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>
Graylog was the worst cost/benefit tenant on this 4-core box: two JVMs plus
MongoDB holding ~1.6 GB resident and ~3% CPU around the clock to store ~3k
messages a day -- about 28 MB across its four live indices. journald already
retains ~25 days of the same logs at its 500M cap, so this costs searchability,
not the logs.
The switch is `graylog_enabled` in inventory rather than a role default,
because three roles read it (common, podman, graylog-config). The disabled
path is an active teardown, not a skipped create: the containers already on
the host keep running and their systemd user units keep restarting them at
boot unless something stops and removes them. fluent-bit follows the same
flag -- with the GELF sink down it would spin retrying a dead 127.0.0.1:12202
and fill the journal it exists to drain -- but only the service state follows,
so re-enabling is a restart rather than a reinstall.
Caddy reloads were silently no-ops. The handler read /etc/caddy/Caddyfile,
which is a single-file bind mount, and podman binds those by inode; the
template module writes a temp file and renames it into place, so every deploy
gave the host file a new inode while the container kept seeing the one it was
created with. Config changes only ever landed when something recreated the
container. {{ caddy_path }}/config is also mounted, as a *directory*, and
directory mounts resolve names at open() time -- so /config/Caddyfile is
always the file Ansible just wrote.
awsddns and its four siblings had accumulated 12 zombies over 30 days of
uptime. The image's PID 1 is busybox crond, which only waitpid()s the job PIDs
it tracks and does no generic orphan reaping, so whenever the run-parts/sh
layer exited before the script it left a permanent <defunct>. init: true puts
catatonit at PID 1 to reap them, and the recreation clears the existing ones.
Also bumps fulfillr and greg-time-bot images.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Caddy was rotating on implicit defaults (100MiB/keep 10/90d) that were not
holding -- 20 rotated files per stream and a 190-day-old .gz, 1.3 GB across
16 log streams. Made explicit at 10MiB/keep 3/7d.
Note roll_size et al are subdirectives of `output file`, NOT of `log`.
Getting that wrong does not degrade gracefully: Caddy refuses to start on a
bad config, so every site went down until it was corrected. Worth a
`caddy validate` gate before reload.
journald had no SystemMaxUse and had reached 4 GB, drifting toward its
10%-of-filesystem default (~190 GB on this root). Capped at 500M.
Both are safe to keep short because fluent-bit ships the journal and every
Caddy access log into Graylog -- though note its GELF output has been
erroring for days, which weakens that premise and wants investigating.
The larger find was unrelated to logs: 896 images totalling 59.6 GB with
75% unused (94 tags of greg-time-bot, 73 of fulfillr -- one per deploy) and
5.4 GB of dangling volumes, mostly 804 MB Nextcloud /var/www/html trees
orphaned by container recreations. Pruned to 22 images / 15.4 GB, and added
a weekly timer keeping 30 days so a rollback still needs no rebuild.
Also dropped the decommissioned 6379/tcp redis rule (nothing listening;
Immich's redis is on the shared podman network) and the orphaned nosql, s3
and searxng volume dirs.
Backup log exclusions turned out to be unnecessary: Gitea logs to console
so its log dirs are empty, Nextcloud already excludes its own, BookStack
mounts only uploads, and Caddy is not backed up.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
The data-only rsync left no way to restore a working instance: mysql/ and
config/ were never backed up, so a recovery would have files but no shares,
users or metadata. Dump the database before syncing files (a DB older than
the files is repairable with occ files:scan; a newer one references blobs
that never made it into the backup) and ship config/ alongside it.
Capture the --chmod=Du=rwx,Dgo=rx flag that had been hand-added to the
deployed skudak-cloud script. It was outside git, so every deploy silently
reverted it. It now lives in backup_rsync_extra_args.
Add OnFailure= alerting. The units failed silently before, which is how an
iDrive sync failure sat unnoticed since May. msmtp rather than the esmtp
already installed: the OpenSRS relay is port 465 (implicit TLS) and libesmtp
only speaks STARTTLS.
Exclude nextcloud.log* from the sync and cap log_rotate_size. skudak-cloud
was running at loglevel 0 and had written a 64 GB log that was being rsynced
and pushed to S3; set it to 2 to match the home instance.
Stagger the timers (04:00 / 04:30) so both finish before the 05:00 TrueNAS
snapshot task, and bound TimeoutStartSec so a wedged rsync cannot leave the
unit activating forever and skip every subsequent trigger.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
- Move fluent-bit to common role (systemd service, not a container)
- Move geoip to podman/tasks/data/ (data prep, not a container)
- Remove debyltech tag from geoip (not a debyltech service)
- Fix check_mode for fetch subuid task to enable dry-run mode
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
