Refactor SiteCommunicationActor's central→site routing table into one
SiteCommandDispatcher — the single routing truth for the 28 migrated commands
(IntegrationCallRequest, the dead 29th, stays on the actor and out of the
dispatcher). The Akka actor and the new SiteCommandGrpcService both route through
one dispatcher instance so the two transports can never drift on where a command
goes. Server-side only: nothing central flips to gRPC yet (that is T1B.3);
ClusterClient remains the live path.
Decisions worth recording:
- Targets preserved byte-for-byte. Lifecycle/OPC UA/query/route → the Deployment
Manager singleton proxy; DeployArtifacts/EventLog/parked → their null-guarded
handlers with the exact same "handler not available" replies; the parked
handler stays NODE-LOCAL (per-node replicated-store owner), never the singleton
proxy — pinned by a dispatcher test that asserts the target is the parked probe
and NOT the dm proxy.
- Sender preservation intact. The actor's command handlers became thin
DispatchCommand delegations that still Forward (central Ask → reply routes
straight back); the existing SiteCommunicationActorTests pass unchanged, which
is the regression guard for that plumbing. UnsubscribeDebugView keeps its
fire-and-forget shape: the actor Forwards, the gRPC service Tells + returns the
synthetic UnsubscribeDebugViewAck so a unary RPC still answers.
- Ack-before-Leave on failover. The dispatcher's PrepareFailover resolves the
standby with a DRY-RUN (no leave) to build the ack, and hands back a deferred
CommitLeave; the gRPC service returns the ack, then schedules the real
Cluster.Leave — so a caller reaching the very node about to leave still gets its
ack instead of a broken stream. The actor path keeps today's coupled
resolve-and-leave (over ClusterClient the ack Tell only enqueues, so order is
immaterial). Proven at both levels: a dispatcher test asserts the ack is built
before CommitLeave runs, and a TestServer test asserts the recorded seam order
is resolve-then-leave.
- ControlPlaneAuthInterceptor gates SiteCommandService by EXTENDING
DefaultGatedPrefixes (descriptor-derived), not by adding a constructor — the
one-public-ctor invariant and its test stay green.
Tests: SiteCommandDispatcherTests (28-command routing incl. parked node-locality
and both failover paths) and SiteCommandGrpcService TestServer tests (auth,
readiness→Unavailable, one command per oneof group, failover ordering). Full
solution build 0/0; Communication.Tests 574 and Host.Tests 377 green. No active
<Protobuf> item.
Phase 1B's contract slice: the wire shape and the canonical translation for the
28 central→site commands that leave ClusterClient. No behaviour changes yet —
SiteCommunicationActor and CentralCommunicationActor are untouched; the
dispatcher refactor (T1B.2) and the central transport seam (T1B.3) consume this.
Protos/site_command.proto (package scadabridge.sitecommand.v1, service
SiteCommandService): six domain RPCs, each with a `oneof` request/reply
envelope. The grouping is what carries deadline policy — every command inside a
group shares a CommunicationOptions timeout class today, so one RPC per group
keeps the deadline choice in one place on the client and one dispatch switch on
the server, while the oneof keeps each command individually typed:
ExecuteLifecycle(6) · ExecuteOpcUa(8) · ExecuteQuery(4) · ExecuteParked(5) ·
ExecuteRoute(4) · TriggerFailover(1). IntegrationCallRequest — the 29th entry on
SiteCommunicationActor's receive table — is deliberately excluded as dead code
(2026-07-22-integration-call-routing-is-dead-code.md).
Contract decisions worth knowing:
- Nullable COLLECTIONS ride in per-collection wrapper messages
(DeployArtifactsCommand's six artifact lists, CertTrustResult.Certs,
RouteToCallRequest.Parameters). proto3 repeated/map collapses null into empty,
and that distinction is live at the site — the same silent-data-loss class the
transport round-trip guard exposed in PLAN-05 T8. Goldens cover null, empty
and populated for each.
- Nullable strings use the empty-string-means-null convention already set by
AuditEventDtoMapper, with ONE exception: RouteToWaitForAttributeRequest's
TargetValueEncoded, where "wait for the empty string" is a real target, so it
carries a StringValue wrapper. Both behaviours are asserted, not assumed.
- Nullable enums ride in one-field messages (proto3 enums have no presence and
no stock wrapper). Enum translation is an explicit switch in both directions —
never by ordinal — so reordering a C# enum cannot re-map the wire; every wire
enum reserves 0 for _UNSPECIFIED and decodes to a documented safe default
rather than faulting a command from a version-skewed peer.
- New LooseValueCodec carries the surviving `object?` members (script params and
return values, attribute values, tag read/write values) as a type-tagged union
so a boxed value keeps its runtime CLR type, as it does today under Akka's
type-preserving JSON serializer. Dates ride as invariant round-trip strings,
not Timestamp, which would silently normalise away DateTime.Kind and
DateTimeOffset.Offset. Lists/maps recurse; anything outside the tagged set
falls back to JSON and is documented as CLR-type-lossy.
- DebugViewSnapshot gets its own full-fidelity alarm/attribute messages rather
than reusing sitestream's AlarmStateUpdate, which flattens values to display
strings — right for a live stream, lossy for a snapshot the UI treats as
authoritative. The encoder omits an AlarmStateChanged.Condition that already
equals the record's derived default, so computed alarms round-trip exactly
(record equality compares the nullable backing field, not the property).
Tests are reflection-driven so the coverage cannot drift: the round-trip theory
enumerates the mapper's own ToProto overloads, the envelope guards enumerate the
generated oneof descriptors, and a missing golden fails the build. 216 new tests
green (Communication 532 total, Commons 684 total, solution build 0/0).
Codegen is checked in under SiteCommandGrpc/ per the sitestream recipe; the
<Protobuf> ItemGroup stays commented out (an active one segfaults protoc in the
linux_arm64 Docker image). docker/regen-proto.sh now handles every proto in that
ItemGroup instead of just sitestream, and re-comments idempotently.
Phase 0 of the ClusterClient→gRPC migration
(docs/plans/2026-07-22-clusterclient-to-grpc-plan.md). Standalone hardening: it
closes a gap that exists today and is a precondition for moving command/control
onto gRPC in later phases.
T0.1 — delete the ManagementActor ClusterClientReceptionist registration.
It was built for an out-of-cluster CLI that was never written: the shipped CLI
speaks HTTP Basic to /management, which asks the actor in-process through
ManagementActorHolder. Nothing in the repo ever sent to /user/management. The
actor still runs there; only the cross-boundary advertisement is gone. Six
documents claimed the CLI used ClusterClient — including the CLI's own README
"Architecture Notes" — and are corrected here rather than left to rot.
T0.2 — record, do not port, the dead integration-routing path.
IntegrationCallRequest is unwired at BOTH ends: RouteIntegrationCallAsync has
zero callers anywhere, and RegisterLocalHandler(Integration, …) appears only in
a test, so production always answers "Integration handler not available". It is
excluded from the gRPC contract (28 of 29 commands migrate) rather than
enshrined on an additive-only wire format, and deleting it during a
transport migration would mix a behavioural change into a change whose whole
value is that behaviour is identical. See
docs/known-issues/2026-07-22-integration-call-routing-is-dead-code.md.
T0.3 — preshared-key authentication on SiteStreamService.
The service shipped with no auth at all: plaintext h2c, no interceptor, so
anything that could reach a site node's :8083 could open a live data stream or
read audit rows back via PullAuditEvents/PullSiteCalls. ControlPlaneAuthInterceptor
now gates /sitestream.SiteStreamService/ — modeled on LocalDbSyncAuthInterceptor
(constant-time compare, fail-closed, PermissionDenied) but gating a SET of
service prefixes so phases 1A/1B add services rather than interceptors. LocalDb
sync keeps its own separate key: it authenticates the pair partner, not central,
and collapsing the two would make a site's central-facing key also admit writes
into its database.
Keys are per site (SB-GRPC-PSK-<siteId>), never fleet-wide, so a compromised
site yields only its own. Central attaches them through ControlPlaneCredentials,
which binds CallCredentials to the channel — covering unary and streaming
uniformly, and letting the key resolve asynchronously, which a client
interceptor could not do without blocking. All three central→site channel
creation sites go through it (SiteStreamGrpcClient and both audit pull invokers);
the pull invokers' channel caches are re-keyed by (site, endpoint) because
credentials are per-site and bound to the channel.
Two decisions beyond the plan:
* StartupValidator now requires GrpcPsk on Site nodes. The plan specified only
the runtime gate, but fail-closed with no boot check produces a node that
joins, answers heartbeats and reports healthy while refusing every stream,
audit pull and telemetry ingest — silent and total. Same reasoning as the
existing inbound API-key pepper rule.
* Added Communication:SitePsks as a central-side key map. The plan assumed
central would read the store, seeded via a dev KEK; the docker rig
deliberately boots with no master key, so store-only resolution would leave
it unable to dial its own sites. The store stays primary — it is the only
source that can serve a site added at runtime — with the map covering
key-less hosts and one-off pins. Neither source falling back to
"unauthenticated" is the invariant.
T0.4 — dev keys on both rigs and tests.
34 tests. The seven that matter most exercise a real in-process gRPC stack over
TestServer: the unit tests on either side of the wire would both stay green if
the halves disagreed, and gRPC refuses call credentials on a plaintext channel
by default — the UnsafeUseInsecureChannelCallCredentials opt-in is only provable
by making a real call. They confirm correct key passes on unary AND streaming,
wrong key and no-credentials both get PermissionDenied, and an unresolvable key
fails the call with nothing reaching the service.
OPERATIONAL: a site node upgraded to this build without a key will not boot.
That includes the gitignored deploy/wonder-app-vd03/ overlay.
Joseph Doherty