box/CHANGELOG.md
claude-bot-andresmgsl 043e556027 Give box-firewall.service RemainAfterExit so its state means something
Found by running the drill on a real host, which I could not do before.

The unit is Type=oneshot with no RemainAfterExit, so systemd marks it
'inactive (dead)' the moment ExecStart succeeds. The rules are applied and the
box-to-box drop is live, and the unit still reads as though it died. That is
precisely the question people ask this unit: drill.sh's own failure hint sends
you to 'systemctl status box-firewall.service' to find out whether the firewall
came up, and today the honest answer and the alarming one look identical.

setup-host.sh already believed this was set — 'The unit is RemainAfterExit, so
once it has run it stays "active" forever' — and reasoned from it to explain why
it uses restart instead of 'enable --now'. The reasoning is right and the
restart is right; only the unit was missing the line the comment assumed.

Verified live: before, 'nft list table bridge box' showed the drop present while
is-active said inactive. After, is-active says active (exited) with the drop
still present, and restart still re-applies.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-17 14:05:23 +00:00

8 KiB

Changelog

History before 0.5.0 lives in git and in drill/RUNS.md, which records not just what changed but what each drill run proved.

Unreleased

Fixed

  • box setup-host finishes in one run (#63). When it had to add you to incus-admin it stopped there and told you to re-login and re-run — an exit 0 that reported success having built none of the stack: no boxnet, no ACL, no box-net profile, no firewall. It now re-execs itself under sg incus-admin and completes in that one invocation. The membership check was also asking the wrong question: id -nG "$USER" reads the group database, which lists the group the moment usermod returns, so a same-session re-run passed the check with credentials that still lacked the group and died further down on a bare permission error from incus. Argless id -nG asks the process what it actually holds.

  • setup-host works as root, with or without sudo — every privileged call was a hardcoded sudo, so on a minimal root image (no sudo package) it died on sudo: command not found before doing anything. Privilege is now resolved once: nothing at UID 0, sudo otherwise, and a clear error if neither is possible. This is what made install.sh's root path real rather than nominal.

  • setup-host grants incus-admin to the human, not to root — under sudo install.sh it would have added root to the group: a no-op (UID 0 opens the socket regardless) that also left the actual user locked out of their own boxes. It now derives the login user from SUDO_USER.

  • box-firewall.service now reports its state honestly — the unit is Type=oneshot and was missing RemainAfterExit=yes, so it went inactive (dead) the instant it succeeded: a host whose isolation was perfectly live read as one whose firewall unit had died. drill.sh sends you to systemctl status box-firewall to diagnose exactly that, and setup-host.sh's own comment already asserted the unit "is RemainAfterExit" — it was not. Found by running the drill on a real host and mistrusting the green: nft list table bridge box showed the drop live while the unit read dead. restart was and remains correct either way.

  • setup-host's apt calls can no longer hang — a fresh cloud image has apt-daily/unattended-upgrades holding the dpkg lock, and a plain apt-get install waits on it silently and indefinitely. Now bounded (DPkg::Lock::Timeout=300) and non-interactive, which matters because install.sh runs it with nobody watching.

Changed

  • drill.sh proves the new contract instead of masking it — the drill ran setup-host itself right after installing, so the stack existed by its own hand and a run passed identically whether or not install.sh had done a thing; a fresh run converged the stack three times, while the messages still described the pre-#63 "first pass may only add you to the group" behaviour. It now asserts the post-install stack in-group before touching the host, and runs setup-host exactly once more — after the clean, which deliberately unsets dns.mode and so has to be converged back. DRILL_OWNS_SETUP=1 hands sequencing back to the drill. Pre-setup tripwires now read before install.sh, since that is what triggers setup now.
  • install.sh runs the host setup itself (#64) — it printed a warning and left you a command to run, so the install reported success and box new failed on a host with no Incus. BOX_SKIP_SETUP_HOST=1 opts out; if setup fails, the install still stands and says what to re-run.
  • install.sh refuses to change versions under existing boxes — building the host stack from the installer means an upgrade reaches under every box attached to that stack, so it is no longer only a tree swap. Same version and ref: says so, changes nothing. Version or ref change with boxes on the host (either tag generation): refuses, loudly, listing them — and refuses before $DEST is touched, so the working install survives the refusal. No boxes: proceeds. BOX_FORCE_UPGRADE=1 overrides; the drill sets it, since wiping boxes is its job. The version-aware upgrade that migrates instead of refusing is #67.

0.5.0 — 2026-07-15

The release the project was renamed in: the repo is heavy-duty/box, matching the CLI it ships. Everything legacy-facing is honored forever — the user.claudebox=1 tag, the .claudebox/ runbook folder, the old symlink the installer retires — but nothing current carries the old name.

Added

  • codex and grok templates — OpenAI Codex CLI and xAI Grok CLI boxes, creds-free like every template. The template mechanic (image + user + resources, never a network or a security.* key) now has three tenants beside blank, and the drill mints all of them cold.
  • box expose <box> <port> [<host-port>] — a deliberate, loopback-only door to a port inside a box, for seeing a dev server in your browser. The listen side is always the host's 127.0.0.1 (no flag to widen it), the door is per-port, --list/--remove manage it, and box info shows open exposures — a box with a hole says so.
  • Inline resource overrides on new--cpu <n> --memory <size> --disk <size> (#57). Resolution most-specific-first: flag > BOX_CPU / BOX_MEMORY / BOX_DISK environment (the scripting form) > template box.env > defaults. Values pass to Incus verbatim; resources are all a flag can touch. --from refuses them — a clone carries its source's resources.
  • Host lifecycle as verbsbox setup-host, box teardown-host, and box migrate-host, which re-homes pre-0.4.0 boxes onto the current stack (--box <n> / --all-boxes, authed state preserved) and retires the legacy bridge once empty (--retire-legacy).
  • The .box/ recipe convention — the agent-facing runbook folder a repo can ship, renamed from .claudebox/ (both spellings read).

Fixed

  • VM mints no longer hang at GRUB — Incus defaults VMs to Secure Boot on, and a cloud image whose shim the host's OVMF doesn't trust dies with "bad shim signature" forever. Boxes now launch with security.secureboot=false; the VM boundary, not boot attestation, is the box threat model.
  • box expose actually delivers packets — a trilogy of drill-found absences: the NAT proxy needs the box's boxnet lease pinned as a static ipv4.address (Incus resolves connect=0.0.0.0 against device config, not the lease); a loopback-sourced packet needs route_localnet plus a masquerade on the bridge to leave the host and be answerable; and the box's replies need a ct state established,related accept ahead of the host firewall's input drop, which was eating them statelessly. Boxes still cannot initiate toward the host — a box-originated SYN is a NEW flow.
  • Firewall rules now converge on upgradebox-firewall.sh rebuilds its chains every run (add + flush + re-add) instead of skipping when they exist, which had pinned every host to the rule set of the release that first ran there.
  • Failed mints tell you why — cloud-init failures print the box's own log excerpts and leave the box up to inspect; a mint that never boots names the likely cause (corrupt image, Secure Boot, GRUB hang) and ships a sanitized console dump; the installer asserts it landed the ref it was asked for.
  • grok installs the binary it actually ships — the installer was read, not guessed at, and the CLI lands on the non-interactive PATH (same fix class as codex).

Changed

  • Debrand complete — env vars, install dir, docs, template descriptions and the README all say box; the install URL is heavy-duty/box (GitHub redirects the old one, BOX_REPO overrides).
  • The drill grew from 47 to 84 checks — the expose door opened, exercised and shut (with the contract re-probed around it), every template minted cold, a faithful pre-0.4.0 box re-homed through migrate-host, and the inline resource flags asserted (including their precedence over the environment).