Abstract
This document discloses, in enabling detail, an autonomous and self-healing bare-metal deployment autopilot. The system drives an end-to-end deployment pipeline through a single uniform per-phase contract — attempt(phase, max, work, verify, heal) — that verifies the desired state before performing any work, performs the phase's work at most once, and on continued failure either remediates and retries or hard-escalates to a human. Verifying first makes every phase idempotent and turns an interrupted run into a resumable one at no extra cost. The defensible element of this disclosure is the mechanism by which the autopilot remediates a node whose in-band control plane (the operating-system management agent) has gone silent. Rather than retrying, timing out, or marking the node failed — the industry-standard responses — the autopilot performs out-of-band differential diagnosis: it reads a pair of sensors over the node's baseboard management controller (BMC) — the physical NIC LinkStatus and the firmware-reported BootProgress.LastState — and selects a remediation as a two-dimensional function of that sensor pair, dispatching to one of several distinct physical actuators. The joint reading disambiguates causes that look identical from the in-band side (all three present as "node unreachable") but demand entirely different physical fixes. The disclosure also covers the surrounding domain heals — patience against management-plane extension synchronization lag, discovery-and-pinning of moving required extension versions from the validator's own error text, and classification of hardware asymmetry as physically unremediable — and a full firmware-inventory diff used as a node-symmetry verifier. Together these establish dated public prior art intended to bar patenting of the disclosed mechanism.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
Recommended Citation
Assuncao, gustavo matthew, "Verify-First Phase Autopilot with Out-of-Band Differential Diagnosis", Technical Disclosure Commons, ()
https://www.tdcommons.org/dpubs_series/10963