A gateway hard-killed while draining (a container/VM recreate SIGTERMs it
before _stop_impl reaches its terminal-state persist) leaves
gateway_state.json frozen at 'draining'. With no explicit desired_state to
fall back to, container_boot read that transient value literally, found it
not in _AUTOSTART_STATES, and left the gateway DOWN on every subsequent
boot — dashboard up, messaging silently dark. Observed on a relay-opted-in
staging instance (2026-06): the s6 gateway-default slot kept its 'down'
marker across recreates and the gateway never came back.
'draining' is a transient sub-state of RUNNING (written by the drain
watcher / scale-to-zero go-dormant path), never an operator stop and never
a failed boot. Normalise it to 'running' in the gateway_state fallback so a
stranded drain marker reads as the run-intent it represents. This extends
gateway/run.py's #42675 handling (persist 'running' on an unexpected signal)
to the case where the gateway died before persisting anything at all.
'starting'/'startup_failed' are deliberately NOT normalised — those mean a
mid-boot death and must stay down to avoid the crash-loop the down-marker
guard prevents. An explicit desired_state still wins verbatim, so an
operator stop survives a transient 'draining' runtime value.
Tests: draining named-profile + default-root autostart (both fail without
the fix), plus a guard that an explicit desired_state=stopped still blocks a
draining runtime.
Ben
d3f2931b8c