Traced a real "Operation failed" report to its root: MeshService::stop()
ran synchronously inside start_flash_job, BEFORE the background task was
even spawned — so the RPC call itself blocked on it. The mesh listener's
reconnect/multi-candidate-probe loop doesn't check its shutdown signal
between candidates, and in this incident it was mid a Meshcore-then-
Meshtastic probe cycle when the flash request came in, so stop() never
returned. The HTTP request timed out client-side ("connection closed
before message completed" in the server log), the frontend surfaced a
generic "Operation failed", and — worse — the job had already been
inserted into the single-job-guard slot before stop() ran, so with nothing
ever spawned to complete it, every subsequent flash attempt failed with
"already in progress" until a full service restart.
The existing MAX_JOB_DURATION ceiling didn't help here: it only wraps
run_flash(), which is reached AFTER stop() returns — so a hang in stop()
itself was completely unguarded.
Fixed by moving the stop() call inside the spawned background task with
its own 20s timeout. The RPC call now always returns immediately once the
job is registered, and a slow-to-stop listener fails the job cleanly with
a clear message instead of hanging the request and wedging every future
attempt behind it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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