A helper that would have deployed a channel nobody named

The channel is declared twice: in lembas.env, which this process reads and the
page prints, and baked into the systemd unit, which is what the helper actually
deploys. install.sh writes both together so they agree by construction -- and
the moment somebody edits one by hand they diverge, with the page naming one
channel down every card and the button deploying the other. Nothing anywhere
would have said so.

It cannot be collapsed to one place. Reading it from lembas.env at deploy time
would mean the service account decides what gets deployed, since it owns that
file -- and "the request carries no channel" is the property the whole design
rests on. So the two stay, and the marker file the page already reads to know
the helper exists now carries the channel it was installed with. A disagreement
is an alert.

Display only, deliberately: the service account can write that marker, so a
compromised process could lie about what the helper will do -- but not change
it, because the helper's own channel lives in /etc where that account cannot
reach. Lying about the channel is a much smaller thing than choosing it.

An empty marker -- every host installed before this -- reads as unknown rather
than as a mismatch. Claiming one would put a red alert on every existing host.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
2026-08-06 21:44:35 +02:00
parent f68caec849
commit 0ce8026bd2
5 changed files with 98 additions and 4 deletions
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@@ -16,7 +16,15 @@ for 1.0.0 have something to be assembled from.
## Unreleased
Nothing since 0.9.8.
- The Updates page notices when the update helper on a host was installed for a
**different channel** than the page follows. It is declared in two places —
`lembas.env` and the systemd unit — and only the installer writes both, so
editing one by hand would have left the button deploying something other than
what the page named, with nothing anywhere saying so.
- Fixed: release notes from a **signed** tag rendered the signature block.
`_notes_for` stripped the PGP header only, and which header appears depends on
`gpg.format` — this repository signs with SSH.
- A `CHANGELOG.md`, kept from now on rather than assembled at release time.
## 0.9.8