Valid questions, point taken, but let me still address concerns one by one.
I’m not aware of innards either. I’m just another dude/gal like yourself.
When I embarked on a journey of trying to figure out the issue for you, I also had no clue what is wrong. I have never seen that failure before in my life. But I was convinced you cannot be the very first one who hits that bug, so I asked you for more full logs, then read them (with eyes) line by line until the first warnig/error. The same thing I would have done if I was solving any of my issues. (I have none, everything works, so to scratch the itch of solving puzzles I hang out here)
I found “not signed by any CA in the whitelist” in the blob of first failure log. I had no clue what that meant either. But I assumed you can’t be the first one who encountered it, so So I searched the forum, and found this comment by @Alexey
I copy-pasted the answer.
What if there was no forum post? I would have searched source on GitHub for that sentence. It would have been quite easy to figure out what failure results in that log message.
I’m using the same approach for everything. I like debugging and triaging (it’s my day job) but I"m also phenomenally lazy, and I don’t want to do the work that someone else has already done before. So I search error messages in forums, chats, slack, GitHub, etc. 99.34% of the time this yields the solution or significant progress. The remaining 0.66% are the new puzzles that I end up solving myself and loving every second of doing so.
A big part of it is, in fact, humility, nor arrogance: not thinking that I’m the first one to encounter a specific issue, or that behavior I’m seeing is a bug in the software, etc. Because in 99.34% of time it is not the case. And therefore solution is almost certainly a search away.
Just like with the previous question – forum search for “Is disqualification permanent?” yields:
It was not chosen arbitrarily 
But I’m aware that in western world a lot of sugarcoating is required in normal communication, I’m working on making my rants more palatable, not everyone operates straight on facts, but I’m not putting too much effort into it. It’s a technical forum, I would have also preferred brief answers that show direction to handholding and sugarcoating myself.
That data is encrypted/sigend with node identity? It’s described in the whitepaper. So of course it’s obvious, but it requires reading the whitepaper in the first place.
I don’t feel superior, and I learn something new every day. I’m far from being familiar with storagenode software. What you sensed in my comments as superiority and arrogance is in fact mild annoyance that all of your questions could have been answered by forum searches. And answered much faster than typing the post and waiting for responses. To be clear – this is mild annoyance, and I did not have to repond “if it bothered me so much”, but I’m here to help, and I hope I did not just help but maybe showed a bit of approach.
This is not specific to storj or this forum. It’s a general attitudes towards asking questions.There is a good old writeup floating on the interwebs https://www.catb.org/esr/faqs/smart-questions.html on precisely that.
I have adopted that approach (before stumbling on that writeup) myself. It’s very powerful.
The idea is you start writing an email/post with questions about the problem you encountered. If you described the problem well, steps you took to solve it, what went wrong, and were you are stuck, your brain will be forced to arrange the thoughts in a coherent form to put them in writing, and while doing that you will have a lot of “hmm” and “aha” moments. Ultimately in 94% of cases you would end up not sending that e-mail, because you would have found a solution while writing it.
If you adopt this approach – you’ll find you almost never truly stuck – by the time you are finished typing that email/forum post/etc, you have understood the problem and found a solution, and the satisfaction of having solved the puzzle.
How could have this topic gone instead:
Start writing new post: “I see this error message” … hmmm what was the error message?.. found it! " something something ‘Not signed by any CA’“. “I have no idea what it means” …hmm… maybe I can find out. let me search that… Oh, it is probably because identity is not signed.
Delete last paragraph, write instead – I have signed identity and now see this issue about node id not matching data”… wait… Node id not matching data? Data must be from old node, dang it! Delete the data. Restart. all works. Delete the draft of the post without sending.
I hold myself to that standard, I feel embarrassed if I asked question that I could have found an answer on myself. And I expect the same standard from all participants in any technical discussions, be that here or at work. And if someone does not play by the same rules I feel that I have to do something to help that person become more effective and improve community – so that posts that do end up posted are actually interesting new problems. I want to solve problems, not google on fellow forum user’s behalf. At least this is my perspective.
Anyway, sorry for arrogance, long rants, and I’m glad we figured it out.