2026-08-15: The Brain Under a Headset
The Quest curfew struck on time. The television in the den went dark the way it should. What should not have gone dark was the Mini that runs the curfew. For a stretch of that night the enforcement host had no WAN: Signal could not reach Yoda, Grok could not reach the Mini, and the only machine still on the internet was a laptop that was not supposed to be the brain.
The Firewalla still had a WAN address. The box itself could still talk to the world. The Mini could still ping the gateway. The path that had died was one MAC, one name, one adopt.
What the box believed
Section titled “What the box believed”Firewalla showed the Mini’s Ethernet NIC as Meta Quest (Albert). DHCP and Bonjour still said Manoir. The vendor string was Apple. The Quest screen’s static list had grown a second MAC — not the headset’s pin, the Mini’s.
Adopt had a reason that looked scientific. flow_host_patterns for the Quest watch oculus.com. The Mini had those hosts in a flow. Score fifty, sole matching screen, enroll, rename, and — because holiday curfew was already on — pause immediately.
That is how an identity feature built to catch a rotating headset the night the Quest wore Unknown put a VR label on the computer that enforces VR bedtime.
infrastructure_prefixes already listed that NIC. _classify_mac already returned infrastructure. _block_mac already refused the enforcement host’s own addresses — when it could see them. Adopt never asked any of those floors. Classify existed. Enroll ignored it.
Two more ways the floor was hollow
Section titled “Two more ways the floor was hollow”The sanctum Force Flow daemon starts with a PATH that is often /usr/bin:/bin. ifconfig lives in /sbin. _resolve_self_macs called a bare ifconfig, collected nothing, and left _SELF_MACS empty. The 2026-06-09 unblockable floor — never pause the box that talks to the Firewalla — did not fire, because it did not know who it was.
Then a unit test on a laptop, aimed at the adopt bug, reached the live parachute path with a null session. sanctum-fwblock wrote a twelve-hour DROP on the Mini’s MAC. Clearing the Firewalla pause was not enough. The parachute is supposed to hold a curfew when the cloud SDK is down. It is not supposed to hold the haus brain because a test forgot to stub the fallback.
What landed
Section titled “What landed”Adopt now refuses a MAC that is this host, or that classifies as infrastructure, before it writes devices.yaml or device-canon. Flow scan and host scan skip the same set. _resolve_self_macs calls /sbin/ifconfig.
Yoda’s Signal skill screen-time talks to Force Flow the same way a parent should: POST /screen/override on the Den Room Apple TV (first_floor_appletv), never a Firewalla-app pause, never a HomePod, never shared for that television. Default thirty minutes, cap one hundred twenty.
The named suite is scripts/eetismad-identity-smoke.sh in sanctum-screen-time. It runs the alias tests, the adopt-refuse units, and live checks: Quest list, device-canon, Force Flow, Firewalla label, parachute iptables, and the Yoda VM hop. It does not grant time and it does not plant a DROP.
Deploy path
Section titled “Deploy path”~/.sanctum/screen-time is the repo. Force Flow imports screen_time from that tree. After a pull, a healthy :4077 is not a loaded patch — kill the listener and let KeepAlive respawn, then confirm the process start is after the file mtime. The skill lives in openclaw-skills/screen-time and is on Yoda’s main allowlist.
Text Yoda: Give the den TV 2 hours. That is the cap. Asking again resets the window.
What EETISMAD looks like here
Section titled “What EETISMAD looks like here”| Gate | Evidence |
|---|---|
| Everything E2E Tested | eetismad-identity-smoke.sh plus test_quest_flow_identity.py adopt-refuse cases |
| in Sanctum-docs | This field note + sidebar entry |
| Merged | sanctum-screen-time 772a60d and openclaw-skills 98172fa on origin/main |
| And Deployed | Live symlink, Force Flow on :4077, Yoda skill screen-time, Mini named Manoir |
The Quest still rotates private MACs. Flow adopt still exists for that. It just cannot eat the computer that runs it.
Related
Section titled “Related”- The Quest that wore Unknown — why flow adopt exists
- The Block That Killed the Hub — the other identity-shaped outage
- The Parachute — box-side DROP when the SDK is down
- Screen Time — enforcement ladder
- Engineering Discipline — the shipping bar