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>
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-hostfinishes in one run (#63). When it had to add you toincus-adminit stopped there and told you to re-login and re-run — anexit 0that reported success having built none of the stack: noboxnet, no ACL, nobox-netprofile, no firewall. It now re-execs itself undersg incus-adminand 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 momentusermodreturns, 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 fromincus. Arglessid -nGasks the process what it actually holds. -
setup-hostworks as root, with or withoutsudo— every privileged call was a hardcodedsudo, so on a minimal root image (nosudopackage) it died onsudo: command not foundbefore doing anything. Privilege is now resolved once: nothing at UID 0,sudootherwise, and a clear error if neither is possible. This is what madeinstall.sh's root path real rather than nominal. -
setup-hostgrantsincus-adminto the human, not to root — undersudo install.shit would have addedrootto 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 fromSUDO_USER. -
box-firewall.servicenow reports its state honestly — the unit isType=oneshotand was missingRemainAfterExit=yes, so it wentinactive (dead)the instant it succeeded: a host whose isolation was perfectly live read as one whose firewall unit had died. drill.sh sends you tosystemctl status box-firewallto 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 boxshowed the drop live while the unit read dead.restartwas and remains correct either way. -
setup-host's apt calls can no longer hang — a fresh cloud image hasapt-daily/unattended-upgradesholding the dpkg lock, and a plainapt-get installwaits on it silently and indefinitely. Now bounded (DPkg::Lock::Timeout=300) and non-interactive, which matters becauseinstall.shruns it with nobody watching.
Changed
drill.shproves the new contract instead of masking it — the drill ransetup-hostitself right after installing, so the stack existed by its own hand and a run passed identically whether or notinstall.shhad 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 runssetup-hostexactly once more — after the clean, which deliberately unsetsdns.modeand so has to be converged back.DRILL_OWNS_SETUP=1hands sequencing back to the drill. Pre-setup tripwires now read beforeinstall.sh, since that is what triggers setup now.install.shruns the host setup itself (#64) — it printed a warning and left you a command to run, so the install reported success andbox newfailed on a host with no Incus.BOX_SKIP_SETUP_HOST=1opts out; if setup fails, the install still stands and says what to re-run.install.shrefuses 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$DESTis touched, so the working install survives the refusal. No boxes: proceeds.BOX_FORCE_UPGRADE=1overrides; 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
codexandgroktemplates — OpenAI Codex CLI and xAI Grok CLI boxes, creds-free like every template. The template mechanic (image + user + resources, never a network or asecurity.*key) now has three tenants besideblank, 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's127.0.0.1(no flag to widen it), the door is per-port,--list/--removemanage it, andbox infoshows 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_DISKenvironment (the scripting form) > templatebox.env> defaults. Values pass to Incus verbatim; resources are all a flag can touch.--fromrefuses them — a clone carries its source's resources. - Host lifecycle as verbs —
box setup-host,box teardown-host, andbox 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 exposeactually delivers packets — a trilogy of drill-found absences: the NAT proxy needs the box's boxnet lease pinned as a staticipv4.address(Incus resolvesconnect=0.0.0.0against device config, not the lease); a loopback-sourced packet needsroute_localnetplus a masquerade on the bridge to leave the host and be answerable; and the box's replies need act state established,relatedaccept 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 upgrade —
box-firewall.shrebuilds 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.
grokinstalls 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 isheavy-duty/box(GitHub redirects the old one,BOX_REPOoverrides). - 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).