podman wraps a bare HealthCmd as CMD-SHELL (measured on Dankclaw's podman 5.7:
--health-cmd "/surreal is-ready" stores {"Test":["CMD-SHELL","/surreal is-ready"]}),
and the pinned SurrealDB v2 image is distroless — no /bin/sh, not even `ls`.
So the probe could never run: every 30 s interval exited 1 in ~30 ms with empty
output while the database was listening and answering, and open-notebook's first
deploy died at the gate ("did not become healthy in 90s"). The hand-check
`podman exec … /surreal is-ready` printed OK, which is why the old comment
believed the probe worked.
The JSON array survives the Quadlet generator (--health-cmd "[\"/surreal\",\"is-ready\"]")
and stores ["CMD","/surreal","is-ready"], which execs directly: a throwaway
instance of the pinned digest went healthy on that form. The seam is re-pinned
to the shell-free contract; the old assertion forbade quotes in any HealthCmd,
which is what pinned the broken shape.
Two containers, because that is what upstream runs (docker-compose.yml:6,13):
the app image under supervisord, plus SurrealDB. The `v1-latest-single` tag is
not in play — it bundles its own database, is deprecated upstream, and would
give the host a second hidden DB.
Both images are digest-pinned with Pull=never and a documented one-time pull,
the frank-dragoon posture: a Quadlet on :latest re-resolves on the first restart
after an unrelated daemon-reload, and the failure is silent.
Port map paid for by what is already on the host: seerr holds 127.0.0.1:5055
(since 2026-10-14, live `ss -ltn` agrees), so the API leaves on 5056 and the env
file has to set API_URL to match, because the frontend derives the API URL from
the window origin when it is unset. 8502 publishes on 0.0.0.0 — the service
carries its own password and the episode-audio route is unauthenticated. 8000 is
published nowhere, where upstream exposes it on loopback with root credentials.
The app joins dankclaw_default first and the private systemd-open-notebook
second: it reaches the published fleet endpoints through the former
(host.containers.internal, the arrangement Prometheus is proven against) and
finds its database by container name through the latter. Generated --network
flags keep file order, so the tunable file is listed before the host secret file
in both units — podman applies last-match-wins.
No UserMapping: the app runs as root in its namespace (no USER in the Dockerfile)
and writes only paths owned by that root. Exec= carries no database credential —
`exec start --user --pass` puts it in world-readable argv; the image's own
entrypoint passes it on stdin, so only the container env holds it.
Frank