Both were invisible to inspection and only appeared under the hard matrix:
the flap damper tearing down an established session via the lease it stopped
renewing, and a missing peers file being completely silent. The second has a
production edge worth spelling out -- an unsaved commit reverts on reboot and
takes pppoe0 with it, leaving a standby that can never take over while
looking perfectly healthy.
Hard failover proven by destroying the master outright (virsh destroy -- no PADT,
the case a graceful stop cannot cover): the survivor took the VIPs, dialled, and
the access concentrator showed exactly ONE simdsl session from its MAC for the
whole seven minutes. When the destroyed router came back it did NOT dial --
ConditionResult=no, ActiveState=inactive, NRestarts=0, pppoe0 absent, may_dial=no
-- and the AC session count stayed at 1. That is the gate doing the one job it
exists for, on the path that previously had no protection at all.
Two more harness bugs of the same family as the last three, both of which
reported a working system as broken:
- ppp_on() returned an EMPTY string for an unreachable router, and `[ "" = 0 ]`
is false, so the hard-failover wait sat for its full timeout waiting for a
DESTROYED box to report zero -- long after the survivor had taken over
correctly. Absent now means 0.
- a VM restart recreates its taps under new names and the OVS bond keeps the
old ones: lacp dies, VLAN 1 goes with it, and the box returns reachable on
some VLANs and not others. That looked exactly like a failed failover. It is
the same stale-membership fault ovs_bond_router already detects, but nothing
ran it after a restart; the harness now does.
migration/PPPOE-HA.md is the runbook: what the design is, why `disable` cannot
work, the measured numbers, the deploy order (vyos002 first, on its own commit,
verified on the wire with tcpdump rather than from state), and the one-line
rollback.
It also records a model hazard found while writing it. The imported baseline
captures the RUNNING state, not the safe one -- vyos001 has no `vif 53 disable`
because it happens to be master, vyos002 does. An apply performed while vyos002
held the VIP would therefore enable vyos001's WAN too, putting the cloned MAC on
both boxes. An override must assert `vif 53 disable` on BOTH, accepting that an
apply then briefly disables the current master's 10 gig until the reconciler
restores it.
Still not applied to production.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01DMVzWZgiKW2wquf5z8S1yH
