Description

During nemoclaw onboard, the sandbox image builds successfully (~2.6 GB), but the subsequent push/import of the image into the OpenShell gateway consistently fails with a timeout error.

This was originally reported on Reddit by u/alpadrino6.

Environment

• OS: Ubuntu (local machine)
• GPU: None (using cloud inference)
• OpenShell: 0.0.10
• NemoClaw: 0.1.0 (npm global install)
• Docker: Running and healthy

Steps to Reproduce

1. Install nemoclaw 0.1.0 globally via npm
2. Install openshell 0.0.10
3. Run nemoclaw onboard
4. Complete preflight checks (pass)
5. Wait for Docker image build to complete (succeeds, ~2.6 GB)
6. Observe failure at step [3/7] during image push into the gateway

Expected Behavior

The sandbox image should be successfully pushed/imported into the OpenShell gateway after building.

Actual Behavior

[3/7] Creating sandbox ... Successfully built openshell/sandbox-from:

Pushing image openshell/sandbox-from: into gateway "nemoclaw"
Error: × failed to read image export stream
└─▶ Timeout error

Additional Observations

• The failure occurs after the Docker build, specifically during the image push/import into the gateway
• The gateway container (openshell-cluster-nemoclaw) remains healthy throughout
• Retrying nemoclaw onboard reproduces the same error consistently
• Direct OpenShell sandboxes work fine (openshell sandbox create / openshell sandbox connect), but they are not recognized by NemoClaw (nemoclaw list shows none)
• This appears to be a timeout on the image export pipeline for large images (~2.6 GB)

Workarounds Attempted (none resolved the issue)

• Freed port 8080 (was previously in use by another process)
• Restarted Docker and the gateway
• Clean reinstall of nemoclaw
• Verified PATH and npm global install
• Deleted existing sandboxes and retried onboarding

Questions

1. Is there a way to increase the timeout for the image import step?
2. Could the image be imported in a chunked/streamed fashion to avoid the timeout for large images?
3. Is there a way to bootstrap a NemoClaw sandbox from an existing OpenShell sandbox?

References

• Reddit thread: https://www.reddit.com/r/openclaw/comments/1rwmhw6/comment/obcyt4l/
• NemoClaw README notes the sandbox image is ~2.4 GB compressed, and that machines with < 8 GB RAM can hit OOM during image push. This may be a related pipeline bottleneck even on machines with sufficient RAM.