Three defects, and the loudest one was self-inflicted.
test_watchdog.sh stubbed only curl and docker, so notify-send resolved to
the real binary and the suite fired a dozen genuine critical popups every
run -- from a pre-commit hook. On 2026-08-31 the timer emitted zero
messages and the desktop still collected 297, all of them from committing.
The stubs now live in the harness, and the suite asserts the counts.
give_up() had no once-only flag, so a six-hour window announced itself
every two minutes -- up to 180 times -- while its own text said "no
further restarts". A stamp in the state dir now gates the popup, and only
the popup: journald still gets every line, which is why the existing
stdout assertions are untouched.
alarm() hardcoded --urgency=critical, which xfce4-notifyd never expires,
and passed no replace id, so they stacked instead of superseding.
notify-send --print-id now feeds --replace-id from one slot. WATCHDOG_NOTIFY
picks how much reaches the desktop at all; it defaults to escalation, so
the routine restart/recovery pair is journald-only from here.
test_watchdog.sh crossed the 250-line cap, so the sandbox and the
assertions moved to test_watchdog_harness.sh, and the hook that runs the
suite now watches all three files.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01416TegJ3sa8xL5qGGgrygP
Today the bot was up, healthy and answering nothing for three hours. A host
firewall change (fixed in testsAndMisc 334c0cd9) cut every Docker container
off the internet; signal-cli lost Signal and reconnected in a loop from
15:32:50 onward. Nothing noticed:
- the container's own healthcheck answered 204
- /v1/groups answered 200 out of local state, so discovery saw no change
- the bot's WebSocket to the container stayed OPEN, so the transport's
reconnect logic never fired
- /healthz answered {"status": "ok"} the entire time
The only symptom was silence, which is also what a quiet evening looks like.
signal_bot/liveness.py asks the one question that cannot be answered from a
cache -- GET /v1/devices, which needs a live round trip -- but only after
SILENCE_SECONDS (120) with no frame of any kind, so a busy group costs
nothing and an idle one costs one request per window. Three consecutive
failures and /healthz answers 503 with the reason. Verified end to end in
scripts/e2e.sh against the real process: 503 after 84s with the fake's
connection cut, back to 200 on its own 30s after restoring it.
scripts/signal_api_watchdog.sh + a two-minute user timer do the recovery the
bot cannot do for itself, since a wedged bot cannot restart the container it
depends on. Two tiers, so the steady state costs no Signal round trip at
all: the bot's own /healthz first, the authenticated probe only when that is
not 200. It stops after 3 restarts in 6 hours and escalates instead -- a
deregistered account or a blocked network is not fixable by restarting, and
a restart loop would hide it. Its own bash suite stubs curl and docker and
drives every branch including the give-up cap.
signal_bot/trust.py answers the other half: TRUSTED_INVITERS decides who may
put this bot in a group. The gate sits in GroupDirectory._permitted, which
both _join_pending and _adopt already route through -- gating only invites
would gate the door nobody uses, since prime_profile.sh exists precisely so
that an add becomes a direct join. Evidence is either the group-update
envelope, which is the only frame naming an inviter, or a trusted identity
being a full member in the listing. A refusal is logged once, with that
group's members, so the operator can see which string to add.
verify_allowlist moved to membership.py to keep discovery.py under the
250-line gate; it was already the module that owns MembershipError.
Verified live, by stopping the container by hand and touching nothing else:
18:54:35 docker stop signal-api
18:56:36 liveness: failure 1 of 3 after 123s of silence
18:57:36 failure 3 of 3 -> /healthz answers 503 from 18:57:45
18:58:18 watchdog: probe failed (1/2)
19:00:28 watchdog: probe failed (2/2) -> docker restart signal-api
19:00:36 liveness: receive path recovered after 8 failed probe(s)
19:01:13 watchdog: signal-api is back
Six minutes, unattended, against three hours of silence this afternoon. All
four real groups are still adopted with TRUSTED_INVITERS=+48123456789 set,
and no group was refused.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01KbjfWdAyHbCubac7wJKJZW
