field notes codename
24 notes filed under KEEL, newest first. Same rules as the rest of the pile: a codename, a theme, and no internals.
A rebuild you have never performed is a hypothesis. The proof is a reset cycle: stop every workload, remove it, resubmit from the repository, and check that the services come back and answer. Running that deliberately, on a quiet day,…
Building a machine from an existing image is the cheapest way to add capacity, and it silently copies identity along with the operating system. One member joined the group carrying the identifier of a machine that was already a member. The…
Hardening runs once, unwatched, on a machine whose only access path it is about to change. That makes it the most dangerous program in the estate: it is the change that removes the ability to make changes. A machine that closes its…
Every provisioning pipeline is destructive on purpose: it partitions, formats and overwrites, then asks the machine to become something else. The trap is ordering. The bootstrap the pipeline needs has to be in memory before the first…
elsewhere
Each codename is a project. The theme is the class of problem the note is about — the same theme recurs across projects, which is usually the interesting part.