Unify rather than delete. The defect in F-03 was never "a second attempt to
create a key exists" — it was that failure was silent and the completion marker
lied about it. A second attempt is only dangerous when it is an unaudited second
PRODUCER carrying its own idea of success, its own absent retry policy and its
own absent failure record.
Single producer. gen_tls() is now the only code in the ISO build that creates
/etc/archipelago/ssl/archipelago.{key,crt}; gen_ssh() the only code that creates
/etc/ssh/ssh_host_*. Two secondary producers are gone:
- the Dockerfile's `openssl req` layer, which baked a keypair the strip layer
deleted moments later in the same build;
- the installer's "ensure SSL cert exists for nginx HTTPS" block, which before
the strip almost never fired and after it would have fired on every install.
Proof is mechanical, not a claim: every executable `openssl req` / `ssh-keygen
-A` invocation in the builder now lives inside the generator heredoc, and the
test suite fails if one appears outside it.
Build-time assertion. The one realistic total failure is a missing generator
binary, which is deterministic — no retry or reboot fixes it. A rootfs RUN layer
now fails the build if openssl or ssh-keygen is missing or non-executable.
openssl and openssh-server are both already in the package list (and
openssh-server hard-depends openssh-client, which ships ssh-keygen), so today
this is cheap insurance; it earns its place the first time someone edits that
list.
Self-heal, never dead-end. Fail-closed governs SERVING; retry governs
RECOVERING, and they are different things. Adds
archipelago-first-boot-secrets.timer (OnBootSec=5min, OnUnitActiveSec=15min),
installed and enabled with a hand-written symlink fallback because chroot
systemctl enable can fail silently. The service's own ConditionPathExists=!
makes every trigger a no-op once the marker exists, so a healthy node pays
nothing. On success the script now restarts consumers that are in `failed` —
try-reload-or-restart is a no-op on a failed unit, so without this a recovered
node would have valid keys on disk and nginx still down.
Never serve a bogus key. gen_tls parses both halves back with `openssl pkey`
and `openssl x509` before the swap, so a truncated or half-written artefact is
never what nginx reads.
Tests: 6 cases, each with an isolated negative control (transcripts in SUMMARY).
- case 4, TLS fails every attempt on a stripped root -> no key from any source.
Control: reintroduce a fallback key creation -> only case 4 red.
- case 5, self-heal: a failed run then a later successful run -> key present,
marker set, failed units restarted. Control: dead-end on a node that already
failed -> only case 5 red.
- case 6, single-producer invariant. Control: reintroduce the installer block
-> only case 6 red, naming the line.
Residual risk, stated plainly: a machine where generation can never succeed
still ends up with no SSH and no TLS. Build-time assertion removes the
deterministic cause, retry plus timer removes the transient ones, so what
remains is genuinely broken hardware — and it says so on the console and in
/var/lib/archipelago/first-boot-secrets.failed rather than quietly serving a
key nobody audited.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
