TELEICU/Current state assessment
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The current TELEICU deployment across 200+ sites suffers from three systemic reliability factors. This page documents them so the upgrade targets them specifically.
Factor 1: Power and internet disruption
Sites in semi-urban and rural areas experience unreliable grid power and internet connectivity.
Impact:
- Nodes go offline without graceful shutdown, risking data corruption on the underlying filesystem
- Configuration pull agents (once deployed) will have irregular check-in windows
- Monitoring must account for nodes that are expected to be offline for hours at a time
- Alerting must distinguish between a genuinely failed node and one that is simply disconnected
Factor 2: Tampering and configuration drift
Hospital PCs are physically accessible to local staff. This has led to:
- Cloudflare tunnel credentials being modified or replaced
- Docker Compose files being hand-edited, breaking expected service definitions
- System configuration (networking, firewall rules) being changed without change control
- No audit trail for who made what change
Impact:
- Declared state and actual state diverge silently
- Support calls increase as nodes exhibit non-standard behavior
- Security posture degrades as tunnel creds may be compromised
Both upgrade paths address this differently:
- Ansible: ansible-pull reverts drift on each run (soft guarantee — drift can exist between pull intervals)
- NixOS: Immutable /etc — tampering is impossible without rebooting to a different generation (hard guarantee)
Factor 3: OS security and maintenance gaps
The fleet is fragmented across three Ubuntu versions:
- Ubuntu 20.04 — several nodes, nearing or past EOL for some packages
- Ubuntu 22.04 — the majority
- Ubuntu 24.04 — newer additions
Impact:
- No consistent patch cadence across the fleet
- Security patches applied ad-hoc or not at all
- Ansible roles / NixOS modules must handle version-specific differences
- Upgrade path to a single baseline requires either OS reinstall (NixOS) or an in-place upgrade playbook (Ansible)
Summary
All three factors compound: unreliable connectivity makes updates harder, tampering makes state unpredictable, and OS fragmentation makes every node slightly different. The migration strategy targets all three simultaneously by enforcing a single, immutable or pull-reconciled configuration across a uniform OS baseline.