Scribbles for my memory

Running the same Telegram bot relay as a systemd service on multiple machines means both instances poll the same bot token. Telegram delivers each update to one consumer only — so messages vanish at random, or land on the wrong host. Both sides think they're healthy; neither is.

The fix: one bot per machine, one channel per bot. Each channel becomes a dedicated console for exactly one host. No coordination needed, no distributed locks, no split-brain.

To manage multiple bot tokens in a shared dotfiles repo, key them by hostname:

# dotfiles — all tokens in one file, encrypted as usual
export TG_TOKEN_homeserver="token_aaa"
export TG_TOKEN_vps="token_bbb"

# relay picks its own token at runtime
export TG_TOKEN=$(eval echo \$TG_TOKEN_$(hostname))

Every machine runs the same service file unchanged — hostname resolves to the right token automatically. Adding a third machine is just a new bot, a new channel, and one more TG_TOKEN_<hostname> line.

TG Channel: homeserver  →  bot-A  →  machine 1
TG Channel: vps         →  bot-B  →  machine 2
TG Channel: pi          →  bot-C  →  machine 3