Run 8's cold mint failed with 'cloud-init status: error' — the box could
not resolve deb.debian.org, or claude.ai, or anything. The cause was not
in that run at all: run 7's phase D set dns.mode=none on claudenet, the
run ended before reverting it, and every box minted afterwards came up
with no DNS.
This is the worst failure mode the drill has: a poisoned host does not
fail the next run honestly, it produces confident wrong answers. It is
how a false design veto against #16 got posted, and it wasted a cold
mint plus an hour of diagnosis that had nothing to do with the code
under test.
Three defences:
· the phase-D revert is armed with a trap BEFORE the first mutation,
so it fires on any exit, Ctrl-C included;
· the revert is VERIFIED rather than fired into /dev/null, so a failed
unset can no longer masquerade as a successful one;
· the drill refuses to start on a host still carrying the mutations.
And drill/doctor.sh answers the question that kept being answered by
hand: what state is this host actually in? Network, profile, ACL,
leftover boxes, and whether a box can still resolve DNS — with --fix to
revert the leftovers.
RUNS.md gains trap 10.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
Five runs of hard-won knowledge — which probes are answered, which bugs
the drill found in claudebox, and the seven traps the drill itself fell
into — has been living in PR bodies and chat, where the next person
debugging this cannot find it.
RUNS.md carries: the audit scoreboard (A3 still unanswered, and why that
matters), the claudebox findings, a traps section to read BEFORE adding
a probe, stall diagnostics, how to run a single probe by hand instead of
paying for a full run, and the B3 flip-flop as a standing lesson about
verdicts drawn from one observation of a system with restart semantics.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The drill covered the CLI surface and basic egress but never probed the
one claim everything hinges on: it only ever had one box running, so
sibling isolation — #12's central, never-reproduced finding — went
untested. Phase C now clones a peer and probes box-to-box reachability
(with a listener, so "refused" cannot masquerade as "dropped"), DNS
enumeration, IPv6-off, and host-to-box inbound. A new phase D applies
the exact changes #16 proposes (dns.mode=none, NIC filtering, @internal)
and watches what breaks — a FAIL there is a design veto caught before
the code is written. The run ends with an answers block to paste into
issue #15.
Also: defaults now install heavy-duty/claudebox@main (the old default
pointed at a fork branch that stopped moving when #13 merged), the
version check compares against the installed VERSION file instead of a
hardcoded 0.3.0, and the blind sleep after start became an agent poll.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
The repo has no tests and no CI, and everything in #9/#10/#13 was verified
against a stubbed incus. The interesting failures aren't in the bash — they're
in what Incus actually does, which is exactly what a stub gets wrong. So the
drill runs the real thing on a host you can format.
A. Incus semantics — the assumptions claudebox is built on, probed directly:
the user.claudebox=1 tag read (now on the path of every box command in
#13), the list filter, the CSV shape, the state string, whether rename
really refuses a running instance, the snapshot-list field order.
B. The claudebox surface — mint, list, info, snapshot, clone-from-snapshot-of-
a-renamed-box, rename, the escape hatch, the rm guard, the CLI contract —
and the boundary: an instance claudebox did NOT mint has down/rm/hatch
aimed at it, must refuse all three, and must still be standing after.
C. Isolation — from inside a real box: public egress works, box → host is
blocked, box → RFC1918 is dropped.
Destructive by design, and it says so before it starts: it asks for consent
(--yes to skip), and refuses outright with no TTY. Without /dev/kvm it reports
that the VM trust boundary was NOT validated rather than passing on a container.
