A rootless Alloy shipped zero lines: the journal files are
root:systemd-journal 0640 (other::---) and a rootless container carries no
supplementary groups, so sd_journal_open sees an empty view silently; the
rootless quadlet container logs also live in user-1000.journal, not the
ctr.log paths the old config tailed.
As root, one loki.source.journal reads system.journal + user-*.journal
and carries both. Network=host because Loki publishes 127.0.0.1:3100 and
no bridge container can reach the host loopback; the UI binds loopback
directly (no PublishPort). The /etc/machine-id mount is load-bearing —
sd_journal finds the journal dir by the local machine id; without it the
source reads 0 lines, health green.
deploy_alloy routes around the rootless loop: build rootless, mirror the
image into the root store (a root build fails on DNS in the build
container), retire the old rootless alloy unit, install to
/etc/containers/systemd. Validated with a throwaway root probe: 31,825
lines read, 26,966 pushed to Loki in 20s, zero drops.
prometheus, grafana, loki, alloy and node-exporter ran only from
dankclaw/compose.yaml. Rootless podman does not restart bare containers, so
they did not survive the 2026-09-11 reboot for the amd_iommu=off change and
had to be restored by hand — the same gap that had already cost the fleet
Caddy and Pi-hole, which is why the boot-persistence rule exists.
Each is now a rootless Quadlet unit under dankclaw/observability/quadlet/,
installed and dispatched by deploy_observability in deploy-remote.sh, with
the compose definitions retired so only one owner exists per container name.
Images, mounts, arguments and container names are unchanged, so Caddy's
proxies and Prometheus' own scrape config keep resolving.
Two posture changes, both about the unauthenticated surface:
* The three HTTP UIs published on 0.0.0.0 with no authentication of any kind
(Prometheus even with the lifecycle endpoint enabled). They now publish on
127.0.0.1: the browser path is the guarded franksdank.cloud vhost, Caddy
reaches them by name over dankclaw_default, and the host-side homepage
status timer probes loopback. Nothing legitimately used the LAN port.
* node-exporter bound :9100 on every interface; it now binds exactly its two
consumers, loopback (homepage timer) and the LAN address (Prometheus, which
runs in a container and cannot reach the host's loopback).
alloy gains a reachable health endpoint: its UI listens on the container's
own loopback and alloy 1.x refuses a config block for it, so the compose
service had nothing to probe — the homepage status card for alloy read 'down'
continuously. The unit moves the UI with a command-line flag and publishes
127.0.0.1:12345.
grafana keeps its Authentik OAuth client secret without receiving the whole
.env: systemd expands the value from a [Service] EnvironmentFile, which never
reaches the container.
Frank