v1.8.14 — the healthy datastore was the one that crashed
Two crashes and a placeholder that stood in for a real answer.
datastore list failed every time on a healthy datastore: an empty style
string rendered []12.5%[/], which Rich parses as markup and rejects. Only the
normal case crashed, which is how it shipped. A datastore legitimately named
[SSD] prod hit the same parser.
vsan_health hardcoded overall_health: "unknown" under a note claiming a full
health check was out of reach. It is not — vsanapiutils ships inside pyvmomi
and the health system sits beside the config system this skill already uses. The
placeholder was the worst possible one, because vSAN returns "unknown" itself:
"we did not ask" was spelled identically to "vSAN does not know", and here it
stood in for red.
The suite also stopped writing to the operator's real audit database.
The vmware-policy floor moves to >=1.11.0. Policy 1.11.0 stops the engine
failing open: on a host whose locale is not UTF-8, reading rules.yaml raised a
decode error that was swallowed, and a freeze-production-writes rule came back
ALLOW. No new API is used here, so the floor could have stayed — it is raised
because leaving it low means a user resolving 1.10.0 keeps the permissive engine
and the fix never reaches them. One behaviour travels with it: on a host whose
rules file cannot be read, operations move from all-allowed to all-denied.
VMWARE_POLICY_DISABLED=1 is checked above the rules, so the escape hatch does
not itself depend on them loading.
Also in this release: the suite no longer appends to the operator's real
~/.vmware/audit.db. It held over 30,000 rows dominated by tool names nobody
had invoked, including 1,400 entries for a destructive operation that never
happened — an audit trail carrying test fiction cannot answer the question it is
kept for.