Network Policy

Explain Network Policy to Agents

View as Markdown

Use policy-explain to give a sandbox agent a compact, redacted view of its active network policy. The summary helps the agent distinguish policy denials, missing credentials, unsupported capabilities, and upstream failures.

Print the redacted summary:

$nemoclaw my-assistant policy-explain

Pass --json when a tool needs a structured object:

$nemoclaw my-assistant policy-explain --json

During OpenClaw onboarding, NemoClaw writes the rendered context to /sandbox/.openclaw/workspace/POLICY.md. It refreshes that file after policy-add or policy-remove. Refresh the file without changing policy:

$nemoclaw my-assistant policy-explain --write

Understand Redaction

The summary includes the recorded tier, applied presets, allowed host categories, known presets that are not applied, and policy management commands. It also explains the support boundaries between NemoClaw, OpenShell, and the agent.

The output omits network rule bodies, credential metadata, and binary allowlists. It includes only host stems and category-level summaries. NemoClaw drops private, loopback, link-local, metadata, unique-local, reserved, CGNAT, benchmarking, and internal-suffix hosts from allowedHostCategories. It reports their count in redactedHostCount.

Interpret Verification Status

Each active preset includes a verification value:

StatusMeaning
verifiedThe registry lists the preset, and the gateway confirms enforcement.
registry-onlyThe registry lists the preset, but the gateway does not enforce it. Treat the allowed hosts as unverified.
gateway-onlyThe gateway enforces a preset that the registry does not list.
gateway-unavailableNemoClaw could not probe the gateway. Treat the report as advisory until the gateway is reachable.

Classify a Failed Request

The classifier evaluates conditions in this order:

  1. unsupported means the active agent does not offer the asserted capability. Surface the limitation without retrying.
  2. missing-approval with high confidence means a host on an applied preset returned HTTP 401. The network path is open, but credentials are missing or invalid.
  3. missing-approval with low confidence means a host on an applied preset returned HTTP 403. Confirm credentials, then inspect the effective policy for a method, path, protocol, or binary denial.
  4. blocked-by-policy means no applied preset allows the host or the request returned a network-block error. Apply an applicable preset or create a custom preset.
  5. unknown means no classification matched. Surface the underlying error.

Network-block error codes include EHOSTUNREACH, ENETUNREACH, ENOTFOUND, ECONNREFUSED, ETIMEDOUT, and EAI_AGAIN. A block code on a host from a registry-only or gateway-unavailable preset produces a low-confidence policy verdict. A block code on a host from a verified preset stays unknown because the gateway already confirmed enforcement.

Each verdict includes confidence set to high or low. Low confidence means the agent must report multiple possibilities instead of treating one next step as authoritative.

For blocked-by-policy, run nemoclaw <name> policy-add <preset> or follow Custom Preset Files. For missing-approval, confirm the API token and scopes. For unsupported, surface the limitation without retrying.