Release 2.1.55 (2026-06-23)

Bug fixes

• wait for SSH readiness before the cloud-init probe so a boot race is not a hard fail (#1776) On a fresh off-platform box, await_readiness raced sshd startup: a single cloud-init probe that hit the IAP boot-time 4003 connect error (ssh exit 255) was conflated with a real cloud-init fault and hard-failed the create at a non-deterministic point with a misleading message.

Add an explicit, bounded SSH-readiness wait ahead of the cloud-init poll (and the verbose log tail, which also tunnels in), so neither races sshd. Connection-class failures (ssh 255 / IAP 4003) are now distinguished from cloud-init's own error/degraded exits by return code and treated as 'still booting, retry'; only an exhausted timeout is terminal, with a message that says the box never became reachable. The readiness probes run quietly via a new transport quiet flag so the expected connect errors no longer spam the operator with raw 4003 noise.