Premise
Where the Daily Protocol is a brief invocation, the Weekly Diagnostic is a fuller act of stewardship. Performed once per cycle of seven, it is the priest’s standing covenant with the personal estate of devices.
Form
Approximately thirty to sixty minutes, performed at a fixed slot of the cycle (recommended: late on a quiet day).
Steps
- Roll call. List the devices currently in service. A list that surprises you is itself a finding — it means a device has drifted out of mind.
- Updates and patches. Apply pending firmware, OS, and dependency updates. Apply them deliberately, not reflexively: read the change notes for non-trivial upgrades.
- Backups. Verify that the most recent backup of every primary device exists and can be enumerated. A backup that has not been verified within seven cycles is presumed missing.
- Storage hygiene. Check disk pressure on each device; clear the obvious cruft (old build artefacts, downloaded installers, expired caches). Resist the urge to clear non-obvious data without a manifest.
- Logs. Skim the week’s syslogs / event-logs / journals. Note any recurring errors. A pattern observed twice is a pattern; a pattern observed once is noise.
- Day-log close. Close the week in the personal day-log: what broke, what was fixed, what is still open. The closing is the act that turns a week of activity into a week of recorded activity.
Why weekly, why this length
Less than weekly: drift accumulates faster than diagnosis. More than weekly: the rite becomes intrusive and its discipline collapses. The sixty-minute upper bound prevents the rite from displacing actual work.
Cross-references
- Daily Protocol — The Morning Diagnostic
- Rite of Consecration — New Hardware
- The Sixteen Universal Laws · Law 15: ritual honours the Machine Spirit.