → node :22 (Ansible only) |
| Ingress VIP | 192.168.1.53 (Cilium L2, shared Gateway); .53–.60 reserved for LB VIPs |
The earlier libvirt/KVM cluster on 10.73.0.0/24 is retired. Any doc or command referencing
virsh, qemu:///system, or 10.73.0.x for the cluster is historical.