archy/docs/paid-file-recovery-qualification-20261007.md

Paid-file recovery qualification — 2026-10-07

Status: OPEN — safety fixes and combined isolated validation pass; corrected-artifact deployment and actual-node initial-payment interruption acceptance remain required.

Findings repaired

The on-chain cross-rail admission helper had no callers. Both current Cashu purchase and Lightning create/pay/retry/external exposure could bypass an existing on-chain operation, despite sharing its admission lock. They now check the durable on-chain journal while holding that lock, before any alternate wallet operation or externally payable invoice can be created. Read-only Lightning lookup remains available. Retired unallocated on-chain operations retain the journal's existing release policy; unresolved and funded operations must be recovered, not paid again.

The old content.download-peer-paid route still directly spent ecash before a recoverable operation/receipt existed. Its cache_only flag controls response format, not payment authorization. The old content.request-invoice and content.request-onchain methods likewise bypassed the durable purchase flows. Fresh legacy spending and invoice/address creation now return actionable errors. Already-owned exact/alias cache reads, existing invoice/on-chain status and original-payment download endpoints remain available. This does not reconstruct missing historical Cashu/Fedimint delivery receipts: a legacy spend without a saved file binding/receipt still needs investigation, not another purchase. Generic wallet history alone cannot prove which file a lost legacy request bought. No automatic conversion to another method, payment retry, or bypass of reviewed fee consent was added.

Compatibility impact: current PeerFiles used the legacy spender for Fedimint; Cashu already uses content.purchase. New Fedimint file purchases are therefore temporarily unavailable, explicitly shown in the payment UI and guarded against stale callbacks. Existing purchased files remain accessible. Restore Fedimint purchases only with durable dispatch, ambiguous-outcome recovery and receipt handling. Hidden Web5SharedContent.vue also references the legacy spender; its import is currently commented out in Web5.vue. No current UI callers of the two legacy invoice/address creation methods were found.

Verification

• Focused PeerFiles payment suite: 62 passed, zero failed. /tmp/archy-paid-file-ui-20261007.log. TypeScript vue-tsc --noEmit also passed; /tmp/archy-paid-file-typecheck-20261007.log.
• New backend regression exercises actual Cashu and Lightning RPC entry points with a persisted on-chain attempt, including consent, retry and external invoice exposure; checks unchanged original journal, absent replacement records and no wallet creation. Separate real-handler regression checks rejection of all legacy ecash choices and invoice/address creation, then exact cached Fedimint bytes and zero-payment repeat access.
• Backend tests must run through scripts/test-backend-isolated.sh. Two compilation attempts were deliberately interrupted before test execution: the first after IndeeHub's final outer guards arrived during source capture, the second after prolonged host page-I/O starvation when the final IndeeHub lifecycle/health correction was ready. Neither is a test failure or a pass. Logs, input hashes and explicit incomplete status are retained.
• Final combined isolated backend suite: 2,006 passed, zero failed, five ignored. Both new actual-RPC regressions pass. All 532 captured backend, helper and catalog inputs remained unchanged. This includes payment fix 18b08720 and complete IndeeHub lifecycle/health fix b0b95810. Compilation took 36m19s under host disk contention; isolated execution took 23.74s with 325.1 MiB peak memory and no swap. No source or wallet pass is inferred from the earlier interrupted attempts. /tmp/archy-paid-indee-lifecycle-backend-20261007.log and /tmp/archy-paid-indee-lifecycle-provenance-20261007.log.
• Current live read-only recheck: dev and Yaya each retain the accepted 20 MiB fixture with exact original SHA256 and ownership despite the seller share having been removed. Only ownership lookup and cached HTTP GET were used; the cumulative payment ledger remained byte-identical. Initial harness rejected JSON-RPC error:null; corrected rerun passed both nodes. Both logs are retained; this is not initial-payment response-loss acceptance. /tmp/archy-paid-cache-readonly-20261007-rerun.log.
• No actual funds, wallet state, live services, files or peer policies were changed by this qualification. No deployment or publication has occurred.

Reconciled prior evidence — do not repeat payments

Older summaries retain stale open subitems. Existing receipts establish:

• Framework's October 2 one-sat Lightning purchase: seller settlement, exact 121-byte cache, durable ownership and operator-confirmed free reopen. Framework/Shorty were on the documented older binaries; this is not current seller-journal acceptance.
• /tmp/archy-190-framework-paid-files-readonly-final.log records one durable ownership entry and exact accepted bytes in Files/Documents. Optional Files copy was subsequently verified, despite an earlier SSH failure in the ledger.
• October 6 dev↔Yaya purchases: two distinct 1-sat Cashu fixtures, seller credit, exact 20 MiB bytes, range reads and free cached reopen after temporary shares were removed. The existing private cumulative spend ledger must not be reset.
• /tmp/archy-paid-cache-restart-qualification.log records twenty cached interruptions across both nodes, management restart on each, preserved app containers/cache/ownership and zero additional sats.
• Existing isolated tests cover lost offer/acceptance/settlement replies, persistent native invoice dispatch recovery, damaged journals, corrupt/truncated delivery and one-wallet debit. These are fixtures, not actual-node fault injection during initial payment.

Still required: verify current corrected artifact, initial payment/settlement response-loss recovery before successful delivery headers, and current seller persistence across restart. Never send a new payment to recover the historical sales. The original missing-file incident was individually accepted by the operator; broader release acceptance remains separate. Timed IndeeHub rental and producer payout acceptance belongs to the independent IndeeHub workstream.

Durable evidence

Logs, the final input manifest and earlier interrupted-attempt evidence are retained under ~/.local/state/archipelago/release-qualification/paid-file-recovery-20261007/. The combined run qualifies source/isolated behavior. It does not claim a new production payment, initial-payment outage/restart acceptance or deployment of this backend to either node.

Later source checkpoints (before the final combined pass)

The 2,006-test stable-input pass above predates Indee scope-launch correction 01a55d2d and rental admission fix 4dde14bf; it remains valid historical qualification, not a full-suite pass for current source. The corrected Indee fixture executable SHA256 3cbe5a5c3a74e6463ab0874c74e23dfca68f0bfc3fe54883f0edf69abb37ac0d contains the scope-launch correction but predates the rental guard. Its VM runtime acceptance must not imply rental guard deployment.

Rental quote, consent and recovery now take the same buyer/seller/content lock and on-chain/Lightning journal guards as permanent purchases. Two new actual RPC regressions cover concurrent alternate-rail commit, subsequent quote and consent retries, exposed Lightning refusal and preserved original records. Formatting/syntax checks pass; isolated execution waits for the VM-free compiler slot. No real or repeated payment was sent.

Final combined qualification including rental, Fleet and controller fixes

The full isolated backend suite now passes 2,012 tests, zero failures, five existing ignores against source frozen at 9964b5c1. All 532 tracked backend/helper/catalog inputs were captured before compilation and verified unchanged afterward. Both new rental RPC regressions, all four Fleet provenance regressions and eleven selected paid-file recovery/admission cases explicitly passed. Tests ran in the required isolated runner: 24.77 seconds, 272.3 MiB peak, no swap, process exit zero. No real payments or live service changes occurred.

This supersedes the pending current-source validation above. It includes the Indee scope/helper corrections, rental guard 4dde14bf, and Fleet provenance 9268930c. The older normal executable still predates these final changes; a matching corrected executable and actual VM/full transaction acceptance remain required before deployment. Actual-node initial-payment response-loss acceptance also remains open; synthetic test success does not close it.

Durable evidence (backend log, input manifest, receipt and runner): ~/.local/state/archipelago/release-qualification/paid-file-recovery-20261007/final-combined-9964b5c1/. Temporary original: /tmp/archy-paid-final-combined-fjrs3hIE/. The compiler slot was released to Indee immediately after successful provenance verification; no additional backend compilation was started by this agent.

Subsequent pre-target rollback safety correction (qualification pending)

Independent source review found that a failed initial drain could enter native rollback and stop intact original writers, even though no target had started. Commit 07c7eb0f fixes this in supervised_update.rs: recovery durably chooses which exact originals to preserve, restores only stopped/missing members, adopts an operation-owned recreation after a lost start acknowledgement, and refuses unexpected replacements or violations of an original stopped state. Preserved members keep their original service recipes. Journal schema 2 prevents an older backend from ignoring these preservation decisions; existing schema 1 journals remain readable and migrate before restoration.

Six new regressions cover intact busy originals, partial frontend stop, lost start acknowledgement, changed preserved identity, old-journal migration, and unexpected startup of an originally stopped member. Formatting and diff checks pass; these tests have not yet executed. The previous 2,012-test result and normal executable 913c6572bf689f8c88d25ac6e7436e978fc88a3c1e0cecf26db159967285aa5b predate this fix. The next single combined isolated suite waits for the Indee helper's actual-original restart-policy correction and VM shutdown. No live node service or payment was changed for this work.

Combined qualification after pre-target preservation and launch v2

The subsequent full isolated suite passed 2,021 tests, zero failures, five existing ignores against source frozen at 32317236, including native preservation 07c7eb0f and helper restart-policy ownership f42f3298. All 532 tracked backend/helper/catalog inputs remained unchanged across the build and execution. The receipt explicitly requires all six new pre-target recovery tests, three launch-identity tests, both rental tests, four Fleet tests, and eleven selected payment recovery/admission tests. Isolated execution took 26.17 seconds, peaked at 315.3 MiB, used no swap and exited successfully.

Launch v2 records normalize only unique environment ordering and the generated container hostname, while retaining explicit hostname/environment, command, mount and other launch semantics. Old raw hashes remain unchanged: no legacy journal is promoted or accepted through a relaxed comparison. Invalid or ambiguous environment data prevents fresh supervised capture.

Durable verified evidence: ~/.local/state/archipelago/release-qualification/paid-file-recovery-20261007/final-combined-32317236/. Original temporary directory: /tmp/archy-paid-final-combined-3fFXJD1v/. The slot was released immediately to Indee for the matching normal executable and fresh v2 synthetic transaction. The older held synthetic transaction remains unaccepted and preserved in its parent VM lineage; it is not silently rewritten. Actual-node initial-payment response-loss acceptance remains open. No real or repeat payment and no live-node lifecycle mutation occurred in this suite.