The live gate for the manual-failover control caught the self-form fallback
forming a SECOND cluster. A node bounced by a failover restarted, received
InitJoinAck from its live peer — the join was in flight and healthy — but did
not get the Welcome inside the 10s window, because the peer's ring still held
the node's previous incarnation (Exiting -> Down -> Removed). The fallback
fired on the timer and the node islanded itself until an operator restarted it.
The original design assumed Cluster.Join(SelfAddress) would be ignored
mid-handshake. It is not — it wins. And since manual failover deliberately
produces that restart, every failover could island the node it bounced.
Before self-forming, TCP-probe the other seed addresses; a reachable peer means
wait another window instead. That is also what the fallback claims to detect:
'no seed answered InitJoin (peer down at boot)'.
Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01GASWkNEi68FSCtvr6rLoEW
Joseph Doherty
ea45ace1c3