The canonical instance -- the one with her actual writing -- turned out
to be the least protected thing in the estate:
- No scheduled backup at all; the newest snapshot was a month old. Now
petal-backup.timer: VACUUM INTO, gzip, age-encrypt with the parodia
public recipient, push to the VPS over headscale with a size check,
prune both ends. Persistent=true because the box is not on 24/7.
Neither machine can decrypt what it holds; the identity is offline.
- Petal ran as a bare ./petal with PPID 1, so a crash or reboot left it
down until somebody noticed. Now petal.service, verified by kill -9.
- The Piper units retried forever without ever failing: RestartSec=3
against systemd's default 10s window means the burst limit is never
reached, which is how a dead service logged 26,800+ restarts over a
day while read-aloud silently fell back to browser speech.
StartLimitIntervalSec=300 makes a broken Piper show up in --failed.
backup-petal.sh now handles both deployment shapes (compose exec on the
VPS, local binary on millenia) and encrypts before anything leaves the
host. The VPS no longer uses it -- Petal rides parodia-backup there.
Deploy plumbing so Petal can run on the public VPS behind the Traefik
already on that box, with vLLM reached over headscale.
- Dockerfile: node build -> go build -> alpine runtime. CGO stays off
(modernc SQLite is pure Go), so the runtime layer exists only for
ffmpeg (read-aloud transcodes Piper's WAV) and tzdata (the companion's
bedtime nag and night mode read the local clock). Runs as uid 10001
with /data as the single writable mount.
- docker-compose.yml: Traefik labels following this host's convention
(external `traefik` network, `web-secure` entrypoint, `default` cert
resolver). Petal publishes no host port. ./data is a bind mount, not a
named volume, so the nightly backup and a restore are reachable from
the host.
- Piper runs as two sibling containers rather than host systemd units.
The plan assumed Piper was already installed on the VPS; it is not,
the host has no lingering user session to keep user units alive, and
containers keep the TTS ports on an internal network unreachable from
anywhere but Petal. One image, voice chosen per service, model cached
in a shared volume -- so the pt-PT voice is a new service, not a new
image.
- db.Backup + a `-backup` flag: VACUUM INTO, not a file copy. Petal runs
in WAL mode, so the newest committed pages may live in petal.db-wal;
copying the three files separately can capture a torn mid-checkpoint
state. VACUUM INTO reads one coherent snapshot without taking a write
lock, and emits a single file with no -wal/-shm companions. Refuses an
existing destination so a failed run can't destroy the last good
backup.
- deploy/backup-petal.sh: nightly snapshot, compress, push to millenia
over headscale with a post-transfer size check, prune both sides.
- deploy/petal.env.example: LLM_TIMEOUT raised 30s -> 90s for the
WAN+VPN round trip, since the voice and collocation passes send a
whole document and the timeout is a hard deadline on Complete.
prosolis