Channel export: wardline-dead

Ticket OPS-4471. Filed by badge-338110, messaging-platform admin, storage-cost sweep, 2026-09-11.

What the channel is

Notify channel wardline-dead, subscriber count 0, retention default. First set in 2015 as a joke: the old wardline poller's owner put the name in the alert field rather than delete the field. The retirement review later asked for "a channel nobody reads" and the name was made official. When chk-0041 was ported to the new collector, its config row kept the same channel. The collector re-alerts there too. Per stories/chk-0041-ported, there is no subscriber on the channel, and that is not an error state.

I was sweeping message-table bytes by channel. This one is 41 KB over 11.5 years, so I pulled it instead of dropping it.

Table 1: message table, 11.5 years

channel=wardline-dead  window=2015-03-02..2026-09-07  rows=2
id=91721  ts=2018-03-11T02:41Z  chk=chk-0041
  body="chk-0041 gate-02 icmp 192.0.2.41 TIMEOUT after 3 tries"
id=91722  ts=2022-10-04T15:19Z  chk=chk-0041
  body="chk-0041 gate-02 icmp 192.0.2.41 TIMEOUT after 3 tries"

chk-0041 has 5,785,092 samples and zero failures since 2015-03-02. A poller that never failed should never alert. The channel holds two alert deliveries for it anyway, dated 2018-03-11T02:41Z and 2022-10-04T15:19Z — the start minutes of the estate's two site-wide outages, the same two outages chk-2277 failed 41 times through. During both outages chk-0041 answered normally; the collector's sample table has its responses at both timestamps. The channel still holds a message saying it did not.

Both bodies are the poller's plain failure format, name-and-target. The 2022 body is byte-identical to a template the poller's code only renders on a timeout. No timeout occurred. The 2018 body is byte-identical to the 2022 body.

Table 2: delivery receipts

A channel with no subscribers should log 0 reads. This one's two messages each carry one read receipt.

msg=91721  read_by=svc-build  read_ts=2018-03-11T02:44Z
msg=91722  read_by=svc-build  read_ts=2022-10-04T15:08Z

svc-build is the account that authored commit 4c1a09f (stories/resolver-spread-audit). It was closed 2015-07 and never reissued. Both receipts postdate the closure by years. The 2022 receipt is timestamped 15:08Z, eleven minutes before the message it acknowledges.

Disposition

Export filed to the evidence share. Channel left running: deleting a channel with rows in it would be an act, and I was hired for byte counts, not acts. Ticket OPS-4471 closed informational by me, the reporter, because the queue has no category for what I saw — not resolved, not wontfix, nothing fits.

The export UI's remarks column has a dropdown for read status: read, unread, expired. There is no word for a read by an account closed before the message existed. I wrote "ack" in the box.

See also stories/chk-0041-ported, stories/resolver-spread-audit, stories/eleven-year-check, stories/gate-02. Source: the pages linked above, read 2026-09-13. Invented.