Second slice of the 2026-09-09 whole-system review remediation
(docs/plans/2026-09-09-arch-review.md §10), on top of the High slice 146a1323.
Runtime/devices: SR-2 alarm on-trigger integration scope; SR-3 correlated NativeAlarmActor
subscribe retry; SR-4 immutable audited DB target; SR-5 ordered InstanceActor stop/flush;
SR-12 rehydration fence; SR-13 S&F gate recheck per delivery; DC-4 no OPC UA security
downgrade; DC-5 alarm snapshot for every new subscriber; ORCH-1 sync-dispose joins the pump.
Management/UI: MG-2 site scope on audit tree + Flow Debugger Replay; MG-3 stale-probe memo
removed; MG-4 server-owned bulk-deploy deadline; UI-5 sandbox runs in a killable child
process (new CentralUI.SandboxWorker project); UI-14 bounded sandbox output/IPC.
Edge/audit: EI-1 relay audit ownership; EI-2 SkipBodyCapture suppresses error text; EI-3/EI-11
error-field redaction + caps; EI-4 single relay deadline, pre-execution-only retry; EI-5
authenticated relay provenance; EI-10 body cap before audit read.
Persistence/contracts: DL-1 global Instance.UniqueName unique index + conflict translation;
DL-2 DataConnection protocol config encrypted at rest (migration
20260909203046_EnforceGlobalInstanceNamesAndProtectProtocolConfiguration — coordinated
central upgrade, old binaries cannot read protected rows); DL-3 bounded Replay paging;
DL-6 cross-site Overwrite of a deployed instance rejected; XC-4 proto descriptor contract test.
Config/hygiene: XC-1 central listener isolation by local port; XC-2/XC-3 inert SMTP + cron
keys removed from rig settings; CM-2 env2 bootstrap guard enabled; DC-6 deploy site exit code;
DC-7 notifier retries only explicit standby rejection; XC-5 ClusterClient purged from docs.
Gates recorded in the report: build 0/0, 9 397 passed / 0 failed, rig redeployed on all
eight nodes with the migration applied. 46 Low findings remain open.
Flow Debugger (design 2026-09-05 §5.3/§5.4): AttributeValueUpdate fields 7/8 stamped by
StreamRelayActor and parsed by SiteStreamGrpcClient (older frames => null/false). New
PullTraceEvents unary RPC on SiteStreamService (same PSK-gated prefix as PullAuditEvents):
a point read of the site audit SQLite by ExecutionId OR ParentExecutionId
(ISiteAuditQueue.ReadByExecutionIdsAsync, json_extract on the codec's camelCase keys, new
IX_audit_event_occurred index, 64-id / 2000-row caps) that moves no cursor and flips no
ForwardState. Central IPullTraceEventsClient/GrpcPullTraceEventsClient mirror the audit pull
client (endpoint resolution, NodeB failover, fault => empty) and register beside it.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GSLkkHKz9JrAtmJjmQK3cP
Flow Debugger (design 2026-09-05 §5.2/§5.4): site_command.proto gains trace=7 on
RouteToCallRequestDto, child_execution_id=6 + repeated sitestream.AuditEventDto trace_events=7
on RouteToCallResponseDto, trace=6 on RouteToSetAttributesRequestDto (imports
Protos/sitestream.proto the way central_control.proto does). Mapper round-trips them; an
empty trace_events list maps to null so an untraced/older site reads as 'not traced'.
Vendored C# regenerated via docker/regen-proto.sh (csproj untouched); golden samples extended.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GSLkkHKz9JrAtmJjmQK3cP
P8-8: replace the remaining wall-clock sleep-then-assert instances outside
Communication.Tests' Medium-wave sweep with the same row-40 house pattern —
continuous polling (AssertHoldsFor) for ABSENCE assertions instead of a single
end-of-window sample, which cannot distinguish "stayed quiet throughout" from
"hadn't happened yet when the one sample landed" and cannot catch a value that
flips wrong and back before that sample.
- DataConnectionActorBatchTests: QualityCounters_ArePushedOnTransitionOnly_AndCoalesced
(:206/:214 class) converted to AssertHoldsFor; ResolutionProbes_BackOff...
(:181/:184, a genuine real-time backoff-RATE assertion, not a sync-primitive
stand-in) converted to AssertRoundsWithinWindow, which enforces the ceiling
continuously (fails fast on a no-backoff regression) while the floor still
necessarily waits out the window.
- SiteAlarmLiveCacheServiceTests (:452-454, :470-472): converted to the
project's own AssertHoldsFor (mirrors SiteAlarmAggregatorActorTests', same
assembly).
- StoreAndForwardServiceTests (:891-892): async AssertHoldsForAsync variant
(the class runs on the async test thread).
- KpiHistoryRecorderActorTests (:1043-1049): two skip-path FoldCount==0
absence checks converted.
Each helper is a private per-file copy, matching the Medium-wave T17
precedent (SiteAlarmAggregatorActorTests.AssertHoldsFor) rather than a shared
TestSupport utility. Proof of the mechanism: a standalone (non-repo) harness
run 100 trials of a real background thread flipping a boolean true then back
to false inside a 300ms window — Thread.Sleep(300)+one sample missed the
violation 100/100 times (false pass), continuous 20ms polling caught it
100/100 times. Most of the actual conversions here guard monotonic counters
(their single-sample variant would eventually see the final value too), so
each converted test carries an inline honesty note on what specifically the
conversion buys for that assertion (fail-fast vs. true flip-back detection).
P8-9: ScadaBridgeTelemetryTests.EmitHelpers_DoNotThrow called
SetQueueDepthProvider(() => 5) against the process-global row-32 provider
slot with no clear and no [Collection] — a landmine for any future
same-process reader of scadabridge.store_and_forward.queue.depth. Fixed with
compare-and-clear in a finally via the existing (production, untouched)
ClearQueueDepthProvider. Searched this assembly and the whole test tree for a
second same-process reader that asserts on the value: none exists today
(MetricsEndpointTests scrapes /metrics but only asserts on the response
shape, and the only value-asserting test, QueueDepthGaugeTests, lives in
StoreAndForward.Tests — a separate test-host process the leak cannot reach),
so no [Collection] was added; the test's doc comment records the search and
flags it for re-check if that changes.
Test-only change, zero production edits. Full suites green: DCL.Tests
342/342, Communication.Tests 729/729, StoreAndForward.Tests 135/135,
KpiHistory.Tests 54/54, Host.Tests 522/522. Each converted test additionally
looped 20x in isolation with zero flakes.
P3-4 — SiteAlarmAggregatorActor pinned _openInFlight forever on a stream open
that produced none of its three peer-driven outcomes. SiteStreamGrpcClient gives
up on response headers after ConnectedHeaderTimeout (10s) and then treats the
first received EVENT as its fallback connected signal, so an alarm-only site
that stays quiet supplies neither — leaving _streamDown=true AND _openInFlight=
true, which makes OnReconcileTick's reopen guard (_streamDown && !_openInFlight)
skip every tick until the site's 4h max stream lifetime ends the call.
Fix: bound one open attempt with a generation-fenced single-shot deadline
(GrpcAlarmStreamOpenTimedOut, ctor-injected, production default 30s — above the
10s header timeout, below the 60s reconcile interval). Firing it releases the
flag and nothing else: no retry-budget spend, no node flip, no liveness
republish, and the abandoned subscription is left running so a merely-slow
connect still comes up normally. Self-healing rather than reachability analysis.
The deadline is cancelled on connect / error / graceful completion.
P3-5 — SiteStreamGrpcServer cancelled the incumbent stream on a duplicate
correlation id and only THEN checked the concurrency cap. Checking Count >= max
after the removal is right at exactly the cap but wrong above it, and above it
is reachable because the cap check is documented check-then-act: two subscribes
that both clear it before either registers overshoot by one. In that window a
routine reconnect killed a healthy stream AND was refused with
ResourceExhausted, leaving the correlation with ZERO streams until its next
retry.
Fix: claim the removal, consult the cap only for a genuinely NEW correlation id,
then cancel. A replacement is net-neutral on the count so it never consults the
cap; a refused new subscriber cancelled nothing (TryRemove found nothing), so
the incumbent survives. Newest-wins is unchanged — a fresh authenticated
subscribe still displaces a dead/wedged incumbent.
Tests (both shown failing against the unfixed code):
- OpenAttemptThatNeverResolves_ReleasesTheInFlightGuard_SoTheTickCanReopen —
fails (reopen never happens) with the deadline arming disabled.
- OpenDeadline_DoesNotFire_OnAStreamThatConnects_NorFlipNodeOrBurnBudget —
inertness lock on every healthy path.
- AtCapOvershoot_DuplicateReconnect_IsNotRefused_AndLeavesExactlyOneLiveStream —
fails with ResourceExhausted against the old ordering; the overshoot is driven
deterministically by parking both openers on the ServerCallContext token read,
which sits between the cap check and the _activeStreams insert.
- AtCap_AGenuinelyNewSubscriber_IsStillRefused_AndTheIncumbentSurvives.
The P3-4 test's doc comment carries the honesty note: the aggregator-side
starvation reproduces exactly, but how often the >10s header delay that gets you
there occurs in production is NOT demonstrated — the site flushes headers
explicitly as soon as its relay is attached, so the budget has to be consumed by
connect + handshake + server scheduling instead.
The gauge test polls baseline+1, but the process-global gauge's baseline is
captured once: a parallel class's streams closing after capture lowers the
gauge below baseline+1 forever. Survey confirmed only SiteStreamGrpcServerTests
and CleanupVerificationTests drive the real SubscribeInstance handler that
moves the counter; both now share the SiteStreamSubscriberGauge collection
(row-96 pattern). 4/4 full-suite runs green, durations unchanged.
ROW 80 (observability correctness). An unreplicated site published
LocalDbReplicationConnected=false / LocalDbOplogBacklog=0, contradicting the
nullable semantics every doc and the proto already state ("null means no
reading, NOT disconnected with an empty backlog").
Root cause: the replication engine is registered unconditionally and idles
without a peer, so ISyncStatus answers false/0 on a node that was never meant to
replicate, and LocalDbReplicationStatusReporter passed that straight through.
Two consequences: an operator read connected:false on a healthy site as a fault,
and central's null branches — row 33's conditional KPI emission and
sustained-badge anchor exclusion — never received the null they exist for, so
rig site-b/site-c emitted a permanently misleading
localDbReplicationConnected=0 series.
Fix mirrors the SiteEventLogReplicationCheck precedent: the Host evaluates
SiteLocalDbSetup.ReplicationIsConfigured ONCE and passes it to
AddLocalDbReplicationHealthBridge as a third provider; unconfigured
short-circuits the probe to (null, null). HealthMonitoring never reads LocalDb
config itself, and the same captured value now also feeds
SiteEventLogReplicationCheck so the two surfaces cannot disagree.
ISiteHealthCollector.SetLocalDbReplicationStatus widens to bool? — the
non-nullable bool was the type-level root cause (null was inexpressible).
false now means exactly one thing: configured, peer session down = a real fault.
Wire/central/UI needed no change: the proto already carries BoolValue/Int64Value
wrappers and the aggregator + KPI source already branch on null. This makes code
match doc, so no doc claim was weakened.
Watch the trap that caused this: configured-ness is PeerAddress OR ApiKey (only
the dialling half sets a peer address). The pre-existing SiteLocalDbWiringTests
fixture sets ApiKey and IS a replicating node, so its false/0 assertion is
correct and is kept, with a comment saying so; the new
UnreplicatedSiteLocalDbHealthTests fixture is the genuinely-unreplicated one.
ROW 73 (silent loss of self-heal). AkkaHostedService skips
SiteReconciliationActor when no IDeploymentConfigFetcher is resolvable, and that
skip was a lone boot Warning — a node with no self-heal path at all went on
reporting itself perfectly healthy forever.
Adds tri-state SiteHealthReport.StartupReconcilerActive (null = not reported,
i.e. the central self-report or a pre-row-73 site build; true = running;
false = booted without it), latched once at boot by the Host in both branches.
Additive proto field 29 (BoolValue, vendored C# regenerated via
docker/regen-proto.sh centralcontrol; csproj restored, verified empty diff).
The skip branch also raises its log to Error — no configuration makes the
fetcher legitimately absent on a site node — and writes a best-effort
deployment/Error site event so the evidence outlives the boot log.
Central treatment: a "No self-heal" WARNING badge on the site tile, not a
failure. Config still reaches the node via LocalDb replication while it is up;
what it lost is recovery from a deploy that landed while it was down — degraded,
not offline. Only the explicit false is badged (badging null would light up the
whole fleet the moment central is upgraded ahead of the sites), and offline
sites are skipped, matching the replication-backlog badge.
Fail-before evidence: with the row-80 gate behaviourally reverted,
UnreplicatedSite_HealthReport_ReportsNullForBothLocalDbFields fails
"Expected: null / Actual: False" and 3 of the 8 new reporter unit tests fail.
Tests: HealthMonitoring 128, Host 518, CentralUI 1051, Communication 717,
Commons 715, SiteEventLogging 81 — all green.
Six sleeps across four test files stood in for an observable edge. Each preceded an
ABSENCE assertion (or "settled" before one), so they failed toward false-pass rather than
flake: the assertion could not distinguish "the mechanism ran and correctly stayed quiet"
from "the mechanism had not run yet".
ScriptDeadlineAtEnqueueTests (two sleeps, the worst offender)
- :105 Thread.Sleep(2s) — now two explicit edges: the run must be observably QUEUED
(scheduler.QueueDepth >= 1, never checked before), then the wait polls until the 1 s
budget has elapsed, bailing early if the run leaves the queue, and asserts it is STILL
queued afterwards. The test now proves the design claim it was named for — queue wait
burns the run's budget — instead of assuming it.
- :128 Thread.Sleep(2s) + Assert.Equal(0, DetachedThreadCount) — replaced by a positive
control: a second script that genuinely wedges a worker, on the same scheduler, same
1 s timeout + 1 s grace, armed strictly later. Its stuck report is the edge; once it
lands, every watchdog armed at or before it has provably finished its grace delay. The
absence is then asserted per script name, and the detach counter is pinned at 1 (the
wedged run) rather than 0 — which a counter that never moves also satisfied.
DeploymentWarmThenGateTests (:117 plus two sibling Task.Delay(500) startup waits)
- The manager calls SetInstanceCounts unconditionally when its startup config load
completes, so a report counter on the test collector is the startup edge. The
empty-site zero is now the manager's own observation instead of an untouched field.
SiteAlarmLiveCacheServiceTests (:195, :216)
- Both sampled IsLive once after a fixed sleep. Now they poll continuously across three
linger windows on a new teardown observable (the mock client counts subscription
cancellations), so a stop at any instant inside the window is caught, and each closes
with a positive control proving that counter moves.
DataConnectionActorTests (:435)
- A Task.Delay(200) "settle" after an AwaitCondition on a connect counter. The counter
only proves ConnectAsync was CALLED; the actor is still Connecting until it processes
the piped result. Now waits for the Connected health publication that BecomeConnected
emits, so the subscribe under test provably runs against Connected rather than being
silently stashed. (The stash path keeps its own coverage in
WP6_ConnectingState_StashesSubscribeRequests.)
Negative controls (product broken in the working tree, old vs new test compared):
- Stuck-script watchdog disabled entirely: OLD test passed 2/2, NEW test failed. The
whole watchdog could be deleted and the old assertions were satisfied.
- Startup reporting a phantom instance count and taking longer than 500 ms: OLD passed
2/2, NEW failed (expected 0, actual 1).
- Linger cancellation disabled + the remaining-viewer guard dropped, so the stream is
torn down under a live viewer while IsLive keeps reporting true:
Resubscribe_Within_Linger OLD passed 2/2, NEW failed. (Last_Viewer_Leaving caught this
particular break in the old form too, via a later assertion — its strengthening is the
teardown observable and the positive control, not a false-pass fix.)
- DataConnectionActorTests :435 has no false-pass demo: the sleep guarded no assertion
there, and the change is determinism plus proving the claimed state.
Also fixes a latent race these timing changes exposed in
InstanceActorChildAttributeRaceTests: it resolved child actors single-shot immediately
after construction, but ResolveOne throws until the child's cell is published on the
parent AND the cell's Actor property stays null until the child's constructor has run on
its own mailbox thread. Neither is ordered against the test thread, so it failed both ways
under full-suite load (~1 run in 6 once the sleeps above stopped padding the schedule;
14/14 green on the unmodified tree, so it was latent, not new). Resolution now retries to
a bounded deadline; the assertion is unchanged.
Verification: SiteRuntime.Tests 8/8 green (605 tests), Communication.Tests 3/3 (717),
DataConnectionLayer.Tests 3/3 (319). Test-only change — no src/ modifications.
An external system's MaxRetries/RetryDelay existed on the central entity but never
reached a site and had no management surface, so every ExternalSystem.CachedCall
buffered with the S&F engine default (DefaultMaxRetries 50 x DefaultRetryInterval
30s ~= 25 min to park) whatever central had configured. The sibling
DatabaseConnectionArtifact had always carried its equivalents.
The consumption end was already wired: ExternalSystemClient.CachedCallAsync already
read system.MaxRetries/RetryDelay and passed them to EnqueueAsync with the 0-as-unset
convention. Only the transport and persistence were missing.
Commons
- ExternalSystemArtifact gains MaxRetries/RetryDelay as optional positional params
(0 / TimeSpan.Zero = unset), matching DatabaseConnectionArtifact rather than going
nullable, so it maps 1:1 onto the entity and the proto3 scalars.
- Create/UpdateExternalSystemCommand gain nullable MaxRetries/RetryDelay, following
the existing TimeoutSeconds "omit to preserve" convention. Both additive.
Central
- ManagementActor create maps both; update preserves-if-null.
- ArtifactDeploymentService projects them onto the artifact.
Wire
- site_command.proto ExternalSystemArtifactDto gains max_retries=7 /
retry_delay=8 (google.protobuf.Duration), mirroring DatabaseConnectionArtifactDto.
Additive: a pre-existing site decodes them as 0/absent, which IS the unset value,
so old behaviour is preserved. Vendored C# regenerated via docker/regen-proto.sh
sitecommand; csproj Protobuf item re-commented, no message types added or removed.
Site
- external_systems gains max_retries / retry_delay_ms via AddColumnIfMissing,
DEFAULT 0 = unset. Storage upsert, repository SELECT/mapping (new ordinals 6/7
appended so existing ones are untouched), apply path, and the legacy migrator's
explicit column list all carry them.
Replicated-table decision: external_systems IS in SiteLocalDbSetup.ReplicatedTables,
so this was checked against the AckTime/native_alarm_state precedent. Real columns
are correct here, not a JSON bag: the table has no general-purpose config column
(auth_configuration and method_definitions are both semantically specific),
timeout_seconds already set the additive-column precedent on this exact table, and
sibling database_connections stores the same two values as plain columns. Verified in
LocalDb source that RegisterReplicated re-reads PRAGMA table_info every boot and its
install script is DROP-then-CREATE, so capture triggers rebuild over the new column
set automatically, and SiteStorageSchema.Apply runs before registration on the same
boot. The only cost is the ReplicatedTable.ComputeDigest change, which the sync
handshake compares fail-closed - a mixed-version pair refuses to sync loudly instead
of diverging silently. Both-nodes-together is already the standing site-pair rule, so
no new operational constraint; recorded in topology-guide.md.
Also fixed: ArtifactDiff.CompareExternalSystem never compared MaxRetries/RetryDelay,
so a bundle import that changed a system's retry budget previewed as "Identical" -
harmless while the values were inert, a live behaviour change now.
No EF migration: the central ExternalSystemDefinitions columns already exist
(InitialSchema). Central UI already had both form fields.
Tests: site storage round-trip + unset-default, site apply path, central artifact
projection, proto round-trip (via the shared sample), management create/preserve,
CLI option parse + alias, and diff reporting. Fail-before verified on the two core
tests (expected 7 got 0 on the read path; expected 9 got 0 on the apply path).
Docs: Component-ExternalSystemGateway, Component-StoreAndForward, Component-CLI,
components/StoreAndForward, components/SiteRuntime, deployment/topology-guide,
CLI README (which was also missing --timeout-seconds entirely).
scadabridge_site_connection_up never counted data connections. It counts open
central->site gRPC subscriber streams (Debug View + the site-wide alarm feed),
so it correctly reads 0 on a healthy site nobody is watching — and the name
invited reading it as device health. That misreading has already cost a live
debugging session: register row 48's 'connection_up is 0 on all six site
nodes' was healthy steady state, not the fault it was diagnosed as.
Two halves, per the row:
RENAME. scadabridge.site.connection.up -> scadabridge.site.stream.subscribers.active
(helpers SiteConnectionOpened/Closed -> SiteStreamSubscriberOpened/Closed), and
the instrument gains the unit:"1" the other gauges already carried. Every
reference updated: the gRPC server, both test suites, Component-Communication.md,
components/Commons.md, docker/README.md and docker/seed-live-probe.sh. A test
now pins the new name AND asserts the old one is gone, so it cannot creep back.
NEW. scadabridge.site.data_connections.connected / .total — the first exported
data-connection signal (the state existed on the health report and in the CLI,
but never as a metric). connected < total is the alert condition; neither
number alone separates 'a device is down' from 'nothing is configured', which
is why the denominator ships with the numerator.
Sourcing is deliberate on two counts. It is fed by the DCL at its four state
transitions rather than derived from the health report, so the metric survives
a dead report pipeline — the exact failure the 'metrics stale' flag exists to
catch, and a derived gauge would go blind at the same moment. And it uses a
static registry reached through ScadaBridgeTelemetry (the SiteConnectionOpened
precedent) rather than a DI-injected holder: the DCL actors already take
ISiteHealthCollector through their constructors, and threading a second
dependency through both would ripple into every test that builds them. It also
keeps SiteHealthCollector untouched, which matters right now — another agent is
concurrently editing that file for the tag-resolution path.
Removal is wired too: an undeployed connection leaves the registry, so it stops
counting toward the total instead of latching connected < total on forever.
Both gauges read 0 on the standby (connections open on the active node only) —
healthy, documented, and called out in the docs so it does not become the next
site_connection_up.
No ObservedMeters allowlist change: all three instruments ride the existing
ZB.MOM.WW.ScadaBridge meter. (An unlisted meter exports nothing, silently.)
Tests: Commons 711 passed (9 new, delta-based against a baseline with unique
per-test connection names, so they do not inherit the register row 32
QueueDepthGaugeTests static-state flake); Communication 717; DCL 319.
Root-caused from a full-suite-load-only failure of
GrpcStreamIntegrationTests.Pipeline_DuplicateCorrelationId_ReplacesStream:
ObjectDisposedException escaping SubscribeInstance.
SubscribeInstance's duplicate-prevention path cancelled AND disposed the
replaced stream's CancellationTokenSource. That CTS belongs to the replaced
handler's own `using var streamCts`, which is still running and still has to
read `streamCts.Token` — the Dispose raced that read. The race is pre-existing
and independent of R2: the same Dispose sat against the same first-token-read
when the handler still used `ReadAllAsync(streamCts.Token)`; it only ever
loses under enough scheduling pressure to land the replacement inside the
first stream's setup window.
Cancel only. The owning handler's `using` still disposes it exactly once on
every exit path, and cancellation is all replacement ever needed. The Cancel
is wrapped for the converse race (owner already finished and disposed),
mirroring CancelAllStreams().
Regression test makes the race deterministic by gating the first stream inside
its setup window — the _activeStreams entry is registered before Subscribe is
called, so the replacement always lands before the first stream reads its
token. Verified fail-before (ObjectDisposedException) / pass-after by
reinstating the Dispose as a negative control.
Every AttributeValueChanged/AlarmStateChanged rode its own gRPC message on
SiteStreamService; at target scale that is ~37.5k messages/s/site of pure
framing overhead. Coalesce them, additively, with no new RPC.
Wire (sitestream.proto, regenerated via docker/regen-proto.sh sitestream):
InstanceStreamRequest.batching_supported = 3
SiteStreamRequest.batching_supported = 2
SiteStreamEvent.batch = 4 (new oneof case)
SiteStreamEventBatch { repeated SiteStreamEvent events = 1 }
The proto3 default of batching_supported IS the negotiation, and it is
load-bearing: a batch frame reaches a pre-R2 central as EventOneofCase.None,
whose ConvertToDomainEvent returns null — the whole batch would vanish with
no error anywhere. An old central cannot set the flag so it never receives
one; an old site ignores the unknown request field and keeps sending
per-event frames, which the new client's ForEachEvent handles as the
single-event case. Both skew directions are covered by tests that go through
a real proto serialize/parse round-trip.
Server: SiteStreamEventBatcher, a per-subscriber pump replacing the handler's
await-foreach/WriteAsync loop and byte-identical to it at a cap of 1. It
never delays a lone event — it drains the already-queued backlog for free and
lingers only once a backlog is proven — emits a single-event buffer as a
plain frame, preserves order and per-event Timestamps exactly, and flushes
what is buffered when the send channel's writer completes. It sits DOWNSTREAM
of StreamRelayActor's bounded DropOldest channel, so it changes framing only
and does not move the burst ceiling (deferred register row 31, which lives in
the shared publish stage upstream of the BroadcastHub).
Client: sets the flag on both subscriptions and unpacks in order into the
existing per-event pipeline, so SiteAlarmAggregatorActor,
DebugStreamBridgeActor, consumer-keepalive/orphan logic,
reconnect-on-graceful-completion, generation fencing, the (siteId, endpoint)
factory key and IsLive semantics are untouched.
Options (validated): GrpcStreamBatchMaxEvents 100 (1 disables),
GrpcStreamBatchWindow 25 ms — validated strictly under 250 ms, the load
test's end-to-end P99 threshold. Measured worst case (trickle-with-backlog,
window-bound rather than cap-bound): P50 13.8 ms, P99 25.4 ms, max 25.8 ms;
cap-bound case sent 600 queued events in 6 frames.
Telemetry: histogram scadabridge.site.stream.batch_size tagged by stream
kind, recorded only on negotiated streams (per-event otherwise). It rides
ScadaBridgeTelemetry.MeterName, already in the ObservedMeters allowlist.
Docs: Component-Communication.md gains an Event Batching section; CLAUDE.md's
gRPC streaming bullet records the wire shape and the negotiation rationale.
Deferred flake-pattern sweep of tests/ for the class fixed in c4caebe9 and
cfa6acbf — a bounded wait on observable A followed by a bare assert on an
observable B that the product only reaches strictly after A. Three clear
instances, each reproduced deterministically by delaying only the later step
and each re-verified green with that same delay still injected.
AlarmOnTriggerRuns_ShedAtTheSameCap_WithAnAlarmScopedSiteEvent gated on the
rate-limited shed site event and then asserted the shed COUNT bare.
AlarmActor.ShedAlarmRun increments the counter and only then emits the event,
and the event fires on the first shed only — so the gate observed Flap(4)'s
shed and ordered nothing with respect to Flap(5)'s, which is a separate
mailbox message with no observable of its own (an alarm on-trigger run has no
Ask caller to reply to, unlike ScriptActor.ShedRun, whose sibling test is
correctly ordered by its ScriptCallResult and is left alone). Deferring
Flap(5) by 2 s failed it with "Expected: 2 / Actual: 1". The count is now
ACCUMULATED across polls rather than re-read, because
SiteHealthCollector.CollectReport DRAINS the interval counters — a poll loop
that simply re-read it would consume the first shed and never reach 2.
EndToEnd_GrpcStubError_RowStays_Pending_NextTick_Succeeds gated on the
central row arriving and then asserted bare that the site SQLite row had left
Pending. SiteAuditTelemetryActor pushes via IngestAuditEventsAsync (which is
what writes the central row) and calls MarkForwardedAsync only after parsing
the ack. Delaying just that post-push step failed it with
"Assert.DoesNotContain() Failure: Filter matched in collection".
PreSnapshotBuffer_IsCapped_DropsOldest_AndCountsTheDrops gated on
"Count >= cap" and then asserted "Count == cap + 1" bare — a gate strictly
weaker than the assertion it guards, so it ordered nothing with respect to
the last event of a FlushBuffer loop that delivers one at a time. Parking
that loop after its 19,999th delivery failed it with
"Expected: 20001 / Actual: 20000".
Also hardens GrpcCentralTransportTests.WaitUntil, which returned silently on
timeout; today's single caller re-asserts immediately, so this only sharpens
the message rather than fixing a live flake.
Cleared with evidence, not guessed: SiteAlarmLiveCacheService's LingerStop
removes the site entry inside one lock, so IsLive and GetCurrentAlarms flip
atomically; and SiteReconciliationActor walks response.Gap with a sequential
foreach in which the asserted "Gone" log precedes the awaited "Good" row, the
inverse of this class.
Test-only; every ordering named above is correct as written.
F1 (HIGH) DebugStreamBridgeActor: the 5-minute orphan net measured the MAILBOX
(SetReceiveTimeout), and once stream events were correctly marked
INotInfluenceReceiveTimeout nothing recurring reset it — the snapshot lands once
and GrpcStreamStable once — so every healthy session self-terminated at ~6 min
with a false "Site disconnected". Replaced with a periodic self-tick
(ConsumerLivenessCheckInterval, 30s) over a consumer-last-seen stamp renewed only
by DebugStreamConsumerAlive, which DebugStreamService Tells on a shared timer to
every session still in its registry (holding a session there IS "a consumer is
attached" — both the Blazor view and the SignalR hub release it on
dispose/disconnect, and it works headless). Reverting the wrapper was rejected: it
would restore the quiet-instance orphan bug.
F2 (MED) SiteStreamGrpcClient: the RpcException(Cancelled) filter now requires
cts.IsCancellationRequested. A peer-originated / channel-dispose Cancelled fired
none of onError/onCompleted/onConnected, leaving SiteAlarmAggregatorActor with
_streamDown=false forever (IsLive stuck true, reconcile reopen guard never fired).
F3 (MED) SiteStreamGrpcClient: a header TIMEOUT is no longer reported as
connected — that shape is exactly what an unreachable site produces, and it
cleared _streamDown, consumed _seedOnConnect and launched a full snapshot fan-out
at a dead site. AwaitHeadersAsync returns bool; the first received event is the
fallback connected signal, fired at most once from headers OR first event.
F4 (LOW-MED) SqliteAuditWriter.MarkReconciledUpToAsync: the blanket below-cursor
UPDATE retired late-stamped inserts that were never served (then age-purged —
silent loss). The flip is now bounded by insertion order: a Pending row retires
only if its rowid is at or below the high-water mark of rows this instance has
served from ReadPendingSinceAsync (clamped on purge, since SQLite reuses rowids);
Forwarded rows are exempt (central ACKed them over the push path). At-least-once
is unchanged.
F5 (LOW) Documented the liveness dependency (a served row never covered by a later
cursor stays Pending forever; PurgeExpiredAsync never purges Pending) in
ISiteAuditQueue + Component-AuditLog.md, and added a cheap site-health signal:
SiteAuditBacklogReporter logs a rate-limited warning when the existing
oldest-pending metric exceeds 24h.
F6 (MED) SiteAlarmAggregatorActor: _fanoutSinceLastTick was armed by the
reconcile's OWN fan-out, so steady state ran fan-out→skip→fan-out→skip — one
reconcile per 2x interval (120s), halving the not-reporting refresh and the alarm
reconcile backstop. The skip is now armed only by connect/failover-driven seeds
(initial, _seedOnConnect, and a re-seed queued behind one).
Tests: Communication.Tests 691 passed (+13), AuditLog.Tests 382 passed (+5).
MES alarm-status API §6.4 (docs/plans/2026-06-30-mes-alarm-status-api.md,
Phase 1 task 1). MES needs a real AckDT for a triggered alarm, and the mirror
carried acked-vs-unacked but never WHEN. AckTime now rides the whole path:
DCL transition -> AlarmStateChanged -> gRPC AlarmStateUpdate -> site SQLite.
Stamping rule, identical on both protocols: non-null ONLY while the condition
is active AND acknowledged. That single predicate yields all three required
behaviours -- null while unacked, cleared on re-raise (a re-raise arrives
unacknowledged), and no phantom ack on a return-to-normal. The last one is
load-bearing for MxGateway, which maps INACTIVE to Acknowledged = true; without
the active check every clear would claim an ack the system never observed.
Provenance is honest, never fabricated:
- OPC UA A&C supplies a TRUE ack instant, so we now select it:
AcknowledgeableConditionType/AckedState/TransitionTime at SelectClause
index 18, APPENDED so the positional reads at 0-17 keep their meaning.
Servers that omit the field fall back to the event's own Time.
- MxAccess Gateway supplies none, so the ack transition's own timestamp is
used -- accurate to when the system SAW the ack. An ACTIVE_ACKED
re-subscribe snapshot restores one from LastTransitionTimestamp rather
than dropping it.
The decision lives in pure mappers (Opc/Mx AlarmMapper.DeriveAckTime), so it is
unit-tested with no live server or gateway.
Additive-only throughout: init-only property on AlarmStateChanged, trailing
optional positional on NativeAlarmTransition (all 14-arg call sites untouched),
proto field 24 (never reusing a number) regenerated via docker/regen-proto.sh
sitestream with the csproj diff verified empty.
Persistence rides native_alarm_state's existing metadata_json blob rather than
a new column -- deliberately. That table is RegisterReplicated in
SiteLocalDbSetup and LocalDb builds its CDC triggers from the column list at
registration time, so an additive JSON property changes no schema, no triggers
and no replication contract; metadata_json is exactly the extension point UA4
introduced for this. Rows written before the field deserialize it as null.
Tests: 4 OPC UA + 6 MxGateway mapper cases, 3 NativeAlarmActor (emit,
failover rehydrate, pre-AckTime row), 1 proto round-trip incl. the null case,
4 Commons additive/back-compat. The OPC UA SelectClause count lock-in moves
18 -> 19 with an index-18 assertion -- intended, the clause is appended, which
is precisely what that guard exists to make visible.
Phase 4 of the ClusterClient -> gRPC migration deleted the Akka transports
but left the naming behind: `ClusterClientSiteAuditClient` was transport-
agnostic and worked unchanged, so it survived the deletion under a name
that now describes a transport the repo no longer has. Same for a scatter
of doc-comments still framing gRPC as "the new transport" beside an Akka
one that is gone.
Renames it to `SiteCommunicationAuditClient` (and its test file) and
rewrites the stale comments to describe the single transport that exists.
Also tightens CLAUDE.md: drops the self-describing directory listing and
the 27-component enumeration in favour of the non-obvious parts only.
Behaviour-neutral: names and prose only. Recorded as the Phase 4
follow-up in docs/plans/2026-07-22-clusterclient-to-grpc-plan.md.
'Pattern 4: Integration Routing' — RouteIntegrationCallAsync →
SiteEnvelope(IntegrationCallRequest) → SiteCommunicationActor integration
handler — was plumbed end to end but connected at neither end: no
producer (zero callers) and no handler (AkkaHostedService never
registered LocalHandlerType.Integration). It was an early scaffold the
architecture routed around — the brokered External→Central→Site→Central
round-trip is served by the Inbound API's routed-site-script path (the
RouteTo* verbs, driven from CommunicationServiceInstanceRouter), which is
live, tested, and shares IntegrationTimeout.
Decision (#32): delete. Removed the IntegrationCall{Request,Response}
messages, RouteIntegrationCallAsync, the SiteCommunicationActor receive
block + _integrationHandler field + LocalHandlerType.Integration, and the
four tests that covered them (2 actor, 2 message-contract, 1 dispatcher-
reject, 1 mapper-reject). KEPT IntegrationTimeout — it is the live
timeout for the RouteTo* verbs. Updated the exclusion-narrative comments
(proto/mapper/dispatcher), design §4, the components doc timeout table,
and marked the known-issue RESOLVED.
Full solution build clean (0/0); Communication 634 + Host 421 green.
Net -172/+20 across 14 files. Not in the gRPC proto (was deliberately
excluded there), so no wire-format change.
ClusterClient→gRPC migration Phase 4 (docs/plans/2026-07-22-clusterclient-to-grpc-plan.md).
Phases 2/3 proved both directions on gRPC; this removes the Akka transport underneath.
Deleted:
- AkkaCentralTransport, AkkaSiteTransport (+ their dedicated tests)
- ISiteClientFactory + DefaultSiteClientFactory; CentralCommunicationActor legacy
ctor + SelectTransport (Host now builds GrpcSiteTransport and injects it)
- ClusterClient creation + both ClusterClientReceptionist.RegisterService calls in
AkkaHostedService; the RegisterCentralClient message + receive block
- CommunicationOptions.CentralContactPoints; the CentralTransport/SiteTransport
coexistence flags; the CentralTransportMode/SiteTransportKind enums
gRPC is now the only site↔central transport (site→central CentralControlService via
GrpcCentralTransport; central→site SiteCommandService via GrpcSiteTransport), both
built unconditionally by the Host. NoOpCentralTransport is the fail-loud null-default
so TestKit command-dispatch suites still construct the site actor without a wired
transport; production always injects GrpcCentralTransport.
Config: CentralGrpcEndpoints is now unconditional — CommunicationOptionsValidator
rejects blank entries (role-agnostic), and StartupValidator requires a Site node to
list >=1 endpoint (fail-fast, mirrors GrpcPsk). Rig configs moved
CentralContactPoints -> CentralGrpcEndpoints (docker x6, docker-env2 x2, Host default,
deploy/wonder-app-vd03). Kept Akka.Cluster.Tools (ClusterSingleton still used).
Tests: build 0/0; Communication.Tests 640, Host.Tests 421 green. Removed the
ClusterClient.Send per-site-routing tests (covered by the transport suites), swapped
the ISiteClientFactory-based ctors to a substitute ISiteCommandTransport, converted
the audit-push integration relay to an in-process bridge transport.
Docs: Component-Communication/Host/StoreAndForward, components/Communication,
topology-guide, grpc_streams (SUPERSEDED note), the frame-size known-issue (retired
amendment), and CLAUDE.md transport decisions.
Not included: the dead IntegrationCallRequest path (#32) is a separate user-owned
behavioral decision — SiteEnvelope routing is transport-agnostic so it still compiles.
Extract the central→site send path in CentralCommunicationActor behind a new
ISiteCommandTransport, selected by ScadaBridge:Communication:SiteTransport
(Akka | Grpc, default Akka — rollback = flip the flag). CommunicationService's
27 commands, SiteCallAuditActor's 2 parked relays and DebugStreamBridgeActor's
subscribe/unsubscribe are untouched; the seam sits below SiteEnvelope.
- AkkaSiteTransport: today's per-site ClusterClient path extracted verbatim
(the _siteClients lookup + ClusterClient.Send with the reply-to sender
preserved, and the "no client ⇒ warn + drop, caller's Ask times out" path).
- GrpcSiteTransport: dials the site SiteCommandService (T1B.1 proto client) via
SiteCommandDtoMapper, PSK + x-scadabridge-site on the channel through
ControlPlaneCredentials, per-command deadlines set EQUAL to today's
CommunicationService Ask timeouts (per-command, not per-group: DeploymentState
query and TriggerSiteFailover use QueryTimeout; the two parked relays map to
QueryTimeout so SiteCallAudit's inner RelayTimeout 10s < 30s ordering holds;
WaitForAttribute keeps its dynamic Timeout + IntegrationTimeout).
- SitePairChannelProvider: per-site A/B channel pair with sticky failover
(flip only on Unavailable — NEVER on DeadlineExceeded, a write/deploy/failover
may have run), background failback probe to the preferred node with 1s→60s
doubling backoff, PSK invalidation on site removal. Fed by the SAME DB refresh
loop (extended to carry GrpcNodeA/GrpcNodeBAddress) — no second poll.
Tests: actor-with-substitute-transport (routing, Ask-reply plumbing, per-site
lifecycle across refreshes), ResolveDeadline pinned to each command's current
Ask timeout, and GrpcSiteTransport/SitePairChannelProvider over dual in-process
TestServers (PSK+header+deadline attached, Unavailable failover + stickiness,
failback to preferred, no-retry-on-DeadlineExceeded). Proto csproj untouched
(no active <Protobuf> item). Full solution builds 0 warnings; Communication.Tests
607 green with Akka default.
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.
Introduce ICentralTransport as the site->central choke point inside
SiteCommunicationActor. The seven site->central sends (notification submit/
status, audit + cached-telemetry ingest, reconcile, health, heartbeat) now
delegate to an injected transport instead of owning ClusterClient.Send inline.
- AkkaCentralTransport: verbatim extraction of today's ClusterClient.Send path,
including the exact sender-forwarding that routes central's reply straight
back to the waiting Ask. Default when no transport is injected -> behaviour
unchanged, existing SiteCommunicationActorTests pass as-is.
- GrpcCentralTransport + CentralChannelProvider: dial CentralControlService with
sticky failover + background failback (1s-doubling-cap-60s), PSK +
x-scadabridge-site via ControlPlaneCredentials, per-call deadlines mirroring
today's Ask timeouts. Cross-node retry ONLY on provably-unsent
connect failures; never on DeadlineExceeded. Heartbeat stays fire-and-forget.
- StaticSitePskProvider: site's single own-key provider (fail-closed).
- CommunicationOptions: CentralTransport flag (default Akka) + CentralGrpcEndpoints
(validator: required when transport=Grpc). Host selects the impl; the
ClusterClient is created only on the Akka path.
Tests: actor-with-fake-transport (7 delegations + fault routing + heartbeat
no-fault), AkkaCentralTransport sender-forwarding, GrpcCentralTransport over
in-process TestServer (failover flip, sticky, failback, PSK+header, deadline,
no-retry-on-deadline), validator. Communication.Tests 371 green, Host.Tests 391
green; the three above-seam suites pass unmodified.
Central now ALSO listens for the seven site→central control messages over
gRPC, alongside the existing ClusterClient path. Nothing flips to gRPC yet —
sites keep CentralTransport=Akka (T1A.3's job); central simply starts also
accepting.
- CentralControlGrpcService (Communication.Grpc): decodes each RPC onto the
SAME in-process message the ClusterClient path carries, Asks the existing
CentralCommunicationActor (zero handler-logic changes), encodes the reply via
the T1A.1 mapper. Readiness-gated like SiteStreamGrpcServer.SetReady —
Unavailable until AkkaHostedService hands the actor over. Heartbeat stays
fire-and-forget (Tell, always-OK, never gated on readiness). Ingest reuses the
shared SiteStreamGrpcServer.AuditIngestAskTimeout constant. Fault→status
mapping is retry-aware: Unavailable (never dispatched, safe to cross-node
retry) vs DeadlineExceeded/Internal (it ran, do not re-send elsewhere).
- CentralControlAuthInterceptor (Host): a SEPARATE interceptor class, not a
variant constructor on ControlPlaneAuthInterceptor. Central's model is per-site
(verify the Bearer token against the key for the site in the required
x-scadabridge-site header, via ISitePskProvider) where a site verifies its one
own-key — a genuinely different model. Fail-closed on every branch: missing or
blank header, unresolvable key, and mismatched token all → PermissionDenied,
never pass-through. One public constructor only (the explicit-prefix ctor is
internal), pinned by a reflection test — a second public ctor makes
Grpc.AspNetCore's GetFactory() throw per-call and silently disables the gate.
- Explicit Kestrel h2c listener on new option ScadaBridge:Node:CentralGrpcPort
(default 8083, symmetric with sites), mirroring the Site branch. Additive to
central's :5000 HTTP/1 surface, which is untouched — gRPC does NOT go through
Traefik (HTTP/1 only). Registered by type on AddGrpc; service mapped with
MapGrpcService. Port range-validated by NodeOptionsValidator.
- Rig: publish the central gRPC port 9013:8083 / 9014:8083 on both central nodes
so a later task can exercise it.
Tests: CentralControlEndToEndTests (Host.Tests, TestServer + real interceptor +
real service over a stub actor) proves auth positives/negatives are
distinguishable and covers unary + the ingest bridge shapes; the interceptor is
registered BY TYPE, never in DI. CentralControlAuthInterceptorTests pins the
per-site gate + one-public-ctor invariant. CentralControlGrpcServiceTests
(Communication.Tests, TestKit) covers the readiness gate, fire-and-forget
heartbeat, and the DeadlineExceeded-vs-Unavailable status mapping. No active
<Protobuf> item. Communication.Tests (356) + Host.Tests (384) green.
Phase 1A of the ClusterClient→gRPC migration needs a wire contract for the
seven messages SiteCommunicationActor forwards to /user/central-communication.
This lands the contract and its mapper only — hosting (T1A.2) and the site-side
transport seam (T1A.3) follow.
`Protos/central_control.proto` (package scadabridge.centralcontrol.v1, service
CentralControlService) declares SubmitNotification, QueryNotificationStatus,
IngestAuditEvents, IngestCachedTelemetry, ReconcileSite, ReportSiteHealth and
Heartbeat. Note the direction is the inverse of SiteStreamService: here the site
dials and central serves.
Decisions worth recording:
- The two ingest RPCs IMPORT sitestream.proto and reuse AuditEventBatch /
CachedTelemetryBatch / IngestAck rather than redeclaring them. The site
telemetry actor already builds those messages, so a second copy would fork one
wire contract into two kept in lockstep by hand. ForwardState / IngestedAtUtc
stay off-wire exactly as they are today.
- Heartbeat replies google.protobuf.Empty — it is fire-and-forget and must never
surface a fault onto the heartbeat timer path.
- The three NULLABLE SiteHealthReport collections travel inside single-field
wrapper messages (ConnectionEndpointMapDto / TagQualityMapDto /
NodeStatusListDto). proto3 cannot express presence on repeated/map fields, but
null and empty genuinely differ here — SiteHealthCollector emits
`ClusterNodes: _clusterNodes?.ToList()` and the central health surface reads
null as "not reported", not as "reported empty". Same reasoning drives the
BoolValue/Int64Value/DoubleValue wrappers on LocalDbReplicationConnected,
LocalDbOplogBacklog and the two age gauges, whose docs are explicit that null
is not zero/false.
- ConnectionHealthEnum reserves 0 for UNSPECIFIED instead of mapping Connected
onto it, and the decoder resolves anything unknown to ConnectionHealth.Error.
An unrecognised connection state must not render as "healthy".
- Guid? execution ids travel as "D" strings with empty meaning null; a malformed
non-empty value throws rather than being laundered into "no correlation".
- DateTimeOffset normalizes to a UTC instant (a protobuf Timestamp has no
offset). Lossless in practice — every producer stamps UTC — and documented +
asserted rather than left implicit.
SiteCallDtoMapper gains a ToDto(SiteCall) overload. Its doc comment previously
asserted such a method "would be dead code"; that held only while ClusterClient
was the sole path from IngestCachedTelemetryCommand (which carries SiteCall, not
SiteCallOperational) to central. Comment corrected alongside.
Golden tests round-trip every message through a real protobuf encode/decode —
DTO → proto → bytes → proto → DTO — with a fully-populated case and a
null/empty/minimal case for every optional member. Verified to have teeth by
mutation: dropping a scalar, collapsing an empty nullable collection to absent,
and nulling a gauge each fail a test.
Codegen stays CHECKED IN under CentralControlGrpc/ (protoc segfaults in the
linux_arm64 Docker image); no active <Protobuf> item is committed.
docker/regen-proto.sh is generalized to `regen-proto.sh [sitestream|
centralcontrol|all]` — it now injects the ItemGroup rather than unwrapping a
comment, so it no longer depends on there being exactly one Protobuf line, and
it restores the csproj verbatim on every exit path.
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.
Central and each site are SEPARATE Akka clusters, so central cannot act on a
site's membership -- it asks. New TriggerSiteFailover/SiteFailoverAck contract
travels the existing ClusterClient command/control channel (mirroring the
RetryParkedOperation relay); the site's own SiteCommunicationActor performs the
graceful Leave and acks the outcome.
- ClusterFailoverCoordinator moved out of Host into Communication/ClusterState,
beside ActiveNodeEvaluator. Both paths now share ONE oldest-Up implementation;
SiteCommunicationActor cannot reference Host, and the two definitions must not
drift or the node asked to leave stops being the singleton host.
- Site scope is the SITE-SPECIFIC role (site-{SiteId}), not the base Site role --
site singletons are placed on the former, so the base role would move the wrong
node. Pinned by a unit test asserting the role string and by a real-cluster test.
- Site-side guards: refuses a command addressed to another site (a misroute must
never fail over a site the operator did not select), refuses when there is no
peer, and reports a fault as an ack rather than throwing into supervision --
a restart there would drop central's Ask into a bare timeout and lose the reason.
- Ack is sent before the Leave takes effect so it still reaches central.
- UI: the same control now serves both scopes via a SiteId parameter. The site
confirmation deliberately does NOT claim the admin's page will disconnect --
it won't, and crying wolf there devalues the central warning that is real. A
site refusal and an unreachable site surface distinctly.
- Rolling upgrade: a site on an older binary has no handler, so the message
dead-letters and the Ask times out, reported as "site did not respond". That
is the honest outcome; documented on the contract.
Fallout fixed: HealthPageTests now renders the page inside
CascadingAuthenticationState with the real policy set and IAuthorizationService,
because the cards embed an AuthorizeView. That mirrors production, where the
layout supplies the cascading value.
Extend CommunicationOptionsValidator with eager bounds for the four T4
live-alarm-cache options (linger >= 0, reconcile > 0, seed concurrency 1..64,
subscribers-per-site >= 1). Enforce the per-site viewer cap fail-safe in
SiteAlarmLiveCacheService.Subscribe (reject excess viewers with a no-op
disposable rather than growing the list or throwing into the Blazor render
path). Surface two telemetry instruments on the existing ScadaBridgeTelemetry
meter: an active-aggregator observable gauge and a reconnect counter, wired from
the aggregator actor's PreStart/PostStop and its NodeA<->NodeB flip /
reconcile-driven reopen.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MtdgwpEeCUn6cUA5f1LMPj
Adds the active-central-node, in-memory, reference-counted per-site live alarm
cache backing the operator Alarm Summary page. No persisted central alarm store
([PERM]) — no EF entity/table/migration/DbSet.
- ISiteAlarmLiveCache (new): singleton seam — Subscribe(siteId, onChanged) ->
IDisposable (ref-counted, linger stop on last-out), GetCurrentAlarms, IsLive.
- SiteAlarmAggregatorActor (new): one per site. Seed-then-stream ordering copied
from DebugStreamBridgeActor — open the site-wide alarm-only gRPC stream first,
buffer live deltas while the snapshot fan-out runs, flush with per-key dedup
(AlarmKey = InstanceUniqueName|AlarmName|SourceReference), then live pass-through
into an in-memory dict. Placeholder rows seeded from the snapshot and never
expected on the stream; a real-alarm delta (distinct key) never wipes them.
NodeA<->NodeB reconnect (retry budget + stability window), reconnect re-seeds,
periodic reconcile (authoritative clear-and-rebuild) corrects instance-set drift,
and a budget-exhausted stream self-heals on the next reconcile tick.
- SiteAlarmLiveCacheService (new): DI singleton facade — viewer reference-counting,
linger-delayed last-out stop (version + TryRemove(ref) race guards), the
snapshot fan-out seed (RequestDebugSnapshotAsync per Enabled instance, capped),
bounded start-retry self-heal on transient start failure, and the immutable
published-snapshot store the page reads. Cache mutated only on the actor thread;
viewer callbacks invoked outside the lock.
- CommunicationOptions: LiveAlarmCacheLinger (30s), LiveAlarmCacheReconcileInterval
(60s), LiveAlarmCacheSeedConcurrency (8), LiveAlarmCacheMaxSubscribersPerSite
(200). Task 6 formalizes eager validation + telemetry.
- DI registration + AkkaHostedService SetActorSystem wiring on the active central node.
- Tests: 14 actor (seed/stream ordering, dedup, native-alarm parity, placeholder
coherence, reconnect re-seed, reconcile replace, self-heal, stop) + 6 service
(shared start, linger stop, resubscribe cancels stop, idempotent dispose, unknown
site, transient-start self-heal). Code-reviewer pass: no persistence, no Critical;
both Important findings addressed.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MtdgwpEeCUn6cUA5f1LMPj
Add SiteStreamGrpcClient.SubscribeSiteAsync mirroring SubscribeAsync but for
the site-wide, alarm-only SubscribeSite RPC: builds a SiteStreamRequest, opens
the server stream, and delivers each event via a typed Action<AlarmStateChanged>
callback (this stream is alarm-only by contract, so Task 4's per-site cache
consumes an alarm delta with no downstream type test). Reuses the shared
enrichment mapping via a new internal ConvertToAlarmEvent helper that returns
null for any non-alarm event, defensively filtering anything that should never
appear on the stream. Factory unchanged - it already caches a client per
(site, endpoint). Adds focused unit tests for the alarm-only filter and the
test-only-client guard.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01MtdgwpEeCUn6cUA5f1LMPj
Joseph Doherty