On a fresh-start reinstall (wipe=data/all of a disk that held an install), the operator
re-answers everything, including answers the machine already knows — node modes and hosts,
sidechain, alerts. A bench session lost its remote-Tari setting this way: the form defaulted
Tari to local and the machine started downloading a chain the operator never wanted locally.
The previous config sits on the target's data partition during the installer session. The host
(which already enumerates disks) could, for a pithead-with-data target, mount the data
partition read-only, read pithead/config.json, strip the secrets (dashboard auth, view keys,
node passwords, workers), and publish the remainder to the spool as the form's pre-fill —
exactly the last-attempt.json mechanism the pre-seed path already uses. The operator sees
their old answers as the starting point and changes what they came to change.
Host-side only (the container never mounts anything), read-only, and secrets never reach the
page. Not load-bearing: the form works without it — this is a convenience with a real failure
story behind it.
On a fresh-start reinstall (wipe=data/all of a disk that held an install), the operator
re-answers everything, including answers the machine already knows — node modes and hosts,
sidechain, alerts. A bench session lost its remote-Tari setting this way: the form defaulted
Tari to local and the machine started downloading a chain the operator never wanted locally.
The previous config sits on the target's data partition during the installer session. The host
(which already enumerates disks) could, for a pithead-with-data target, mount the data
partition read-only, read pithead/config.json, strip the secrets (dashboard auth, view keys,
node passwords, workers), and publish the remainder to the spool as the form's pre-fill —
exactly the last-attempt.json mechanism the pre-seed path already uses. The operator sees
their old answers as the starting point and changes what they came to change.
Host-side only (the container never mounts anything), read-only, and secrets never reach the
page. Not load-bearing: the form works without it — this is a convenience with a real failure
story behind it.