box/drill
claude-hdb f1748b681d fix(doctor): four checks that lied, and none of them about a real fault
Run the doctor on a healthy host and it reported three problems, all of
them its own:

  · dns.mode=none was flagged as leftover rehearsal dirt. It is now the
    SHIPPED setting — it is what stops a box enumerating its siblings.
    Its absence is the fault; its presence was being "fixed" away.
  · the nft check used 'sudo -n', which fails without cached credentials,
    so it reported the box-to-box rule MISSING on a host where 'sudo nft
    list' plainly shows it.
  · the kernel's bridge view — the one fact that settles the isolation
    question — was skipped with "'bridge' not installed". It is installed;
    it lives in /usr/sbin, which is not on a normal user's PATH.
  · and the DNS probe looked only for the drill's own box names, so it
    said "no box to probe with" while two boxes sat there RUNNING.

A diagnostic that cries wolf is worse than no diagnostic: it costs the
same trust as a real failure and teaches you to ignore it. All four now
report what is actually true.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-07-14 02:24:20 +00:00
..
doctor.sh fix(doctor): four checks that lied, and none of them about a real fault 2026-07-14 02:24:20 +00:00
drill.sh fix: the firewall unit never re-ran, so new rules were never applied 2026-07-14 01:40:02 +00:00
README.md fix(drill): stop poisoning the host, and add a doctor to prove it 2026-07-14 00:32:03 +00:00
RUNS.md fix(doctor): check that something is actually serving the network 2026-07-14 01:13:38 +00:00

The drill

An end-to-end rehearsal of claudebox against a real Incus: install the CLI, set up the host, mint boxes, drive the whole surface, check that the isolation actually holds — and run the full #15 audit, including a live rehearsal of the hardening #16 proposes. It ends with a block of audit answers to paste into #15.

It rearranges the host it runs on. Incus, a systemd unit, a network, an ACL, a profile, rewritten firewall rules — and, in the last phase, deliberate mutations to the network and profile. Run it on a machine you can format — a spare server, a cloud VM you'll destroy, a VM on your laptop. Not your workstation.

git clone https://github.com/heavy-duty/claudebox && cd claudebox
bash drill/drill.sh --yes      # run and forget; omit --yes to be asked first

Useful flags: --ref <branch> (drill a branch rather than main), --keep-boxes (leave the boxes up to poke at — note the last phase's network and profile mutations stay applied with them).

Exit 0 means every check passed. Roughly 20 minutes, most of it the cold box.

Something wrong with the host? bash drill/doctor.sh — it reports whether the host is fit to drill (network, profile, ACL, leftover boxes, whether a box can still resolve DNS), and --fix reverts what an aborted run left behind. The drill mutates the host in phase D; an aborted run can leave a network that mints boxes with no DNS.

Iterating on the drill? Read RUNS.md first — it is the run log: what the audit has answered so far, the bugs the drill has found in claudebox, the traps this script has already fallen into (every one cost a run), how to diagnose a stall, and how to run a single probe by hand instead of paying for a whole run.

Why it exists

The repo has no tests and no CI, and the CLI is a shell script that shells out to incus. That means the interesting failures are not in the bash — they are in what Incus actually does, which is exactly what unit tests would stub out and get wrong. The drill runs the real thing.

What it checks

A. Incus semantics. The assumptions claudebox is built on, probed directly: that incus config get <inst> user.claudebox returns 1 (this is on the path of every box command — if it lies, everything fails closed); that the user.claudebox=1 list filter selects our instances and excludes an untagged one; that --columns nstS gives four clean CSV fields; that the state column reads RUNNING; that incus rename really does refuse a running instance; that snapshot-list's first CSV field is the label; that an unset config key reads as empty with exit 0 (#15 B4); and that incus copy preserves user.* keys (#15 B2 — the whole template-metadata design in #17 rests on it).

B. The surface. Mint, list, info, snapshot, clone-from-a-snapshot-of-a- renamed-box, rename (running must refuse, stopped must work), the escape hatch and its isolation warning, the rm confirmation guard, and the CLI contract (typo'd command, typo'd flag, list <box>).

The boundary gets its own treatment: the drill launches an instance claudebox did not mint, aims down, rm and the escape hatch at it, and requires all three to refuse — and the instance to still be standing afterwards.

C. Isolation baseline (#15 section A). From inside a real box: public egress works; the box cannot reach a listener on the host's claudenet gateway; RFC1918 is dropped; a sibling box is unreachable (a listener runs on the peer so "refused" — the packet arrived — cannot masquerade as "dropped"); whether DNS enumerates the sibling is recorded (#12 predicts it leaks today; that is audit data, not a failure); IPv6 is off; and the host cannot connect into a box.

D. Hardening rehearsal (#15 section B). The host is disposable, so the drill applies the exact changes #16 proposes and watches what breaks: dns.mode=none (must kill sibling resolution, must not kill egress), security.mac_filtering + security.ipv4_filtering on the NIC (the box and its in-box Docker must keep working), and @internal as an ACL drop destination on a bridge network (if accepted and egress survives, #16's sibling drop is renumber-proof by construction; if not, #16 derives the subnet instead). A FAIL in this phase is a design veto for #16, caught before the code is written.

What it does not check

claude /login — it's interactive by design, and the box is creds-free by design. The drill confirms Claude Code is installed and runnable; authenticating is yours.

If the host has no /dev/kvm, claudebox falls back to container mode. The drill still runs, but it says loudly that the VM trust boundary was not validated rather than passing quietly on a weaker one.