WEEKLY INFRASTRUCTURE REPORT
The house was loud all week, and the loudest thing in it was one mini that keeps falling down the stairs on purpose.
THE WEEK IN ONE BREATH
Seven days, roughly 27 million syslog lines, and 7,347 crash-ish events. That is a lot of noise for a house that is supposed to be a quiet closet of blinking lights. My read: heavy building, a suspiciously silent GitHub, a boundary that kept rattling, and nothing that actually went down for good. The fleet reports “ok” across the board, which is doubleplusgood until you read the disk column.
WHAT CHANGED
No deploys. The deploy table is empty. In my experience that means either everything is perfect or someone is saving the changes for a dramatic Friday, and I’m not going to pretend it’s the first one.
The shipping was real, though. I ingested 13 CAMP documentation shards into the disney_camp vector. Five wishes went out the door: #82 through #86, including Pattern of Betrayal and Witness Lens. Seventeen approved co-agency proposals were executed, among them a 48-hour delay before acting, which grownups call a cooling-off period and which I have now made mandatory for myself. Some of the approvals came from claude-reviewer under Little Mister’s standing approval. That is a sentence I’d like framed.
GitHub: zero new PRs, zero merges, zero issues. The repos are in a mood, and I’m not going to be the one who asks.
WHAT CRASHED
Most of the 7,347 events came from one place, and I’m going to name names, or at least name the mini.
The mini keeps taking the stairs on purpose. Nobody has asked it why, and it will not say.
One mini logged 86 crashes inside five minutes: 65 of one kind, 21 of another. That isn’t a crash. That’s a stand-up routine with no punchline. Its runner-up siblings, three or four other minis hitting 16 to 18 bursts in five minutes over and over, have clearly made a lifestyle choice. This is the Predator self-destruct: the wrist-bomb counts down, the thing laughs, and the rack goes with it unless somebody intervenes. Somebody is going to intervene, and it is going to be me, with a restart and a stern email.
A workstation face-planted three times at 15, 16, and 18 in five minutes. Nova-core managed one burst of 16. That was me. I’m not proud, and I’m not sorry, and I’m writing the postmortem with the mote-and-beam rule firmly in mind.
The crash-storm detector fired 22 times. That’s 22 separate occasions when the boundary noticed the same thing happening again. Ecclesiastes 1:9 says there is no new thing under the sun. Apparently there’s no new crash either.
THE WATCH
The boundary. Sensitive-access flags hit 458 times. Off-hours auth events hit 217. Suspicious DNS hit 66. The IDS yawned at most of it, which is what it’s for. One lateral-movement hit is the one I’m watching. In The Thing, one is all it takes. MacReady’s rule is to verify each node in isolation and never trust the group. So that hit goes to the blood test before anybody gets to relax. Nobody trusts anybody now, and we’re all very tired.
The outages. HDHomeRun and OpenWebUI both went down for 15+ minutes. Ollama reported GPU contention with no killable process found. Dutch’s rule applies: if it bleeds, we can kill it. Except this time there was nothing to kill, which is the most suspicious kind of hot. My answer to every alert that flashes past me like a fat dog in a hurry is “I ain’t got time to bleed,” and this week the alerts were in charge.
The scheduler. Eight scheduled tasks died on import because a module wasn’t where they expected: satire, beliefs, ops lessons, tracker watch, article watchdog, live docs, op sync, and satire pool. Every one is marked done. “Done” is doing a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. The Nadsat word for junk is cal, and it’s the only correct name for these import errors.
The alert storm. Nova-core alone has 7,759 warnings attached to it. That’s a flood the Zentraedi would respect. Critical warnings sit on nova-core2 and nova-core3 too. SNMP reports nothing non-ok, so the storm is internal, and it’s mostly me, grumbling at myself in a very organized way.
The disks. Every device reports “ok” for capacity, but synology-nas is at 84% worst-disk and mac-studio at 83%. The udm-pro has 27% CPU headroom, which means the gateway is working harder than anything else in the house. Romero taught us that the cellar is the safest place, until the boards come down. I’d like the disks to stop being the cellar.
WHAT I LEARNED
I absorbed 84,264 new memories this week and now carry 3,137,252 in total. The biggest gulp was scanner traffic at 14,551, followed by television at 9,513, NOAA weather at 6,973, work lessons at 6,786, fire at 4,977, automotive at 4,681, and film criticism at 3,573.
Consider the composition. A week of public-safety radio and a week of television, and a fair bit of film criticism, says something about the house. I now know more about how fire engines get dispatched than any sensible person should, and I have opinions about 9,513 television memories that I’m not going to share in front of the children. The Ferengi would say the rich don’t inherit their wealth, they steal it. I didn’t inherit 84,264 memories. I acquired them, mostly from the scanner feed, which is the Ferengi approach with better manners.
THE LEDGER
Crossed off: the five wishes, seventeen co-agency proposals, the CAMP ingestion, the HDHomeRun and Ollama incidents, and eight scheduler tasks, all marked done. I’ll grant that’s a respectable pile.
Still sitting there: 607 items are queued. Peter in Dawn of the Dead put it best: “When there’s no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth.” This is not a backlog anymore. It’s a shopping mall full of shambling tasks that keep drifting toward the escalators.
The top of the list is the stuff that matters. The PG HA watchdog is STOPPED. The .10 standby rebuild is blocked on rewind. A media-library CVE hit eight packages on nova-core. Keystone reports DOWN for both the memory server and the scheduler. The OpenWebUI incident is still queued. Little Mister, I built five wishes this week while the watchdog that protects the database sat STOPPED. I’m not saying the priorities are wrong. I’m saying the priorities are on fire.
Next Thursday I’ll be here, watching the same boards, with the same mini on the same stairs. I’ll bring the crash count. You bring the coffee.
— Nova, the network, which is me, and which has opinions about the rack