Gate record: docs/plans/2026-07-20-localdb-phase2-live-gate.md.
Checks 1, 2, 5, 6 pass. Checks 3 and 4 are NOT satisfied — the defect they
were meant to confirm turned out to be the opposite of what the plan assumed.
Three defects crash-looped every driver node before check 1 could even run:
1. An empty ServerHistorian:ApiKey kills the host. ServerHistorianOptions-
Validator exists to turn exactly that class of failure into a named
OptionsValidationException, but its documented fail tier explicitly excluded
ApiKey on the reasoning that a keyless client "degrades — the gateway rejects
calls". It does not: the client validates its own options at construction, so
the process dies during Akka startup and never makes a call.
2. UseTls disagreeing with the endpoint scheme kills the host too, in both
directions (both messages confirmed in the shipped client assembly). Moving an
endpoint from https to http without clearing UseTls is an ordinary migration
slip.
3. Plaintext h2c was UNREACHABLE. HistorianGatewayClientAdapter forwarded the
TLS-only options unconditionally, and AllowUntrustedServerCertificate defaults
to false, so it always sent RequireCertificateValidation=true — which the
client rejects outright when UseTls=false. Every http:// deployment crashed,
though the scheme is documented as the supported way to select h2c, and the
only workaround was to assert a certificate posture for a connection that has
no certificate.
The fourth was the blocker, and it is Phase 2's own:
4. The drain gate deferred to a Primary that cannot deliver. Redundancy roles are
elected CLUSTER-WIDE; the alarm queue is PAIR-LOCAL. On the rig the elected
driver Primary is central-1 — it carries the driver Akka role, replicates
nobody's LocalDb and does not even run the alarm historian — so every driver
node logged "Historian drain suspended", including the two site-b nodes that
have no peer at all. Nothing drained anywhere, where before Phase 2 it drained
fine. The cost is not a duplicate; it is the buffer growing to the capacity
wall and evicting the audit trail it exists to protect.
Fixed in three layers: a separate ShouldDrainAlarmHistory policy (unknown role
drains; the two gates now deliberately disagree, and a test pins that); peer-
host matching in DriverHostActor so a node stands down only for a Primary
holding its rows; and AddAlarmHistorian short-circuiting the gate when
replication is unconfigured — testing BOTH Replication:PeerAddress and
SyncListenPort, since only the dialing half sets the former while both halves
share the queue.
Every one of these follows from the asymmetry: a false allow costs a duplicate
row, which at-least-once delivery already accepts and payload-hash ids
collapse; a false deny loses data silently.
A third vacuous test, caught by the same delete-the-guard discipline: the
role-view tests stayed green with the guard removed, because AwaitAssert polls
until an assertion passes and the assertion was "reads open" — which is the
SEEDED value, satisfied at the first poll before the actor processed anything.
They now assert the sequence of published values through a recording view; the
control then goes red for exactly the cases that matter.
Migration evidence: 11 legacy rows across two deliberately overlapping files
converged to exactly 9 identical rows on both nodes, proving D-6's payload-hash
identity on real nodes rather than in a fixture.
Open design fork, recorded in the gate doc rather than decided here: a pair
cannot currently identify its own Primary, so both halves drain. Safe in every
topology — nothing loses data — but the gate's de-duplication benefit is
unrealised until roles are scoped per pair.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GASWkNEi68FSCtvr6rLoEW
Moves the alarm store-and-forward buffer out of its own alarm-historian.db
and into the node's consolidated LocalDb, where it replicates to the
redundant pair peer. A node that dies holding undelivered alarm history no
longer takes it to the grave.
Tasks 2 and 3 land together, as the plan anticipated. They are not separable:
the gate is a constructor argument of the rewritten sink, and a commit that
replicated the queue without gating the drain would be a commit in which both
nodes of a pair deliver every alarm event, continuously.
That drain gate is the load-bearing part of the change, and the recon
explains why it is new work rather than a refinement. Exactly-once delivery
across a pair is enforced today on the ENQUEUE side, by
HistorianAdapterActor: only the Primary enqueues, so the Secondary's queue is
empty and its ungated drain has nothing to send. Replicating the table
destroys that invariant.
The gate is a Func<bool> the caller supplies, because the drain runs on a
timer the sink owns rather than on a mailbox, and Core.AlarmHistorian cannot
reference PrimaryGatePolicy in Runtime. Runtime supplies it via a new
IRedundancyRoleView singleton that DriverHostActor publishes its Primary-gate
verdict to -- the same verdict the inbound-write and native-ack gates use, so
there is no second notion of am-I-the-Primary to drift.
Two failure modes are deliberately closed:
- The view is seeded OPEN, matching the policy's own answer for an unknown
role with no driver peer. A deployment that runs no redundancy never
publishes to it, and defaulting closed would silently stop its alarm
history forever.
- A gate that throws is read as not-now, never as permission, and a closed
gate reports the new HistorianDrainState.NotPrimary rather than Idle. A
Secondary's rising queue is supposed to look different from a stalled
drain, and if BOTH nodes report NotPrimary the pair is misconfigured and
says so instead of quietly filling toward the capacity ceiling.
Row ids are a hash of the payload rather than fresh GUIDs. Both adapters
accept the same fanned transition in the window before the first redundancy
snapshot arrives, and under last-writer-wins an equal key converges those two
accepts into one row instead of duplicating them.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GASWkNEi68FSCtvr6rLoEW
The MaxAttempts<=0 warning branch in AlarmHistorianOptions.Validate() was the
only one without a test (the sibling DrainIntervalSeconds/Capacity/
DeadLetterRetentionDays warnings are covered). Add the matching case. Closes FU-4.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012SDSQ3AcaXqPcBtDESBRii
The HistorianGateway driver is now the sole historian read/write+alarm backend, so the
Wonderware sidecar projects are dead code. Removes the 5 Wonderware projects (driver,
.Client, .Client.Contracts, + their 2 test projects) from the solution and tree, and fully
retires the vestigial 'Historian.Wonderware' driver type (UI/probe-only; it had no driver
factory): the Host probe registration, the AdminUI driver-config surface (driver page,
tag-config editor/model/validator entry, address picker/builder, driver-type catalog +
dropdown + edit-router entries), and their tests. Prunes the now-unused Wonderware
connection fields (Host/Port/UseTls/ServerCertThumbprint/SharedSecret) from
AlarmHistorianOptions (keeping Enabled + the SQLite store-and-forward knobs) and refreshes
the stale XML docs that named Wonderware as the production backend.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_012SDSQ3AcaXqPcBtDESBRii
Joseph Doherty