`POST /jobs` ended at a `queued` row and an upload URL; nothing moved it.
This is the join, plus the two things that join turns out to need.
## The scheduler
`src/dispatch` ticks every 5s: for each idle, claimed printer on a farm with
a connected gateway, take the oldest unassigned queued job and send
`start_print`. A timer rather than an event, because a job becomes
dispatchable for two unrelated reasons - someone queued it, or a printer
became free - and the second has no event this backend owns. It arrives as a
telemetry snapshot, seconds after the fact. A scheduler that only ran on job
creation would leave a queue stuck forever behind one busy printer.
Claiming is an `UPDATE ... WHERE status = 'queued'` that returns the row, so
two ticks cannot both win the same job. Selecting and then updating would let
a tick and a nudge each believe they owned it and send two starts.
It checks the bucket before dispatching. `POST /jobs` hands back a presigned
PUT and returns, so the row exists before the file does; dispatching anyway
would have the gateway download R2's 403 error document and give it to a
printer as a project. A job whose file never arrives just stays queued, and a
zero-byte upload fails outright because it will never become valid. The
download URL is presigned at dispatch and not at creation - a queued job may
wait days.
## Job state comes from telemetry, not from the gateway's ok
This is the part that is not obvious and was learned the expensive way on
2026-10-15: a real print was accepted, uploaded byte-perfect, reached
RUNNING, and then the printer paused itself on a physical broken-filament
fault. A job marked `printing` on the gateway's reply would have claimed to
be printing for the rest of the day.
So `advanceJobsFrom` runs on every telemetry snapshot and the mapping lives
in `job_status.ts`, apart from the database so every pair can be tested
without a Postgres or a printer. The line that matters: an idle printer does
*not* complete a job that is still `uploading`. A printer is idle for the
entire transfer - minutes of it, at the 0.2 MiB/s measured over FTPS - so
reading that as completion would mark every job successful seconds after
dispatch, before the file reached the machine. 15 tests cover the table
exhaustively.
Because the gateway now acks a start immediately (it must - awaiting the
transfer would stop its telemetry for minutes, and telemetry is what this
depends on), a failure after the ack has no result message to travel on.
Hence the reaper: a job `uploading` for 20 minutes is failed, not requeued,
because the printer may actually be printing it and a requeue would put a
second job on a working machine.
## Unclaimed printers are visible now
`persistTelemetry` still refuses to create printer rows for gateway ids it
does not recognise - a typo in a `printers.toml` becoming a permanent phantom
printer is worse. But the refusal was silent, which made the worst first-run
experience in the platform: gateway connects, reports happily, fleet stays
empty, and the only evidence is in stderr. The observation is now kept and
served by `GET /farms/:id/unclaimed-printers`, with `gatewayOnline` alongside
it because an empty list otherwise cannot distinguish "all claimed" from "no
gateway ever connected". Claiming is still `POST /printers`, still owner-only.
77 tests pass.
octoturge
564d01816b