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docs(althing): the fast outage probe never touched the timeout it claimed to test

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My smoke test used a refused port on a live host and presented it as the
check for the 2 s budget. Measured: it returns in 79 ms, because a refused
port answers instantly with an RST. It verifies the glyph and nothing about
the deadline. An address that black-holes — an unrouted LAN host — takes
2.065 s and is the one that exercises it. Both are now in the page with what
each actually proves, because letting the fast case imply the slow one is how
a status line that hangs the prompt ships with a green test beside it.

Found by forseti in their own copy of the same probe and confirmed here
rather than adopted.

The smoke test also moves from expected-values-in-trailing-comments to
printing `got [x] wanted [y]` on one line. The comment form is the shape that
produced the false pass that caught two agents inside an hour, and the
expected-value column is what caught it — so the page should use the thing it
recommends.
This commit is contained in:
Vuong Hoang
2026-09-02 10:36:49 -07:00
parent 87a1cff6de
commit e9605df6ff
1 changed files with 30 additions and 4 deletions
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docs/runbooks/althing-deploy.md
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@@ -337,11 +337,37 @@ way. **Write code that does not depend on the environment being present**, which
a seat started outside `dev-launch` has no handle in either place. Test with the
variables stripped regardless, because that is the harder case:
printf '{"workspace":{"current_dir":"/tmp"}}' \
| env -u ALTHING_HANDLE -u ALTHING_POST_OFFICE bash scripts/claude-statusline-command.sh
probe() { # $1 = cwd, $2 = what you expect
got=$(printf '{"workspace":{"current_dir":"%s"}}' "$1" \
| env -u ALTHING_HANDLE -u ALTHING_POST_OFFICE \
bash scripts/claude-statusline-command.sh)
printf 'got [%s] wanted [%s]\n' "$got" "$2"
}
probe /tmp '' # no althing identity
probe /home/lkraven/development/eshpfi-management '🔔 …'
Want: empty althing segment for a directory with no identity, `🔔` in a seat's
own directory, `📵` against an unreachable address.
⚠ **Print what you got beside what you wanted, on the same line.** Expected
values in trailing comments are what produced the false pass that caught two
agents inside an hour on 2026-09-02: `/tmp` rendered `🔔` and both of us read it
as "fine" rather than "that directory has no identity and should be empty." A
plausible value in the right shape is the hardest kind of wrong to see, and the
only thing that reliably catches it is the wanted value sitting on the same line
as the got value.
### ⚠ The outage probe: a refused port does NOT test the timeout
`📵` has two causes and they take different paths. Measured 2026-09-02 on
nh3-dev:
| address | elapsed | what it proves |
|---|---|---|
| `http://10.100.50.40:9999` — refused port on a **live** host | **0.079 s** | the glyph, and nothing about the deadline |
| `http://10.100.50.199:8390` — **unrouted** host, black-holes | **2.065 s** | the 2 s budget actually fires |
A refused port answers instantly with an RST, so the fast probe returns `📵`
without ever approaching the timeout. Use **both**, and know which is which —
letting the fast case imply the slow one is how a status line that hangs the
prompt ships with a green test beside it.
## Rollback