Measured 2026-09-19. After a reboot, eleven containers reported `Up 9 hours`
with a State.Pid that no longer existed -- ntfy, bitwarden, authelia, gitea,
grafana, prometheus among them. ntfy's healthcheck had failed 539 consecutive
times while podman ps called it up, and it stayed that way overnight because
every ordinary check said yes.
podman-restart.service is Type=oneshot and forks a conmon per container into
its own cgroup. One container failing to create fails the unit, and systemd's
default KillMode=control-group then SIGKILLs every conmon it just started.
conmon is what updates container state, so killed it updates nothing.
Fix applied as ~/config/host/podman-restart-killmode.sh (KillMode=process),
which also carries a --check mode for finding zombies.
⚠ Also records that `kill -0 <pid>` is the wrong liveness test here: the
containers run as root, so as a normal user it fails with EPERM rather than
ESRCH and reports every container dead. That misdiagnosis was made during
this very investigation and read as a total outage for a minute.
connor
24dd2bf59f