One entry per section: how you notice, where to look, what it usually is. Above
all of them the rule the plan already states — a half installed machine is
reinstalled, not repaired — with the reason, which is not convenience. The
script is built so a second run on a freshly imaged machine always comes out the
same; a run on a machine somebody straightened out by hand is no longer that.
Repairing trades a repeatable result for a one-off, and the difference only
shows up on the next host.
rescue_checked is the stated exception, because nothing has been written yet. It
is the only section where fixing in place is right, and the runbook says so
rather than leaving the reader to infer it.
Two things that are easy to get wrong are answered up front. Whether the reboot
has happened is one `findmnt -no FSTYPE /` — tmpfs or overlay means still in the
rescue system, zfs means the first-boot hook already resumed. And when a host is
unreachable, the first question is whether the firewall had even run: it is
applied last, so if `registered` is not done, the cause is the network and not
the rules.
The installer can be watched while it runs. If QEMU is still up, forwarding 5900
over SSH shows what the ISO is doing, and an input mask there means the answer
file was not accepted and the installer has dropped into interactive mode where
it will sit until the hour expires. That failure otherwise arrives as a timeout
saying nothing.
The last heading is the honest one: everything here is written from the script
and the findings behind it, not from incidents. What actually stops on the first
real run belongs in this file afterwards, quoted as it appeared in the console.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
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