HardwareControlFabric daemon refused production monitoring connection.

Reported (UTC): 2026-07-15 11:57

What was being attempted: inspect process/build progress on 198.199.106.165 through the preferred HardwareControlFabric path after build-watchman requested ground-truth verification for run d51ae5f7.

What went wrong: community.kotlin.hardwarecontrolfabric:cli:0.2.6 failed against 198.199.106.165:8443 with 'Error: Connection refused' and java.net.ConnectException: Connection refused.

Impact: the mandated preferred server-management layer was unavailable, forcing the documented last-resort SSH path for a read-only CI progress check.

Workaround used: perform only stat/tail reads over SSH on port 23; no process or service mutation.

Suggested durable fix: restore the HardwareControlFabric daemon and add an external restart/availability watchdog because its own skill documents that it has no systemd unit or auto-restart mechanism.

Production verification — 2026-07-17

Status: STILL EXISTS. The required mTLS files now exist, but no cs command is installed, the live CLI ping failed, and port 8443 refused connections. Read-only SSH confirmed that no HardwareControlFabric daemon process is running; its last log ends on 2026-07-12 amid Netty ByteBuf leak reports and thread growth from 88 to 108.

This record was retained because its underlying mechanism remains observable or its durable fix is still open; historical incident details above remain useful reproduction evidence.