Commit Graph
8 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5 458510a0a8 scope sleep to homelab, and port the boot hang fix
Sleep and suspend is homelab only now. The two exclusions are for different
reasons and both are stated in the run rather than left implicit:

  dev — a laptop should sleep; disabling it is a hot bag and a flat battery.

  vps — not merely unnecessary, harmful. A virtual machine has no lid and no
  power button, but the provider's Shut down control works by sending an ACPI
  power button event. HandlePowerKey=ignore makes the VM ignore it, so graceful
  shutdown requests silently do nothing and the instance is hard-killed instead.
  systemd defaults that key to poweroff for exactly this reason.

The boot hang fix is everything except vps, where systemd-networkd genuinely
manages the network and the unit is load-bearing.

Rather than asking whether boot "feels slow" — a question people answer from
memory of the worst time it happened — the step prints what the unit actually
cost on this boot, from systemd's own accounting. On this host that is 14ms,
which ends the discussion. On a NetworkManager desktop it is two minutes, which
also ends it. On dev the wording says outright that a small number here means
there is nothing to do.

The original's live guard is kept and is what actually decides: NetworkManager
active and networkd not. Anything else, including "cannot tell", is left alone,
and the reason is printed. The warning against disabling systemd-networkd
outright is carried across into the library, where the alternative would be
attempted.

Verified all three roles on this host, which is a networkd machine: homelab and
dev both correctly refuse and explain, vps skips as not applicable, and the
timing helper reads 14ms out of systemd-analyze.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 18:17:17 +00:00
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5 c87127ff93 port the sleep and suspend section
The original ran unconditionally, so a laptop that went through it stopped
suspending — a hot bag and a flat battery. It is a server concern: dev is skipped
with the reason printed, like the ballast.

Four things wrong with it beyond the role:

  HandleLidSwitchDocked was never set. A laptop used as a homelab server, docked
  and closed, still suspends — which is the exact machine this setting exists
  for. Added.

  RuntimeDirectorySize=10% was set alongside the sleep handlers. It is the size
  of /run, has nothing to do with sleeping, and 10% is systemd's own default, so
  the line never did anything. Dropped.

  systemd-logind was restarted on every pass whether or not anything changed,
  disturbing live sessions for nothing. The step now checks first and does not
  reach the restart when the machine is already configured. (The platform's own
  scripts/setup-old/setup.sh already had this guard; the machine script did not.)

  The settings were sed'd into logind.conf in place. They are a drop-in at
  /etc/systemd/logind.conf.d/99-machine-setup.conf now, so what this script set
  is one file that can be read or removed on its own.

Current state is printed before anything is asked — whether the targets are
masked, and what the lid, idle and power-key handlers actually do. logind_effective
reads the main file and every drop-in and takes the last match, since a drop-in
overrides logind.conf; reading only the main file reports a configured machine as
unconfigured.

The power-button consequence is stated rather than left to be discovered: after
this, pressing power physically does nothing and a clean shutdown is
`sudo poweroff`.

WSL has no logind and cannot suspend, and says so.

Verified both roles on this host, which the old script had already configured —
correctly reports the targets masked and the handlers set, and correctly reports
itself not fully configured because HandleLidSwitchDocked is missing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 18:11:16 +00:00
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5 6ffd3534bd do not offer the ballast on a dev machine, and route its alerts through one place
Servers only now. On a machine you sit at, a filling disk announces itself — the
editor refuses to save, the browser complains — and you are there to deal with
it. The reserve is for the box nobody is watching, where the first sign is a
service that stopped working hours ago.

Skipped rather than asked, but said out loud with the reason and recorded in the
summary. A section that silently produces no output is indistinguishable from
one that failed.

The cron this section installs was already there and is unchanged: /etc/cron.d
runs the checker as root every ten minutes, and it deletes the ballast when free
space falls under the threshold.

What changed is where its message goes. Both alerts now run through one notify()
inside the generated checker rather than calling logger directly, so there is a
single place to add a second channel. Today it is still syslog only — the
message lands in the journal and nowhere else, so nobody learns about it until
they go looking, which is precisely the wrong moment. Push, mail or Officer's own
notify sidecar hook in there. It also echoes to stderr now, so running the
checker by hand shows the message instead of appearing to do nothing.

Verified: dev reports not-applicable and asks nothing, vps still asks and records
a refusal, and the regenerated checker parses and reports status.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 18:09:03 +00:00
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5 d19dc5a92a ask where the ballast goes and how big it is
Three questions instead of one, because the two the original never asked are the
two that decide whether the thing is useful.

  1. Do you want one, with the explanation first.

  2. Where. Home (easiest to find again months from now), beside Officer, or a
     path typed in. This is not tidiness: the checker measures its own directory,
     so a ballast only protects the filesystem it sits on. Choosing where it goes
     is choosing which mount is covered.

  3. How much, as 5/10/20% — with the actual numbers, and with what would be LEFT
     rather than only what is taken:

       [1]   5%  — reserves 2.9GB    leaving 54.3GB free
       [2]  10%  — reserves 5.8GB    leaving 51.4GB free
       [3]  20%  — reserves 11.5GB   leaving 45.7GB free

     A percentage on its own is unanswerable. The number that decides it is the
     one on the right: the reserve has to be big enough to matter and small
     enough not to be the thing that filled the disk.

The size is computed against the filesystem the chosen path lands on, after the
location is known, so the percentages are of the right disk. ballast_free_kb
walks up to a directory that exists, since nothing has created the target yet.

An existing ballast in either default location is found and left alone rather
than a second one being made beside it.

Verified end to end in a temp home: created at the chosen path, 2.9G for 5% of
57.1GB, checker installed and reporting it present.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 18:05:42 +00:00
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5 9b0e05bfd8 add three resource-pressure sections, each asked rather than assumed
Swap covers memory pressure. These are its neighbours:

  8.  Emergency disk ballast  the same valve, for disk
  9.  earlyoom                what happens when swap runs out too
  10. inotify watch limit     the silent one

All three follow the rule this script now works to: the role sets which way the
recommendation points, never whether the question is asked. A dev machine is
still offered the ballast, with the recommendation pointing the other way; a
server is still offered the inotify raise, because anything running `bun --watch`
or serving a file browser is a watcher too.

The ballast is section 22 of the original, moved up beside swap where it belongs
and moved out of the user's home. The original wrote the checker into
$USER_HOME/.local/bin and ran it from a root cron — a root cron executing a
script in a directory its owner can write is a privilege escalation waiting to be
noticed. Moot on a box where that user already has passwordless sudo, but wrong.
Both the checker and the file are in root-owned system paths now.

Two bugs found by running the generated checker rather than reading it:

  It df'd the ballast's own directory, which does not exist before the ballast is
  created — and with `set -euo pipefail` that meant cron mailing an error every
  ten minutes. It now walks up to a directory that exists, and the installer
  creates the directory itself rather than depending on the create step.

  The inotify text claimed a default of 8192. This host is at 29461: Ubuntu
  raised it, and stating a number the reader can see is wrong on their own screen
  undermines the rest of the explanation. It now describes the failure instead
  and prints the machine's actual value.

earlyoom is a distro package and a systemd unit, so it is checked with
`systemctl is-active` and reports honestly when it installs but fails to start.

Verified: checker --status and its no-op path both exit 0 with no directory
present, and the helpers report correctly against this host.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 17:54:48 +00:00
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5 716a6e2750 port the swap section, and size it against the disk
Four things the original got wrong, all of which only show up on a machine that
is not this one:

  It detected swap with `swapon --show | grep -q '/'` — a test for a swap FILE.
  A machine using zram or a swap partition reports no swap at all, and the step
  would add a swapfile beside working swap. Reads SwapTotal from /proc/meminfo
  now, which covers every kind.

  It never looked at free disk. On a VPS with 4G free and 16G of RAM it would
  fallocate 8G, fail, and take the run down under `set -e`. The recommendation is
  now capped by what is actually there, keeping 5G back, and refuses rather than
  shrinking to something useless.

  fallocate was assumed to work. It produces a file that btrfs and zfs will not
  swap on, so dd is the fallback — slow, but it always works.

  swappiness was written by sed'ing /etc/sysctl.conf in place, tangling it with
  whatever else lives there. It is a drop-in at /etc/sysctl.d now, so what this
  script set is visible as its own file.

Role-dependent, which is the first use of MACHINE_ROLE: swappiness 10 on a
server, where swapping is the emergency valve and a page fault on a request path
is latency somebody is waiting for; the kernel default of 60 on dev, where
swapping out an application nobody has touched in an hour is exactly what you
want.

WSL is left alone entirely — WSL2 runs its own managed swap inside the VM, and a
swapfile written here is wasted disk the kernel will not use.

Sizes are reported rounded rather than floored. A 4 GiB swapfile is 4194300 kB,
which floors to 3 and reads as though a gigabyte went missing. Free disk stays
floored, deliberately: it decides how much to allocate, and rounding up invents
space.

Verified on this host — 4G RAM, 4G existing swap correctly detected and left
alone — and with the disk check stubbed at 6G free (caps to 1G) and 3G free
(refuses).

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 17:48:45 +00:00
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5 6480788979 port the timezone section
The original took whatever was typed and handed it straight to timedatectl. An
unknown zone — a typo, a guess at the spelling — fails there, and under `set -e`
that takes the whole run down four steps in. Names are now checked against
/usr/share/zoneinfo before use, and a bad one just re-asks.

It also never showed what the machine was already set to, and defaulted to option
1 (UTC) on Enter, so pressing return on a correctly-configured box silently moved
it. Now the current zone is printed, Enter keeps it, and a zone equal to the
current one reports nothing to do rather than setting it again.

timezone_current reads three sources — timedatectl, /etc/timezone, then the
/etc/localtime symlink — because they differ in availability rather than in
answer: timedatectl needs systemd, /etc/timezone is Debian's, and the symlink is
the one that is always there. timezone_set writes through timedatectl where
there is a systemd to talk to and the files directly otherwise, which is what it
would have written anyway; that is also the WSL path, where timedatectl exists
but does nothing.

Europe/Berlin added to the shortlist; TIMEZONE in the environment answers the
prompt ahead of time and is validated the same way, failing early with the bad
value named.

Verified detection (UTC here), validation of four names, and the env-var
rejection path.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 17:43:20 +00:00
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5 163f8d5899 port the locale section
Was three unconditional lines that ran on every pass and reported success either
way. Now it checks, says what it found, and asks.

The original tracked one fact where there are two:

  what a new login shell is told to use   LANG in /etc/default/locale
  whether that locale actually exists     whether it has been generated

Setting the first without the second is what produces "setlocale: LC_ALL: cannot
change locale" on every ssh login and every perl invocation. They fail
differently, so the step names whichever one is actually missing rather than
reporting a flat "locale not set".

Also fixes two things the original would have hit on a minimal image:

  locale-gen comes from the `locales` package, which cloud base images do not
  ship and which is not in core utils. It is installed on demand rather than
  assumed, instead of failing with "locale-gen: command not found".

  The locale is uncommented in /etc/locale.gen rather than only passed to
  locale-gen as an argument. A locale generated by argument alone disappears the
  next time anything regenerates from that file.

`locale -a` prints en_US.utf8 where the configuration spells it en_US.UTF-8, so
both sides are folded before comparing — a literal match reports a working locale
as missing.

LOCALE in the environment overrides the default. pacman, dnf and brew branches
are written but unreachable while the pre-flight gate is apt-only; macOS has no
system locale to set and says so.

Verified both paths on this host: en_US.UTF-8 reports already set and generated,
pt_PT.UTF-8 correctly reports both facts missing.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-08-12 17:41:49 +00:00