Family-wide docs correction (paired with scadaproj 6d222ea4). This plan's superseded
banner was right but its task body still read as if the watchdog were merely patched.
- Dated 2026-08-01 correction section (history preserved): the timer calling
Cluster.Join(SelfAddress) was implemented and REJECTED in both repos after live
testing — outside Akka's join handshake, it fires mid-join on a routine standby
restart (peer alive, join stalled behind stale-incarnation removal) and forms a
permanent second cluster at the same address. ScadaBridge measured a split unhealed
after 90s; Task 8 hit the same shape live here.
- The 'a booting node only self-forms when NO seed answers InitJoin' claim in the Task 2
doc comment is marked FALSE for the watchdog: that guarantee belongs to Akka's native
FirstSeedNodeProcess, which runs inside the handshake; the timer does not, and fires
while a seed is answering.
- Task 8's TCP reachability guard is recorded as an INTERIM patch, not the fix — the
race survived it, which is why the watchdog was deleted rather than patched.
- Shipped design restated: self-first seed ordering (AkkaClusterOptionsValidator +
SelfFirstSeedBootstrapTests) plus the opt-in, default-OFF bootstrap guard (d1dac87f).
Source re-verified 2026-08-01: the defective watchdog is NOT present in this repo — no
ClusterBootstrapFallback.cs, no SelfFormAfter option, no Cluster.Join(SelfAddress) in
src/. Documentation-only change; no code touched.
docs/Redundancy.md's bootstrap section is rewritten around the mechanism that is
actually in force: which of Akka's two bootstrap processes runs is decided by
whether seed-nodes[0] is this node's own address, so the ORDER of Cluster:SeedNodes
is the fix, not a timer. Adds the per-process table, the shipped self-first
example, why the validator is conditional (site nodes are not seeds) and why it
matches PublicHostname rather than the 0.0.0.0 bind address.
The retirement is documented rather than erased: a new subsection explains that a
watchdog outside the join handshake cannot tell "no seed answered" from "a seed
answered and the join is in flight", and the ea45ace1 live-gate finding is kept
verbatim as the evidence that produced that conclusion (InitJoinAck at 10:49:05,
old incarnation retired 10:49:06, watchdog fired 10:49:15, second cluster). The
watchdog's own earlier PASS is kept too — it did pass what it was gated on.
Also: a live gate for the NEW mechanism is registered as outstanding (not
re-drilled on the docker-dev rig since the swap), and the plan doc that shipped
the watchdog gets a superseded banner rather than an edit, so the execution record
and its Task 8 finding stay readable.
Ripple: CLAUDE.md cluster section, docs/Configuration.md + docs/v2/Cluster.md +
docs/ServiceHosting.md SeedNodes entries, the per-cluster-mesh design doc's two
"CLOSED by SelfFormAfter" notes, and mesh-program Phase 6 (which had this
convergence queued — now marked done early) + Phase 7's live-gate name.
Corrects the plan's behavior table (the mid-join-handshake row was FALSE) and
notes the mesh-program Phase 6 convergence on ScadaBridge's self-first seed
ordering, which retires the watchdog + guard entirely.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GASWkNEi68FSCtvr6rLoEW
Joseph Doherty