`@bot restart` saves, sends RCON quit, and relies on the unit's Restart=always
to bring the server back. It never came back. The container sat at exited(0)
while the unit reported active/running with NRestarts=0, so the bot waited for
a startup that was never going to happen and the server stayed down until
someone noticed.
podman generate systemd emits Type=forking with ExecStart=podman start and a
PIDFile pointing at conmon. podman start returns immediately, so the process
systemd was told to supervise was never its child -- it warns about exactly
this in the journal, once per poll, and then does not notice the exit:
zomboid.service: Supervising process 2431312 which is not our child.
We'll most likely not notice when it exits.
That PIDFile is also stale by design: it embeds the container ID, so every
deploy that recreates the container leaves it pointing at nothing.
Type=simple with `podman start -a` keeps podman in the foreground as systemd's
own child, so the exit is seen and Restart=always does what it always claimed
to. stdout and stderr are discarded deliberately -- attaching re-emits the
container's output for systemd to capture straight back into the journal, which
is the flood the k8s-file driver exists to prevent. podman logs still has it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The anti-scanner rules dropped 53-byte Steam query packets above 1/hour with a
burst of 2, per source IP, on the theory that only scanners send queries and
that real players would already have been marked verified by the priority-2
rule when they sent something larger.
That premise is inverted. A client's first contact with the server IS a 53-byte
query, so nobody can be verified before querying, and nobody can query more
than twice an hour without being dropped. The counters said so plainly: five
packets had ever matched the verified-accept rule, against 30,563 drops.
fail2ban then banned each dropped player for a week -- 32 live bans, 550 total,
firing every ten minutes, every one of them a residential address.
Keeps the shape of the protection and moves the threshold somewhere no real
client reaches: opening the server browser or retrying a connection is a
handful of queries, a flood is thousands. Removes the old rules first so hosts
carrying them converge instead of stacking a second copy.
The bans themselves were also hooked into INPUT for tcp only, so they never
blocked the UDP game traffic they were meant to -- the drop rule was doing all
the damage on its own. Cleared the outstanding 32.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The logrotate config added with the Sophie overhaul claimed to bound PZ's own
logs. It did not. data/Logs had reached 18 GB across 112 entries and 146k
files, and rotation had never once fired there.
Two reasons, both wrong assumptions on my part. PZ rolls its logs into dated
directories -- logs_2025-12-14/ through logs_2026-08-26/, up to 279 MB each --
so the Logs/*.txt glob only ever matched a handful of loose files at the top.
And it rotates by size: not one file in that tree exceeds 100M, because the
growth is in the number of files, not the size of any of them.
Age-based pruning is the right tool, so this adds a daily zomboid-log-prune
timer keeping 14 days and deleting the emptied directories behind it. It runs
under podman unshare, since the files belong to the container's UID.
logrotate keeps server-console.txt, which is a single ever-growing file and
genuinely is what it is good at. Narrowed its scope to say so rather than
implying coverage it never had.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The deployment had drifted badly. It was pinned to the Steam `-beta unstable`
branch, which stopped being right the moment B42 became the default at 42.20,
and it wrote every mod ID with the `\` prefix that B42 required only during
that unstable period and now rejects. Three server profiles were carried
around (vanilla, modded, b42revamp) whose mod lists were hand-curated blobs
from a Steam collection that has since moved on.
Moves to the Sophie 42 community preset, vendored from GerDeathstar/sophie-pz
("Sophie 42 Files.zip", 2026-07-31 == the b42 release tag): 283 mod IDs, 256
workshop items, map_distanciado over Muldraugh, plus its SandboxVars,
spawnregions and spawnpoints. Sophie's gameplay settings are kept exactly as
shipped -- PVP with its damage modifiers, the safety system, MaxPlayers=32,
PauseEmpty, no sleep, safehouses off. Only the keys this deployment actually
owns are templated over the top.
The modlist is stored as YAML lists rather than the INI's semicolon blobs, so
the next Sophie update produces a diff you can read. Exclusions live in
zomboid_mods_excluded with a reason each, seeded with IconsInventory -- already
absent upstream, listed so a re-vendor cannot quietly bring it back.
Config is now seeded before first boot instead of patched after it. The old
approach could not write the INI until the server had generated one, so every
setting went through lineinfile guarded on a stat; seeding the whole file from
the preset removes the chicken-and-egg and puts the config in git. force is
off by design: these files are a starting point, not managed state, so the
server can be stopped, hand-edited and regenerated without Ansible clobbering
the edits. Push them again deliberately with -e zomboid_config_force=true.
The B41 Discord keys were dead. B42 replaced DiscordChannel/DiscordChannelID
with DiscordChatChannel, which takes a channel name rather than a snowflake,
so the DiscordChannelID=... this role had been appending was a key the server
ignores and the chat bridge has not been working.
Renaming the server to debbzoid is what starts the new world: PZ derives the
INI, save directory and player DB from the name, so gregboid stays on disk
untouched as a rollback.
Re-enabled, because the reason it was off is now fixed. It was disabled for
saturating the SSD -- ~10 MB/s of log writes into the shared journal, which
starved Gitea CI badly enough to stretch a firmware build to 17 minutes. The
container now logs to its own rotating k8s-file instead of the journal every
other service shares, and logrotate caps the server's own server-console.txt
and Logs/ at 100M keeping 3. copytruncate is mandatory there: PZ holds those
fds for its whole life, so a rename would leave it writing into an unlinked
inode. Memory is unchanged; idle draw is nowhere near MAX_RAM.
Also stops the entrypoint recursively chowning the install tree on every boot.
With 256 workshop mods that is a large inode walk and pure churn once the
first run has set ownership.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Deploy systemd timer that writes zomboid container stats to
zomboid-stats.json every 30 seconds for gregtime to read.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
