The deploy watcher kept logging `Connection closed by 77.42.39.155 port 22` followed by "make sure you have
the correct access rights", which reads as a credentials problem and is not one. `origin` pointed at
gitea.officer.dev, which resolves to the public address and arrives through Nginx Proxy Manager — where
every connection appears to come from one container IP, internet bots get that IP penalised by
srclimit_penalise, and SSH is refused for long stretches.
Gitea is a plugin ON THIS MACHINE, listening on 100.64.0.13:10023. The watcher was leaving the box and
coming back in through a proxy to read a repository sitting on its own disk.
origin now points at the local address; the public URL is kept as `gitea-public` so nothing is lost. No file
was edited to do it, which matters — the watcher is a running bash script and editing one in place is how a
loop starts executing half of two versions. Changing the remote's URL takes effect on the next tick with
nothing restarted.
Loopback would be better still and is not used: 127.0.0.1 fails host key verification because it has no
known_hosts entry, while the tailnet address is already trusted.
The cost of not knowing this, recorded in the prompt: a tag pushed at 21:47 on 2026-08-21 went unnoticed
until 23:07. Eighty minutes, forty-odd ticks, every one of them correctly logged and retried. The loop was
never at fault — it was asking through a door that is sometimes shut.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>