Field note
Marks a validator operator can keep beside an epoch boundary
Operators who book the validator shelf rarely need a definition of an epoch. They need a short list for the week when a client upgrade and an epoch boundary land together. The list on our shelf is ordinary and public.
The marks are the version string the node reports, the vote account the identity is using, whether votes are still landing, and which feature gates in the release are scheduled rather than already active. Any log wording the release calls out for bankhash or replay trouble is marked as well. Those lines are easy to miss if the only thing read is the upgrade command.
You read the version string on your own host. The desk matches it to the note. Keys stay with you, and nobody from the library signs in to a machine. That boundary keeps the appointment inside library work.
A habit we borrowed from operators who ride in from Gwangju for desk hours: keep the three-line version of the list where you will see it during a restart, and rewrite a line only when a release changes that line. A fresh essay every epoch becomes noise beside the logs.
When a release also changes a default flag for gossip, snapshots, or an accounts cache, that flag gets its own line. It is kept separate from “upgrade the binary.” The binary and the flags are different decisions, and the shelf files them that way.