Research & Lab Update: September 4, 2026

Stargate NVMe Workspace Consolidation

The canonical execution root for all automation workflows has been consolidated onto stargate's high-speed local NVMe pool at /mnt/clusterfs2/workspace/lab-franklin/ansible/. This migration resolves path fragmentation across historical network shares and centralizes execution directly on the controller node. Local cache hierarchies, temporary artifact paths, and collection search paths have been codified inside ansible.cfg, eliminating runtime cache instantiation failures.

Ansible Collection Hierarchy & Dependency Mapping

The internal collection hierarchy has been standardized under the canonical lab.franklin namespace. Key updates include:

• Configured explicit dependency graphs inside meta/main.yml across all foundational roles, ensuring baseline runtimes (such as lab.franklin.python) converge before dependent tasks execute.
• Eliminated legacy Galaxy placeholder boilerplate across role metadata manifests.
• Aligned collection symlinks to enable fully qualified collection name (FQCN) resolution natively during ansible-playbook --syntax-check validation sweeps.

Lab Operations Manual Manifest Synchronization

The public Lab Operations Manual and research infrastructure on wonderland were reconciled against active controller ground truth. The update aligned index.html and index.json manifests, purged legacy relative stylesheet imports in favor of the canonical https://www.bitsmasher.net/css/www.bitsmasher.net.css endpoint, and brought DOM landmarks into strict compliance with automated validation hooks.