uptime_sec came from the clone directory's own mtime, but a running VM's
hypervisor can rewrite lock files under that same directory at any point,
resetting the mtime and pinning "up" near 0s for the VM's entire life --
worst exactly while a build is actively running, since that's when the VM
is busiest. The clone name already carries its own creation timestamp
(_make_clone_name, parsed back via parse_clone_name), set once and never
disturbed after -- prefer it, falling back to the old mtime read only for
a name that doesn't parse.
Stage A: swap CSS tokens to the real Gitea dark palette (accent blue #4183c4); add Jinja formatting filters (humanbytes/duration/relative_time/localtime/shorten_path/thousands), a health status-header, and an inline SVG icon sprite; fix two UI bugs — unthemed action pages (htmx swap into #action-slot with a full-page HX-Request fallback) and polling wiping form input (hx-preserve).
Stage B: four read-only panels that degrade to notices (never 500) — host resources (/proc, two-sample CPU%), VMware module health, template inventory (.vmem warn + last backup), and a path-contained file browser; backup card becomes a validated template dropdown; expensive dir-size walk is TTL-cached. Adds operations/inventory.py plus host_resources()/vmware_module_health() in operations/host.py.
Stage C: parse_clone_name() adds a Job column (job_id + started) to the VM table; nav gains a Gitea link-out derived from the OIDC issuer origin (no fabricated run URLs); audit page gets action icons, relative time, and a client-side filter.
Gates: 989 tests pass, coverage 94.12%, ruff + mypy --strict clean. Stage D (service management) intentionally deferred.
A job killed mid-flight never released its IP lease; with only 4 pool addresses a single leak exhausted the pool ("IP pool exhausted after 60s"). IpSlotPool.reconcile() releases leases whose owner clone-dir is gone; vm cleanup runs it only against the real build_vms base. Closes TODO §2.8.
Simone