Chunk 7.0

In this chunk, the critical `VAST_CONTAINERLABEL` mystery was definitively resolved—it **is** injected into containers by Vast.ai, but only as a non-exported shell variable, making it invisible to `env` in SSH sessions but fully available to the Docker entrypoint. This validated the original design. The Docker image was rebuilt and pushed, and the old instance `32709851` was destroyed. A new instance (`32710471`) was created, but the `--ssh` launch mode replaced the Docker ENTRYPOINT with Vast's own init script, requiring the use of `--onstart-cmd` to run the lifecycle entrypoint in the background, providing both SSH access and automated worker management. A major bug was identified and fixed in the `vast-manager` monitor: it matched DB instances to Vast API instances solely by the API's `label` field, which remains `null` unless explicitly set via `vastai label`. This caused the monitor to incorrectly kill the new instance. The fix introduced an ID-based fallback map (`idMap`) that extracts the Vast instance ID from the `C.<id>` label pattern, ensuring correct matching for all lifecycle operations. The first end-to-end test revealed a benchmark failure where the warmup proof failed with a gRPC transport error during PCE extraction, causing `set -e` in `benchmark.sh` to abort the entire pipeline. Both `benchmark.sh` and `entrypoint.sh` were hardened to handle this gracefully. The fixed scripts were deployed to the running instance and the updated Docker image was pushed. The user then directed the assistant to handle two more impacted instances on specific hosts (`93197`, `88910`), working non-interactively until they run correctly. The themes of this chunk center on adapting to platform-specific quirks (Vast's SSH environment handling and entrypoint replacement), fixing critical service matching logic, and hardening worker lifecycle scripts against real-world failure modes like benchmark timeouts, positioning the system for reliable automated deployment.

The Hardening: From Platform Quirks to Production Resilience in a Distributed GPU Proving System 3169 words

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