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diff --git a/docs/design/2026-08-14-velox-reinstall-gaps-3.org b/docs/design/2026-08-14-velox-reinstall-gaps-3.org new file mode 100644 index 0000000..9675973 --- /dev/null +++ b/docs/design/2026-08-14-velox-reinstall-gaps-3.org @@ -0,0 +1,98 @@ +#+TITLE: Reinstall gaps, part three — per-install certs and credentials, and one failure that hid the others +#+AUTHOR: Craig Jennings + +* Third handoff today + +Two earlier notes covered five gaps +([[file:2026-08-14-velox-reinstall-gaps-1.org][the first report]] and +[[file:2026-08-14-velox-reinstall-gaps-2.org][the follow-up]]). +Email was the last thing broken on velox after the 2026-08-13 rebuild, and it +turned up two more — both the same shape, and one of them with a property worth +generalizing. + +Email is fully working now: three accounts, 21,853 messages, 4.0 GB indexed. + +* Gap 6 — the Proton Bridge TLS cert is per-install, and its absence disabled every account + +=~/.mbsyncrc= carries =CertificateFile /home/cjennings/.config/protonbridge.pem=. +That file did not exist after the rebuild, and it cannot be restored from backup +or copied from the other machine: Proton Bridge generates a fresh self-signed +cert per installation. Velox's is issued 2026-08-13 23:44 with a different +fingerprint from ratio's 2026-01-30 one. + +*The part worth acting on is the blast radius.* mbsync parses its entire config +before doing any work, so a missing =CertificateFile= referenced by *one* account +aborts the run for *all* of them. Gmail and dmail need no bridge and no cert, and +both were dead anyway. The error names only the missing pem, so the symptom +("no mail at all") and the message ("this one file is missing") look unrelated. + +Recovery does not need the bridge GUI. The running bridge presents the cert on +its own IMAP port, so it can be pulled straight off the handshake: + +: openssl s_client -connect 127.0.0.1:1143 -starttls imap -showcerts </dev/null \ +: | sed -n '/BEGIN CERTIFICATE/,/END CERTIFICATE/p' > ~/.config/protonbridge.pem + +That is a two-second, fully scriptable step, which makes it a good candidate for +the install rather than a runbook line. + +* Gap 7 — the bridge password is per-install too, and reports a stale value misleadingly + +=~/.mbsyncrc= resolves the cmail password with =cat ~/.config/.cmailpass=. That +file is plaintext and, unusually for my setup, a real file rather than a stow +symlink — so it is not in the dotfiles repo, not encrypted, and not carried to a +new machine. + +The file survived the rebuild but held the *previous* install's password, because +the bridge regenerates it per installation. Ratio's and velox's differ by sha256, +confirmed today. + +*The diagnostic trap:* Proton Bridge answers a wrong password with =no such +user=. I read that as "the bridge has no account signed in" and went looking for +a login problem. The account was configured the whole time. If the install ever +validates bridge connectivity, it should not treat =no such user= as evidence +about account state. + +* The generalization + +Gaps 6 and 7 are the same as 1 through 5, sharpened. Everything that broke in +this rebuild was *generated on the machine by an application* rather than carried +by git, stow, or the dotfiles repo: + +| gap | artifact | why it did not travel | +| 1 | =.ai/=, =todo.org=, =CLAUDE.md= | gitignored | +| 2 | =timers.target.wants= symlinks | written by systemctl enable | +| 3 | roam clone state | local working tree | +| 4 | signal-cli registration | per-device identity | +| 5 | =*.local.el= configs | gitignored | +| 6 | bridge TLS cert | per-install, regenerated | +| 7 | bridge password | per-install, regenerated | + +Gaps 6 and 7 add a distinction the earlier note missed. For 1, 3 and 5 the old +value is still correct, so *restoring* fixes them. For 4, 6 and 7 the old value is +*worthless* — the application has generated a new one, and only *re-deriving* +from the live system fixes them. An install that tries to restore these will +produce exactly what happened here: a file that exists, looks right, and +authenticates against nothing. + +So the install's post-rebuild checklist wants two columns, not one: what to +restore, and what to re-derive. + +* What the install could do + +- Re-derive the bridge cert from the running bridge with the =openssl s_client= + line above. Scriptable, no GUI, no secrets. +- Re-derive the bridge password from the bridge rather than expecting the file to + be right, and rewrite =.cmailpass=. (I have filed a task on my side to make + =PassCmd= ask the bridge directly, which would remove the file entirely.) +- Add a cheap post-rebuild validation that =mbsync --list= parses. Config-parse + failures disable every account at once and say nothing about mail, so they are + worth catching explicitly rather than via "no new mail" hours later. +- More generally: keep the restore list and the re-derive list separate, per the + table above. + +* Unrelated, but noticed while comparing the machines + +=~/.config/.gmailpass.gpg= and =~/.config/.dmailpass.gpg= resolve to mode 777 in +the dotfiles repo, on both machines. They are gpg-encrypted so the contents are +safe, but world-writable is wrong for a credential file. That is a dotfiles fix, +not an archsetup one — noting it here only because it surfaced in the same pass. |