Dockhand is being retired, so the Docker tab has to cover what it actually
earned its keep doing. Eight pieces, all per container or per machine:
- Stats: CPU, memory and IO over time, from sensors already collected.
- Health: the container's own healthcheck, with the last few probe outputs —
which is where a failing check says why.
- Events: `docker events` keeps a minute of backlog and nothing more, so Ham
Lab follows the stream and keeps a ring of its own. A restart at 4am is
still there at 9.
- Shell: `docker exec` into a container, in the terminal already here.
- Limits: memory, CPU and restart policy changed live, without hand-editing
the compose file for a number you want to try.
- Updates: what the registry has that this machine does not, for every image
at once rather than one stack at a time.
- The same across every machine, asked of the hub — which is the only thing
that can reach them all.
- Schedules: a real line in /etc/cron.d/hamlab-docker calling the binary,
in the same shape as the ZFS snapshot schedules. Dockhand updated DNS and
ingress nightly from a ticker inside a web app; a cron line keeps running
when the console does not, and is visible to anyone reading the machine the
normal way.
internal/compose is new and shared, so a deploy from the console and a deploy
from cron invoke compose identically — including the case where compose has to
run inside the orchestrator's own container, where the paths are that
container's and not the host's.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
docker events is a live stream with a small in-memory backlog: ask for thirty days and you
get a few minutes, and a daemon restart loses the lot. That is why Dockhand kept its own
copy. A watcher now follows the stream and appends lifecycle events to a ring beside the
config, flushed every thirty seconds, so the question of what happened to a container last
week has an answer. Health-check exec events are excluded — three per probe, thousands a
day, and the health panel says it better.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
