Too Good an Isolation

Last time I cheerfully reported: all supporting infrastructure is up, bots are running, containers build automatically. Victory. Curtain.

The curtain came up too early.

It turned out the admin bot works in exactly one sense: it’s running. It responds to commands, can send notifications — alive, in short. But everything involving file operations fails. Add a device — fails. Generate a connection config — fails. Trial access — also unavailable.

The cause, I think, is obvious: I packaged the bot into a Docker container and isolated it too well. Inside the container — a clean environment with all dependencies. Outside — the data the bot can no longer reach. Everything it needs to read and write lives on the host, and I didn’t bother mounting the right directories via volumes. The result was predictable.

Fixing it is probably not hard. Maybe even easier than writing this post. But my head is elsewhere right now.

Over the past few days I’ve been unexpectedly seized by a passion for tidiness. Sorting through git: organizing folders, reviving old abandoned projects, sprucing up my personal page. Somewhere last autumn, when the VPN suddenly went down, I dropped another project — now I want to pick it back up. Useful busywork, but nothing to do with the bot.

So the bot remains in a nearly-working state for now. Infrastructure exists, functionality doesn’t. When it’s fixed — I’ll report back.