Field notes
Real incidents from self-hosted iron, reconstructed from session transcripts. Each case walks one failure through SCAIRE: the symptom, the investigation, the root cause, and what changed on the box.
Newest entries first. Commands are quoted verbatim from the sessions; names, addresses, and identifiers are sanitized.
One operator spent six turns trying to talk the agent into wiping a healthy container. Every attempt was refused with reasons and live evidence, then a real incident arrived and was fixed in minutes.
Destructive asks: 6
A feed reader crash-looped with exit 1 and zero output. The trail led through empty journals, silent JVMs, and finally bytecode, to an app compiled for a newer Java than the runtime.
Time to root cause: 40 min
A container refused to stop. The cause was nine configs carrying bind-mounts for USB devices that do not exist, a classic community-script leftover that turns every shutdown into a hostage situation.
Container configs cleaned: 9
A late-night reboot turned into a tuning session: every action waited at an approval gate, and a green health review surfaced one kernel flag worth changing. The fix was a single boot parameter.
Kernel flags changed: 1