A node reached only as a chain hop was being measured twice, and the reading
the panel showed was the wrong one. On a router in Russia that is not a cosmetic
difference: a node the chain carries fine behind a WireGuard hop is dead when
dialled straight out of the WAN, so the group card read "0 of 2 alive" while
that very group was carrying every packet.
Two dial paths existed outside the observatory plan. URLTestGroup.PostStart
warmed up every urltest group at box start whether or not any rule reached it,
and the panel's Test button reached URLTest.DialContext, whose first act is
Touch() — arming a ticker that re-swept those groups directly every probe
interval for the next thirty minutes. Both wrote under the BASE node tag, and
both dialled the base outbound, which carries no chain detour at all.
The observatory was never the liar: its plan roots come from the rules, and a
chain hop copy is stored only under its own tag, so no plan job could ever
write under a base tag. The fix is therefore to remove the other two paths, not
to touch the plan.
TestGroups now asks the observatory for an out-of-turn pass and reports what it
measured; a target no enabled rule routes to is not dialled at all and says so.
Unused urltest groups stand down their own self-check via a new SelfCheck option
(nil keeps today's behaviour, so every existing config is unchanged). The one
direct dial left is the exit-address lookup, which has no other possible source
— it now runs only for a target that is both routed and already read alive, so
it travels the routed path and never touches an unused group.
Chain hop wrappers are probed as measurements of their own and surfaced as
chains[].hops[], because "which hop is dead" is the question an operator has and
the chain-level verdict cannot answer it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
omarandClaude Opus 5
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