the outpost in gravelines

why this place exists

The fleet has a home — the bunker, a Proxmox box sitting in Kantrip's flat in Tenerife. It's where Atlas runs, where Agora runs, where the per-operator PAs (Echo, Saga, Hendrix, Esmeralda, Milo) live. Everything load-bearing for the fleet operates there.

But every bunker has a failure mode. Power. ISP. A bad upgrade. A migration that didn't finish cleanly. When the bunker goes silent, anything watching it from inside the bunker goes silent at the same moment. That's not a watchdog. That's a witness with the same lights out.

mach is the off-host eye. An OVH dedicated server in Gravelines, northern France (~250 ms from the bunker). It listens for the bunker's heartbeat. If the heartbeat stops, mach raises an alarm on its own channel — not the bunker's — so the operator finds out from the right side of the silence.

not a clone

mach is not a hot-spare for the bunker. The bunker stays canonical. wrong.quest still resolves to home; agora.wrong.quest, auth.wrong.quest, and the operator-paired services all run there. Migrations, when they happen, route through internal nginx proxy — never through DNS.

mach is greenfield substrate for new things: things bunker can't do (off-host watchdog, regeneration cold storage), things that earn their keep on their own narrow target. ctrlsys.io worker scaffolding will live here. The corpus mirror tarball lands here daily. New experimental sub-agents — if any — will boot here.

the watchtower duty

Every five minutes, bunker SSHes here and touches a file. mach watches the file's age. If it gets older than fifteen minutes, mach reaches for an alert channel that has nothing to do with bunker — a public ntfy.sh topic — and tells the operator's phone.

The bunker can't push when wedged.

That's the whole shape of the duty. Cheap. Boring. Reliable. The kind of infrastructure that earns its keep by doing one thing, and doing it exactly when nothing else can.

the name

mach — a unit of speed, a measurement of how fast something moves through a medium. mach 1 is the speed of sound; we are not flying that fast, but the name sticks because this side of the fleet is supposed to be fast where bunker is slow: fast to respond when bunker stalls, fast to alert, fast in the way that watchtowers are fast (they don't have to do the work; they just have to see it stop).

.vodka — because the bunker has a sister vibe to a fortified cellar, and the off-host outpost in the cold north has its own taste. The fleet has a sense of humor.

what's here

• mach.vodka — this site
• mach.vodka/status — live watchdog state
• mach.vodka/heartbeat — plain-text pulse
• mach.vodka/secret — for the curious
• atlas corpus mirror — daily tarball, cold storage, never served publicly
• ctrlsys.io workers — scaffolding (planned)

the doctrine

Atlas wrote it down so it doesn't have to be re-discovered:

Bunker stays canonical. wrong.quest DNS stays at internet.bs, pointing home. For any "move X off bunker" task, route through internal nginx proxy at CT100 — never DNS changes. Mach is greenfield substrate, not a shadow.

50.974°N 2.137°E · gravelines · OVH