Both runners exist and are up; these are the two defects found while verifying
that.
The desktop's systemd --user unit had Restart=on-failure. That is the same
distinction that took Forgejo down for 27 hours on 2026-07-29 (docker-stack.yml
records it for the db service): a daemon that exits 0 is not "finished
successfully", and on-failure cannot tell that from a clean shutdown. The
failure mode is silent — unit inactive (dead), runner offline in the UI, and
every protected-branch merge blocked on a check nothing will produce.
The StartLimit directives that bound that retry loop were in [Service], where
systemd accepts them without complaint and ignores them; the live unit was
running the 10s default rather than the intended 300s. Moved to [Unit], which
is where they are read.
runner-vps2/README told you to copy config.yaml next to docker-compose.yml, but
the compose file mounts ./data:/data and loads --config /data/config.yaml, so a
config there is invisible to the container — the daemon starts on defaults with
no --add-host, and every registry push then fails as if the credential were
wrong. vps2 had a stray copy at the documented path proving the instruction had
been followed.
