MACHINE_ROLE is homelab, vps or dev, and several steps have a different right
answer per role with no way to work it out themselves: whether the address is
yours to pin (static IP), whether the box faces the open internet (fail2ban, SSH
hardening, UFW), and whether it is allowed to sleep (suspend, logind).
Asked in pre-flight rather than at each point of use. The steps that care run
from swap through to the firewall, and being asked "is this a VPS?" for the
fourth time halfway down a provisioning run is how people start answering
without reading.
The default offered is guessed from whether this machine's own address is in
RFC1918 space, which beats asking whether it is virtualised — a homelab is very
often a VM on Proxmox and would be misread as rented — and is the same fact most
of the branches turn on anyway. A graphical session means dev; so does macOS.
It is only ever a suggestion the user confirms.
MACHINE_ROLE in the environment answers it ahead of time for an unattended run,
which is why it is declared with :- rather than a plain assignment. The first
version wiped the caller's value before ask_machine_role ever saw it; caught by
running with MACHINE_ROLE=vps and watching the menu appear anyway.
Verified: guesses vps on this host (public IPv4, no DISPLAY, no display
manager), env override takes, and a bad value fails with the three valid ones
named. Nothing consumes the role yet — the steps get wired as each is worked
through.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
pastilhasandClaude Opus 5
41ff8030e9