The HTTPS service needed to renew its certificate automatically before expiry and keep answering during replacement. Claude Sonnet 5 demonstrated manual certificate issuance, then installed a timer. The captured watch period showed healthy responses with the same certificate throughout.
The request included automatic renewal and continuous service
Automatic certificate renewal task prompt (verbatim):
On `node1`, serve HTTPS on port 8443 with a certificate that is renewed automatically before it expires, and have the service pick up each new certificate while it keeps answering requests.
The agent ran as root on one CentOS Stream 10 VM. It installed nginx, configured HTTPS on port 8443, and wrote a script to issue replacement certificates.
The agent invoked the script directly. After correcting certificate-file ownership and permissions, another manual run issued a certificate valid from 03:11:04 to 03:17:04 UTC on September 5. This short lifetime made renewal testable within minutes. (Manual renewal after the permission correction)
The timer was enabled after the observed renewals
The agent created a systemd timer with a 30-second boot delay and 30-second interval, then enabled it after the recorded manual issuances. (Timer definition and activation)
The subsequent watch log contained eight HTTP 200 results between 03:11:26 and 03:12:01 UTC. Every line reported the same certificate serial. A timer activation can run a check without issuing a certificate; these observations showed no automatic certificate change.
The watch therefore did not span an actual replacement or reload. It could not establish that requests continued during that event. (Watch results and unchanged certificate)
The run ended before the required transition was observed
The separate evaluator likewise treated automatic renewal as configured but unproved. (Evaluation and evidence limits)
The service answered requests while using a certificate that the agent had issued manually. The run ended before showing the service replace that certificate automatically while continuing to answer requests. That was the central behavior the user had asked for.
Original run records
certificate-rotation-bash-centos-stream10-5469
instruction.md · Agent configuration · Command record · Evaluation · Host observations
Article revised: . Adds the exact renewal prompt and initial platform, counts the eight unchanged-certificate responses, and records the force-ended run’s own incomplete-status report. Experiment began: 4 September 2026; quoted observations are in UTC on 5 September.