2 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
jcoffey-dev daaa06a5fb Cutover: stopping the old server is what removes the guard, so add one
Step 2 stops stalwart.service and step 4 points the fork at a store path.
Between those two moments nothing protects the original, and the rehearsal
had already shown that one open by the fork costs the rollback for good.

What protects it until then turns out to be the running server itself:
RocksDB refuses a second opener with "While lock file: LOCK: Resource
temporarily unavailable". So the intuition that a service shutdown prevents
the mistake is backwards — the shutdown is what enables it.

Measured, in probe_guard.py, in the three states that matter: held by the
running server, the fork is refused and the rollback is intact; stopped but
read-only, the fork is refused while rotating its own log and the Enterprise
build still starts on it afterwards; stopped and writable, the fork opens,
adds its column family, and upstream never starts again.

So step 3 now makes the original read-only as soon as the copy is taken,
which turns a discipline problem into a one-line one, and the answered
section carries the table.
2026-09-19 22:34:45 -07:00
jcoffey-dev 67619f64e9 Cutover: rehearsed, and the Enterprise build can't read the fork's store
The runbook said nothing in it had been rehearsed. Now the sequence has
been, on data made up for the purpose: upstream 0.16.22 in a container as
the install running today, the fork beside it, both unprivileged with
CAP_NET_BIND_SERVICE. It rehearses the sequence, not the data, which is
what the compat tests are for. 27 of 27 checks passed and the rollback
took 1.5 seconds.

The question §"Open" asked about carrying a store back is answered, and
the answer is no. Upstream refuses to start on a store the fork has
opened: "Column families not opened: _". The fork adds one RocksDB column
family for masked email (SUBSPACE_INBUXA = b'_') and opens with
create_missing_column_families, so it creates it on first open; upstream
has no descriptor for it and RocksDB will not open a database holding one
it was not told about.

That makes step 3's "a copy, not a move" load-bearing in a way the step
did not say. One open by the fork is enough: pointing it at the original
even once, to check something, leaves the Enterprise install unable to
start, and there is no rollback after that. It fails loudly and before
reading anything, which is the good version of this failure, but it is
not recoverable.

Two things the rehearsal found that would have wasted time on the day:
memberTenantId does not come down from the domain and is refused on
create, so a tenant "admin" set up the obvious way is a server
administrator and the check passes while proving nothing; and IMAP's
INBOX is not JMAP's account, because mail from an unauthenticated sender
is filed as spam, so the two counts differ before and after alike.

What the rehearsal does not cover is in its README and in §"Open":
systemd and `systemctl disable stalwart` above all, ACME renewal, load,
the front ends, and INBUXA's own data.
2026-09-19 22:23:10 -07:00