observer: remove redundant manual config validators #8538
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Remove validateSyslog() and validateDebugAddr() from observer/obs_conf.go. These manual validators predate Boulder's struct validation framework and are now redundant with existing validation tags on the config structs. This also fixes a bug where observer rejected SyslogLevel: -1, which is valid for disabling syslog in containerized environments. The struct tag on cmd.SyslogConfig correctly specifies min=-1,max=7. The refactor adds a call to struct validation after YAML unmarshaling in boulder-observer's main(), aligning it with how other Boulder components validate configuration.
sheurich
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Jan 3, 2026
Points to sheurich/fix-observer-syslog-validation branch which removes the manual config validator that incorrectly rejected sysloglevel: -1 in containerized environments. Upstream PR: letsencrypt/boulder#8538 Fixes: HE-31
aarongable
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Jan 7, 2026
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Tagging in @beautifulentropy as second reviewer, as the author of both boulder-observer and our validator integration.
MonConfs and Buckets are already validated by struct tags (min=1,dive). These manual checks in MakeObserver() were unreachable dead code.
beautifulentropy
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Jan 8, 2026
aarongable
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Jan 9, 2026
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Summary
validateSyslog()andvalidateDebugAddr()fromobserver/obs_conf.govalidator.New()incmd/boulder-observer/main.goBackground
boulder-observer (created March 2021) has manual validation functions that predate Boulder's struct validation framework (March 2023). These manual validators are now redundant with existing struct validation tags:
The manual
validateSyslog()also had a bug: it rejectedSyslogLevel: -1, butcmd.SyslogConfigallows-1to disable syslog logging (added in #6307 for containerized environments).Test plan
go test ./observer/...passesgo build ./cmd/boulder-observer/...succeedsSyslogLevel: -1is now correctly acceptedWhen we added automatic config validation to Boulder, we also added the relevant struct tags to as many config structs as we could. This included boulder-observer's config structs, despite the fact that the config validation doesn't run on boulder-observer's configs, due to them being custom yaml rather than our standard json format.
Add a validation call to boulder-observer's main.go. Remove the handwritten config validation from obs_conf.go, and the corresponding unit tests.
Also fix a bug: validateSyslog() rejected level -1, even though we generally want to be able to set the log level to -1 to wholly disable logging.