Files
pulse/internal
courtmanr@gmail.com 55048fb181 Harden PBS backup attribution against shared sources (#1639)
Adversarial review of 84dba861b found three ways the new evidence paths
could still attribute a snapshot to the wrong cluster.

The submission-source learner was asymmetric. Clusters only became known
to it through snapshots that were already attributable, so a cluster with
no uniquely-attributable snapshot was invisible - and a source token both
clusters share then mapped to exactly one visible cluster and looked
decisive. The visible cluster got the other's backups while the other
guest stayed at zero. Callers now declare every connection owning a
candidate guest for a PBS instance, and the learner refuses to resolve
anything for that instance until each of them has had a snapshot
attributed to it. Observation is not scoped per PBS instance, so a
cluster seen submitting to its own PBS server still counts as visible -
the reported two-server topology keeps working.

PVE storage confirmations were treated as authorship. A pbs-type storage
listing proves the connection can SEE a snapshot, which a shared token, a
synced datastore, or an offsite copy all arrange without the connection
having made it, and a single confirmer previously outscored everything
else. Confirmations now carry the storage they came from, and only a
storage view that never lists a snapshot some other connection also lists
can attribute a colliding VMID. An overlapping view has demonstrated it
sees other clusters' snapshots, so nothing it lists attributes anything.
Where an exclusive view and the learned source mapping both speak they
must agree, otherwise the snapshot drops as it did before #1639. The
disjoint case - each cluster mounting only its own datastore - is
unchanged.

Confirmations were evicted by partial poll failures. A storage whose
content query failed contributed nothing, and the partial set overwrote
the previous one, flipping attribution between cycles. They now go
through the same per-storage preservation as storage backups.

Contract text calling the PVE listing "the only deterministic
attribution" is reworded to match the weakened semantics.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-28 12:02:46 +01:00
..