get_setting on BasePlugin namespaces what it reads to plugin.backups.<key>,
while get_settings_defaults declares - and the settings page writes - the bare
key. So the retention read never found the operator's value and always fell back
to 0, and 0 means keep everything. Retention was configurable in the UI and did
nothing. It is the only place in the codebase using the namespaced helper.
The share root also stops shipping one site's file server as its default. That
put a site's internal topology in a bundled plugin and in the public mirror, and
pointed a second site at a server it cannot reach. Blank now, per ADR-015, and a
share kind with no configured root returns nothing rather than composing a path
from somebody else's hostname - a path built on an empty root is not a lesser
answer, it is a wrong one.
The stale-backup card could not be built as designed, and the reason is more
important than the card. Dedup means an unchanged configuration writes no
revision, so collectedat moves only on a CHANGE. A machine stable for six
months has a six-month-old newest revision and is perfectly healthy. Keying a
staleness card on revision age would have flagged most of the fleet - exactly
the noise that makes a board worth ignoring.
Underneath that: ShopDB could not distinguish those cases at all. On a no-op
the server returned "unchanged" and wrote nothing, so "we checked yesterday and
it matched" was discarded. That fact is the one thing a backup system must be
able to prove, and the only record of it was a line in a log file on the PC.
lastseenat records the check rather than the change. Touched on every matching
post including the no-op; set on creation, since a new revision has by
definition just been seen; backfilled from collectedat or createdat so existing
rows start from the last moment the config can be PROVEN current, rather than
from now - claiming a check that never happened would be worse than silence.
The card keys on it, one row per CHAIN rather than per asset: a machine with
two part markers can have one still reporting while the other stopped, and a
per-asset view would report the machine as fine. It stays deliberately silent
about assets never backed up, because whether one SHOULD be is a question only
the manifest can answer, and guessing would list a hundred healthy machines.
The rule lives in services/staleness.py rather than the route, so it is
testable without an auth layer in the way - the same split retention.py uses.
Threshold is backups_staledays, default 3, and 0 disables the card.
Dedup compared a posted config against the latest revision for the ASSET,
which is only correct when a machine number means one PC. Several PCs share one
here: the part markers on 0613, 0615 and WJPRT are separate devices, differing
by COM port, filed under one machine number. Each marker's post therefore
differed from whichever marker had posted last, nothing ever deduped, and the
table grew by one row per PC per collection cycle.
A chain is now (asset, kind, source hostname). An unchanged config is a no-op
again, and each PC keeps its own history against the machine. NULL sources -
rows written before the column was populated, and hand-loaded ones - form their
own chain via IS NULL; `column == None` never matches in SQL, so without that
those rows would have re-posted forever.
Two consumers assumed the old key and are fixed with it. Retention pruned per
asset, so a busy marker's revisions could evict a quiet marker's only backup;
it now prunes each chain separately, protecting the newest and oldest of each.
The revision diff compared against the previous revision on the machine, which
across two markers reported one device's COM port as a change on the other; it
now compares within the source's own chain.
scripts/collapse_duplicate_backup_revisions.py cleans up what the old rule
wrote. It removes only a revision whose hash repeats the one before it in the
same chain - rows the fixed code would never have written - and keeps every
genuine change, every chain's newest and oldest, and every source. Dry run by
default. Its --report mode explains what grew each chain, which separates a
legitimately shared machine number from two PCs wrongly carrying the same one,
and from a value inside the config that changes on its own.
Backup timestamps read wrong because of two faults stacked, which is why it
looked like a single offset.
The API serialised naive ISO ("2026-08-07T12:00:00"), with nothing saying the
value was UTC. JavaScript's new Date() parses that as BROWSER-LOCAL, so every
timestamp shifted by the viewer's offset before any timezone formatting ran.
Every datetime this plugin stores is naive UTC, so the wire format now carries
a trailing Z.
The history view then formatted with toLocaleString(), i.e. the viewer's zone,
ignoring the site_timezone setting entirely. It now loads that setting and
formats through the shared formatInZone helper, matching NotificationsList.
The panel list label is built server-side with strftime, so a client cannot
correct it afterwards. It now converts to the site zone using the same Setting
lookup the notifications plugin uses - without that it showed UTC, four hours
out at West Jefferson.
Tests cover the wire format and that 16:30Z renders as 12:30 in
America/New_York.
DNC Info becomes a single tabbed card - General, eFocas, Serial, NTSHR and
MARK - instead of a flat wall of every value. On 3204 that is 11 rows visible
rather than 22, and on 0600 eleven rather than 27, which also stops the card
unbalancing the detail page's two-column layout.
Everything DNC now lives on that one card, so the Part Marker panel is gone:
its settings are the MARK tab. The partmarker KIND is untouched and still
stores, dedupes and serves revisions - they are listed on the backup history
page - it simply contributes no card of its own, which on 145 of 147 machines
would have been an empty box.
Downloads are named for the machine: 3204.reg, and 3204-wow6432node.reg for
the dialect that imports outside NTLARS. The view had been rebuilding the name
from sourcefilename and producing 3204.reg-wow6432node.reg, so the revision now
carries assetnumber and both ends agree. That needed a viewonly relationship to
Asset - no backref, so the core asset side gains no dependency on this plugin.
The history page was hardcoded to light colours (#e0e0e0, #f4f9ff, #666) and
rendered as a white table on a dark page. It now uses the palette variables
throughout, per frontend/CLAUDE.md. The current-revision tint is a color-mix
against --primary so it reads in both themes rather than a baked light blue
that disappears on dark, and the diff columns are headed as well as red/green,
since colour alone does not survive a colourblind reader.
Adds a kind-pluggable backups plugin. Configuration captured from a PC is
filed against the MACHINE it controls, with a revision history and download
back to the native format.
NTLARS/DNC is the first kind. Settings live in the controlling PC's registry
but describe the machine, so revisions attach to the machine's asset and carry
no foreign key to the PC: history survives a PC being replaced or deleted, and
sourcehostname records the handover.
Storage splits by kind. Parseable kinds store a dialect-neutral JSON
projection in ShopDB and re-render on download; opaque vendor formats (part
marker and similar) keep their bytes on the SFLD share with ShopDB holding
metadata and the UNC pointer.
Two .reg dialects exist in the wild: NTLARS's own Save... export omits the
WOW6432Node path segment, scripted exports include it. Parsing strips whichever
root matched, so a stored revision commits to neither and download offers both
(NTLARS Load... by default, WOW6432Node for direct reg import). Getting this
backwards is silent, so the dedup hash deliberately excludes sourcedialect and
both dialects of one config dedup to a single revision.
Dedup is load-bearing: the collector runs every GE-Enforce cycle across the
fleet, so a revision is inserted only when the content hash differs from that
asset's latest for that kind.
A freshly imaged PC opens NTLARS with a blank General tab. Recording that would
make an empty config the newest revision exactly when someone needs the last
good one, so a blank MachineNo is rejected rather than accepted as a change.
Two of the 320 known-good backups on the share already have that shape.
DNC Info card summarises the latest revision on the machine page: General
(Cnc, NcIF, HostType), eFocas, Serial, NTSHR when populated (only 18 of 147
machines), and MARK when the machine is a marker. MARK is gated on Cnc=MARKER
or the ShopDB machine type, not on the MARK key having content: MARK carries
serial defaults on 145 of 147 machines and DncPatterns reads YES on 103
including ordinary lathes, so neither identifies a marker.
The info card is owned by the kind (BackupKind.infopanel/buildinfo) and served
by a generic endpoint, so the expected successor to DNC ships its own card by
adding a class rather than changing the plugin or the panel wiring.
Also: schedule and retention settings with a prune that never drops the newest
or the oldest revision, and scripts/import_ntlars_backups.py to seed history
from the existing per-machine .reg files (144 of 147 resolve to assets).
Codec verified against all 320 real backups: round-trips clean through both
dialects. Bay-side generation verified on Windows against reg.exe export.
