Two-node keep-oldest could NEVER survive a crash of the oldest/active node:
Akka.NET 1.5.62 KeepOldest.OldestDecision only lets down-if-alone rescue a
side with >= 2 members, so the 1-vs-1 survivor takes DownReachable and downs
ITSELF — proven live on the rig ('SBR took decision ... including myself')
before this change. static-quorum(1) is worse (IsTooManyMembers -> DownAll);
keep-majority just re-keys the fatal crash to the lowest address.
SplitBrainResolverStrategy gains 'auto-down' (new default): BuildHocon emits
Akka's AutoDowning provider with auto-down-unreachable-after = StableAfter.
The leader among the REACHABLE members downs the unreachable peer, so the
survivor takes over singletons and /health/active in ~25s regardless of which
node died. Accepted trade (explicit owner decision): a real network partition
runs dual-active until an operator restarts one side. keep-oldest remains
supported; DownIfAlone validation is now scoped to it.
Live drill on the rebuilt rig: active-crash TAKEOVER in 28s (victim still
down; all 7 singletons Younger->Oldest), standby-crash removal 27s with 0
routing blips; victims rejoin as standby in 2s. New real-cluster tests pin
both directions (SbrFailoverTests.AutoDown_*); TwoNodeClusterFixture gains a
strategy knob. All 16 appsettings flipped (src, docker, docker-env2, and the
gitignored wonder-app-vd03 overlay on disk — owner must sync to the host).
Docs: decision record docs/plans/2026-07-21-auto-down-availability-decision.md,
Component-ClusterInfrastructure downing section rewritten, drill + README
reworked (active mode now asserts takeover), deferred-work SBR row resolved.
Rewritten from the plan's oldest-crash scenario: empirically, 2-node keep-oldest downs
the non-oldest partition, so a hard crash of the OLDEST makes the younger survivor down
itself (total cluster loss) — the survivable case is a crash of the younger node. The
member-removal assertion has teeth (impossible under the pre-fix NoDowning default).
See the test's XML doc for the active/oldest-node-crash gap.
Joseph Doherty