name: baseline-behavior-skill description: Reference list of signals that look suspicious but are normal testbed behavior. Consult before promoting any observation to a symptom. metadata: version: "1.0.0"

Normal Behavior

How To Use This Skill

• This skill is an allowlist of signals that are normal Kathara behavior and can therefore be dismissed as false positives.
• Absence from this list does NOT mean a signal is normal. If a helper flagged something and you cannot find a matching entry below, treat the flag as real evidence, not as "probably fine because it's small."
• Use it to avoid false positives, not to choose the troubleshooting order.
• A baseline note can weaken a theory, but it does not clear a directly implicated device by itself.
• A single follow-up probe (one ping, one curl) does NOT clear an intermittent symptom such as flapping link, transient drops, or status=unknown rows. Intermittent faults need either repeated probes over time or direct evidence on the device.

Universal

• High /proc/loadavg can be host-shared, not container-local, because Kathara containers share the host kernel.
• dmesg is shared host kernel output. Do not use it as per-container evidence.
• Short DHCP leases are common in these labs and do not themselves indicate a fault.
• Brief DHCP instability during startup can self-recover.
• One clean service-layer check does not clear unresolved lower-layer faults.

Routing And FRR

• frr_show_running_config and frr_show_ip_route can look healthy even if FRR is dead; check the daemon processes directly.
• FRR helper tools use router_name.
• If you are unsure of the FRR schema, use exec_shell(host_name="<router>", command="vtysh -c '...'").
• Cached routes can keep ping working after OSPF or BGP breaks.

Service And HTTP

• Healthy DNS or HTTP does not clear lower-layer faults (ACL, OSPF, L2 identity).
• Curl by IP exercises routing plus HTTP only; curl by hostname also exercises DNS.
• A timeout on a service port that has no listening server is expected; confirm the service actually runs before treating it as a fault.