PSU LED flickered amber. Then red. Afternoon.
Checked—no, stared at Fogo's Deterministic leader schedule. Three slots this epoch. First one in forty minutes. I had time. I always have time. That's the habit.
PoH tick in the corner. On Fogo you don't sync to network time. Network syncs to PoH.
Pre-flight clean. Gossip healthy. Vote pipeline normal. My slice of the active zone looked tight.
Didn't check power draw. Second PSU running warm. Heat on my wrist before I checked the gauge. Told myself it was summer. Told myself the cooling was handling it.
First slot approached. Watched PoH advance. Not nervous. I've produced before.
Fogo SVM execution Slot boundary opened. Started block production. Firedancer sequencing. Banking stage active.
Then the heat spiked.
Not gradual. Sudden. That half-second before thermal throttle. Felt it on my wrist. Hand moving toward the rack when failover triggered.
Second PSU took load. Vote stage kept scrolling. The cluster kept producing.
I didn't produce in that slot.
Failover took 800 milliseconds. On a Fogo 40ms cadence that's not "recovering." That's missing the whole window. Twenty slots gone. Leader window rotated three times before I rejoined.
My leader slots were gone by the time I came back. Same stack. Same runtime. Just… not my turn anymore.
My commission. Not mine.
Stared at logs. No error. No crash. Just "leader rotation skipped." "Vote not included." Chain kept extending. PoH kept ticking. Like I was never assigned.
Checked stake dashboard. Uptime dipped. Just enough. Next epoch, my leader schedule lighter.
The schedule doesn't check your LEDs. It checks your timing.
Power-cycled PSU. LED green now. Thermal normal. Everything healthy. Validator producing again. Just not in the slots I lost.
Evening. Next epoch loads in six hours. Could sleep. Could check logs again. Could stare at the LED and wait for amber.
Thumb on the power switch. Not pressing. Warm. The schedule doesn't feel heat. It feels absence.
Fogo chonical client Firedancer keeps producing. Epoch extends. Whether my stake is in the active set or waiting.
The switch is warm.