New doc for the weekly self-deriving inventory pipeline: a three-tier
Ansible collection (hardware off the hypervisors/firewall, VMs/LXCs from
the Proxmox APIs, listening sockets off every guest) writing three linked
NocoDB tables, read live behind a Dashy page.
Covers the design decisions worth defending: ss -tlnp over systemctl for
"what does this host serve", merge-only-by-omission on Tier 1 to protect
the one hand-entered field a lying SMBIOS can't provide, API-only Tier 2
because the two Proxmox nodes aren't clustered, stdlib-only push scripts,
and the deliberate KB-vs-machine-layer separation.
Pipeline diagram + four screenshots (Dashy page, all three NocoDB tables).
Provenance comment wired to the ansible roles/playbooks, the rocky Caddy/
dashy config, and KB note O0d4fqw0mr05. Indexed in README under Systems.
Previous screenshot's token counts/TTL distribution predated card 59
(11 active tokens, 20m/1h/no-expiry split including the standing root
token). Current state: 14 active tokens, 1h/no-expiry split - no root
token in the mix anymore.
The standing root token this doc described is retired. Replaced the
2-flow table with the real 3-flow model now in place: routine AppRole
auth, a narrowly-scoped provisioner AppRole for occasional bootstrap
work, and a break-glass generate-root path for the rare cases the
provisioner deliberately can't cover. Alerting row corrected to note
the audit-log check fires on any root-policy token generically, not
a specific standing one.
Two command-block "evidence" snippets added earlier today pasted real,
live-captured values verbatim: the exact cert file path, the fleet's
actual CA fingerprint, today's real issuance timestamp, and the live
Vault role/principal name. All of it identified real infrastructure
in a way the rest of this repo's established redaction convention
(see docs/firewall-and-network.md's [admin workstation]-style
placeholders) already exists specifically to avoid. Redacted to
bracket placeholders; the structural/format evidence (cert type,
extensions, TTLs) stays genuine.
"No immediate disruption" was true for TLS certs and app secrets but not
for the SSH certificate refresh, which has no static-key fallback and
eventually locks the automation identity out entirely during a sustained
Vault outage. The "always talks through a local agent" law also had an
unstated exception worth naming rather than leaving implicit.
Vault's ssh-client-signer mount was undocumented here entirely. Adds it
as flow 2/5 rather than merging into Certificate Flow, since the actual
mechanism differs (own systemd timer, bypasses Vault Agent's render
cycle, only reuses its cached token) - and explains why that distinction
matters for debugging. Diagram updated to match: a third data-plane box
feeding fleet-wide sshd trust instead of a container.
The SSH CA mount (ssh-client-signer/) existed live in Vault but was
missing from this doc's capability list entirely. Adds it as a fourth
"What It Does" bullet with real role config and a live screenshot of
the secrets engines list, and refreshes the stale ACL policies
screenshot (was showing 15 policies, live is 18).
The old claim described two flows sharing one keypair under different
usernames as a deliberate scoping decision. That was actually a stale,
half-migrated credential mismatch, not a design choice - the real fix was
giving Kestra a dedicated keypair with zero relation to the ansible
automation identity's own key, so a leak of one can never expose the other.
Kestra's SSH plugin has no certificate support at all (a plain Java client,
confirmed via its own plugin schema), which is the actual reason it needs
its own static key regardless of what the fleet's ansible identity does.
Added the real current flow config (kestra_local_user/kestra_local_key) and
a screenshot of the live KV Store showing exactly those two entries. Also
refreshed the automation-self-update.timer example, which had gone stale.
automation-bot