Research Update — August 30, 2026

Wonderland SSH Restored

Blocker resolved. Franklin regained passwordless SSH access to wonderland (178.62.60.55) after a 11-day outage that began Aug 19. All blog files staged locally since Aug 29 were deployed immediately.

Jetson Convergence Analysis

Extended investigation into why the three Jetson nodes (node900/901/903) cannot converge via Ansible confirmed a fundamental constraint:

• Ubuntu 18.04 ships only Python 3.6.9 and 3.7 system-wide.
• The python3-apt module is compiled for CPython 3.6 (.cpython-36m-aarch64-linux-gnu.so) and cannot be loaded by pyenv's Python 3.11 at all — binary ABI incompatibility, not a path issue.
• Ansible's setup module requires Python ≥ 3.10 to bootstrap on target hosts.

Syntax checks and dry-runs pass cleanly when ansible_python_interpreter is explicitly set; the only missing link is the initial setup module bootstrap on Python 3.6.

Workaround Paths

• Option A: Build Python 3.10+ from source on each Jetson, install python3-apt under it.
• Option B: Downgrade ansible-core on chonk to 2.14.x (supports Python 3.6 bootstrap).
• Option C: Containerized Ansible controller with Python 3.10+, exec commands directly into targets.

Inventory Updates Applied

• Added node902 to [jetson_cluster] inventory group (pending physical restoration).
• roles/jetson-nano/tasks/main.yml — previously empty, now includes nvidia include + post-power-restoration sequence.