The failure branch was a two-way choice — superseded? M4 : M1 — and BOTH are
statements about the customer's code. rerr was never inspected, so a hub that
refused, an agent that was stopped and a genuinely mistyped code all produced
the same accusation. Measured live 2026-08-05 with a CORRECT current code: hub
firewalled off 0.0556s, agent stopped 0.0299s, against ~1.0s for a real unseal.
Five classes, from the VALUE and never the text:
hub-unreachable 502/503 from the agent — the code was NOT used
agent-unreachable no agent verdict at all (transport) — NOT used
no-bundle 404
bundle-too-old 409
asked-and-refused 400 — the ONLY class that may mention typing
unknown everything else -> NEUTRAL, the safe default
agentapi.RecoveryRefusal carries the status as a value (refusalError flattened
it into a sentence, and a sentence is not something a caller can branch on).
THE OLD-AGENT CASE IS WHY THIS NEEDS A COUPLING. Agent < 0.126.0 answers 400
for both a fetch failure and a wrong code, so a 400 from one cannot be read as
a refusal. FeatureRecoveryFailureClass (MinAgent 0.126.0) withholds that
reading and the 400 degrades to neutral. The gate BLOCKS NOTHING — it only
decides whether the customer may be told to check their typing.
R-226: the superseded message now names BOTH possibilities and restores the
ten-words prompt. The two are indistinguishable at the engine; the honest
message says so. It still does not promise the earlier package can be opened.
Elapsed time is logged (it is what diagnosed this) and is NEVER a classifier.
Tests: scenarios A-E at the HANDLER + the classifier table asserting the same
sentence under two statuses classifies two ways. Red-proofs, each demonstrated
failing then restored: delete the 502 case (A), remove the mistype clause (C),
default to the accusation (D), route an instant transport failure to the typing
message (E).
Two existing tests encoded the defect and were corrected, not deleted: the web
fake returned a BARE error for 'wrong code' (which is the shape of a failure we
cannot classify), and R-222's test forbade any mention of typing on a
superseded box — half of which R-226 deliberately reverses.
28 packages ok, vet clean, all controller gates OK.
--recover-offsite-check is a docker exec diagnostic in the shape of --print-reset-code: it
reads the customer's recovery code from STDIN, asks the agent to fetch this host's sealed
bundle and open it, and reports whether the recovered key matches the one on disk BY SHA256.
Two hashes and a verdict; never a password, never R, never a blob.
R comes from stdin and not a flag because a flag value is visible in ps, in shell history, in
a container's command line and in any transcript of the session that ran it.
IT COMPARES; IT DOES NOT INSTALL. The recovered password is never written to
offbox/repo_password -- installing changes a live box on a path nobody has walked, and that
link is next session's, with the drill around it. A test asserts the data dir is byte-unchanged
after a check; its red-proof (adding the install call) fails it.
Exit codes: 0 match, 2 clean MISMATCH, 1 a step failed -- "it failed" and "it worked and
disagreed" must never share a status. A box with no local password reports distinctly: that is
the rebuilt-box shape, where the next step is to install rather than compare.
Nothing customer-reachable ships here: no card, no form, no preview.
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