The local portal says when it came up unusable

memex-local up && memex-local update printed two green lines and handed back a portal that could not be signed into and could not be read: /login served nothing, and every control on every page rendered as its own ToString() — NamedAreaControl { Id = , Style = , … } where the UI should be.

The verification could not have said otherwise. It fetched the home page and printed "Portal reachable" whenever curl itself exited 0 — so a 503, a 404, and a portal rendering debug text all produced the same line. update was worse: it printed "update complete" straight after the rollout, having verified nothing at all.

It now asserts the three things a local portal is unusable without, and each failure names its own remedy:

• The portal serves — an HTTP status in the serving range, judged on the code rather than on whether the request completed.
• The sign-in route is routed. The login pages compile into the portal image, so a 404 here means the image predates the GUI extraction and the answer is to rebuild it — never to install something.
• The view packs are present. The default control views and the mesh-node views left the image and now arrive as installable packages. Without them nothing has a view, so every control falls back to its ToString() — and the documented repair, the Plugin Catalog, is itself one of the missing views. A portal in that state cannot repair itself through its own UI, which is exactly why this has to be asked from outside it.

The last check waits rather than samples, because the packages install at boot and compile as they go; and where they are on disk but not yet in the running process it performs the one restart that activates them, instead of leaving it as a manual step. memex-local verify asks the same question of a running install at any time.

Two further faults surfaced while proving the new check could fail. memex-local help was an unbounded fork bomb: a backtick in the usage text re-entered the script's own entry point. And the deploy aborted on macOS's bash for the exact paths the tool itself calls normal — an empty option list is an error there, and both option lists are empty on a plain pull-from-registry run.

None of the three had ever gone red, because nothing in CI had ever opened this script. It is now parsed, linted and behaviour-tested on every build, including static assertions for the two traps a Linux runner cannot reach by executing anything.