#18 shipped DEFAULT_VOICE and #17 explained why the harness cannot name a voice from a setting, but the endpoint page still described voice resolution as if every request carried a name. One contract row, one paragraph in Naming a voice (a call that names nothing is the harness default shape, not a client bug), the env-file row now lists the default voice among its knobs, and the worklog records the rollout: both merges, the one-dispatch deploy with the 33/33 gate, the card flipping to up on the next checker tick, and the previously failing call returning 430124 bytes with the journal reading "speech voice=narrator1 (default)".
The omp speech device forwards a voice only when the call passes voice_id - there is no setting that feeds one (speech.voice is the TUI speak-aloud Kokoro enum, tts.localVoice belongs to the local backend) - so every harness voiceover arrives with no voice key and the shim answered 400 "unknown voice None". Measured on the deployed endpoint 2026-10-18, from a restarted session with the speech role pointed here.
DEFAULT_VOICE makes the absent case a spoken operator choice instead of a code surprise: the pack named there answers a voice-less request and the journal line is marked (default), so an unrequested voice never reads later like a requested one. An UNKNOWN name still 400s with the list that exists - the no-silent-fallback law that this endpoint was built on is untouched, and the strict shape stays the code default (empty DEFAULT_VOICE), which the second new seam test pins. Ships narrator1 in scripts/frank-tts.env.
The section this PR adds claimed speech.voice was the forwarded voice key. It is not: the openai-speech transport builds {model, input, response_format, voice?} and sets voice only when the CALL passed voice_id, tts.localVoice is the local Kokoro backend key, and speech.voice is the TUI speak-aloud voice whose enum is Kokoro-only. A restarted session proved it the honest way - the tts device arrived at 7772 with no voice key and got "unknown voice None; available voices: narrator1, narrator2, narrator3" - so the fresh-process success earlier that day was the run that was told to pass voice_id, not evidence of a setting.
The law now reads: voice comes from voice_id alone, so a voice-less call is the harness default shape (the endpoint grew DEFAULT_VOICE in its own PR to answer it), and speech.voice must stay a Kokoro name - a pack name there breaks the vocalizer and does nothing for synthesis. config.yml reverted to am_fenrir on the operator box, and the worklog entry that recorded narrator1 as wiring carries the correction.
Six statements still claimed the endpoint did not exist: both vault descriptions, the two index.md bullets, the Open Notebook blocker, and the engine page deploy order that opened with "Nothing below has been run". All re-keyed to the deployed state, with the ledger the deploys printed: engine healthy 31 s after the build at 4.0 GiB resident, three voices warm, the ladder measured at 1883 ms then 1226-1283 ms (not the retired 6.2-8.0 s), and two voices rendering the same sentence into different bytes.
Adds a The harness speech role section to the endpoint page with the three wiring laws measured the day of the flip: speech.voice is the forwarded key (tts.localVoice belongs to Kokoro), an explicit speech role has no fallback candidate, and models.yml loads at process start while config.yml is read live - so a session older than the frank-tts row fails exactly like a dead endpoint. Fresh-process proof: omp -p --tools tts saved 180524 bytes with voice=narrator1 while the facade logged the matching speech line.
The endpoint deployed on 2026-10-18, so the admin card must carry its state rather than a placeholder: wip becomes false (the registry schema wants the key on every service; false is what the live cards use) and the description drops the "Hidden until deployed" line. showLink stays false and the card stays admin-only: an HTTP API has no page to open, and homepage-status.py counts ANY HTTP response as up, so the card is honest with no link and no /health path in the probe. The voice seam that pinned wip == down is re-keyed to the deployed contract and now also refuses a link or a user-category placement.
PR #15 corrected the engine's page, the research brief's law bullet and the
warmer's header, but the retired ladder had six more homes: both quadlet files
("6.2-8.0 s… 0.5 ms", "~6-8 s each", "paying the 5.5 s cold decode"),
`scripts/frank-tts-engine.env` (the whole law paragraph and the WARM_TEXT note),
`scripts/frank-tts.env`, the [[Frank TTS]] troubleshooting row that told an
operator to expect ~5.5 s, the research brief's consequences paragraph, and one
test comment.
All re-keyed to what was measured on the deployed container 2026-10-18: the
first synthesis of a freshly registered voice costs 1,883 ms against 1,226-1,283
ms afterwards, so the warm pass buys about 0.6 s — and the reason it exists at
all, which the pages never led with, is that the registry is memory-only: without
the hook every voice name is a 400 until somebody synthesizes. The trial's dated
worklog entry stays as written; the correction points at it.
No behavior change: comments, unit lore and docs only, so no cfhash move and no
image rebuild.
The first real boot gave the chance to measure what warming actually buys, and
the trial's numbers were wrong:
- Empty registry, register only, then time: the FIRST synthesis of a freshly
registered voice cost 1 883 ms; the next two 1 283 and 1 226 ms. A ~110-word
request cost 9.4 s and then 9.8 s.
- So the published 6.2–8.0 s cold / first-audio-byte 5 530 ms / later-requests
0.5 ms ladder does not reproduce, and request time tracks the audio generated
rather than snapshot state. The 0.5 ms figure is an internal state-restore
cost, never an end-to-end request time.
- Warming still earns its place for a different reason than the page claimed:
the registry is memory-only and re-registering does not warm, so a boot without
the hook leaves the façade answering 400 for every name. The saving is ~0.6 s.
Law 1 of [[Frank TTS Engine]] is re-titled the registry law and carries the
measured numbers; its example journal line is a real one from today; the
troubleshooting row for "first request of the day is slow" — the retired law's
symptom — is replaced by the argument-cap fault that actually happened. The same
ladder in the research brief is annotated rather than erased, and [[Voice Packs]]
step 6 stops claiming the hook registers only packs it has not seen (the engine
replaces a name it already holds).
The deploy of the newly built engine image came back `0 voice(s) warm` with
`/app/warm-voices.sh: line 152: /usr/bin/curl: Argument list too long` above
every line, and the unit was `active` with a green `/health` beside it. The hook
built `{"name":…,"wav_b64":…}` in a shell variable and passed it as ONE curl
argument; the kernel caps a single argument at MAX_ARG_STRLEN = 131,072 bytes,
and the shipped reference clips base64 to about 1.27 MB, so curl was never
executed and the hook reported the absence as "HTTP no response".
The body now goes to a mktemp file and curl reads `@file`; the audio enters
through a redirection instead of a command substitution, so the script never
holds a 1.3 MB string at all. Every pack in the fleet is ~1 MB, i.e. ~13x the
cliff, so this was always going to happen — it took the first real packs to show
it because no fixture was ever that big.
The regression test therefore ships a 300 KB pack against the seam's REAL stub
listener with the REAL curl: it fails with the same kernel error the host did
(`Argument list too long`, then the 400-for-every-name summary), and passes once
the body is a file. Proved red before the fix, green after.
The vault link check reads [[Frank TTS Engine]] literally, so wrapping it made
the target "Frank\nTTS Engine" and the unresolved-link seam failed. Rewrapped,
not reworded.
Three faults, all of the reporting-success-while-doing-nothing species: the
build that could not start (no adduser in the base), the warm pass that could
not warm (podman's --env-file keeps the quotes), and the image that would never
rebuild (cfhash over the Containerfile alone). Records the proofs, the two
behaviour seams, and what stays undone: nothing is deployed, #2 phase 1 stays
open until 7772 answers.
Three pages, all from faults found this session:
- `LLM/deployment.md` gains "Locally built images": which images have no
registry digest, what the `cfhash` skip is for, why it must cover every COPY'd
file (the silent shape: build skipped, /health green, old code serving), and
the base-image half of the law — the engine's `useradd`, because the pinned
ubuntu:24.04 has no `adduser`.
- `Dankclaw/Frank TTS Engine.md` troubleshooting gains the two lines an operator
actually needs: every voice cold on a fresh boot with a hand-run hook
succeeding (= `WARM_TEXT` arrived quoted, `podman exec … env | grep WARM_TEXT`
proves it), and a 502 from the façade beside a 200 `/health` from the engine
(model loaded ≠ voices registered). The stale-warmer row is re-keyed to the
new rebuild rule.
- `Dankclaw/Voice Packs.md` step 4 was wrong: it told the next agent to restart
the engine *instead of* the warm hook because the hook "only registers packs it
has not seen". It registers every pack on every run and the engine replaces a
name it already holds — `tools/tts-server.cpp:148` at the pinned commit:
"Re-registering a name replaces the previous entry." A restart is what an
engine bump needs (the registry is memory-only), never worse, only slower.
- `Dankclaw/Frank TTS.md` deploy command re-keyed to `./scripts/deploy.sh
dankclaw --service frank-tts`, the way it is actually deployed; the raw
`deploy-remote.sh` form is plumbing.
build_compose_image skips `podman build` when the installed image's `cfhash`
label matches a hash taken from the checkout now — the skip is what keeps
frank-tts-engine's ten-minute recursive source clone off every re-deploy. The
hash covered the Containerfile ALONE, so any change to a file the image COPYs
was invisible: edit dankclaw/voiceservice/app.py or tts-engine-warm.sh, re-run
the deploy, and podman reports the existing image is fine. The redeployed
container runs the previous code, /health answers 200, and the e2e gate has no
way to see it. It bit the boot warmer twice this week.
Each case arm now names its own extra=(…) — the paths its Containerfile COPYs —
and the label hashes the Containerfile plus those. The two arms are kept apart
deliberately: the façade bakes app.py and tts-start.sh, the engine bakes
tts-engine-start.sh and tts-engine-warm.sh, and comfyui/loki/alloy have no extra
files, so their hash is unchanged and they do not rebuild on this commit.
Hashing rather than word-splitting because these are repo-relative paths under
a fixed checkout root.
The seam drives the real function against a stub podman and asserts observable
output — did the deploy ask podman to build, or did it skip? — in five steps:
first deploy builds, unchanged tree does not, editing the engine's COPY'd warm
hook rebuilds the ENGINE image and not the façade, editing app.py rebuilds the
façade. Reverted scripts/deploy-remote.sh to prove it red on the old hash: the
warm-hook step is exactly where it fails.
`WARM_TEXT` reaches the container **with its quotes**. The unit reads the env
file through podman's `--env-file`, which takes the literal remainder of the
line — no shell parsing — while bash `source` strips one layer. The hook
interpolated the raw value into the synthesis body, so with the quotes intact
the JSON was invalid and every voice logged "registered, but the warm synthesis
failed" while a hand-run hook (bash shape) succeeded. Reproduced both ways
against a real `podman run --env-file`, not by reading the man page.
The hook now strips exactly one matched pair — only when both ends are the same
quote AND the inner content carries another quote or a backslash, so a value
that legitimately contains quotes is never mangled — and then JSON-escapes what
is left, which is what makes a sentence like `He said "hi\" once"` arrive as
itself instead of corrupting the body.
The seam gains a test that reads `scripts/frank-tts-engine.env` BOTH ways —
`source` and the way `podman --env-file` does — and asserts the engine receives
the same sentence either way, in both shapes. A test that only sources the file
cannot see this bug, which is how it survived the first deploy.
The runtime stage of Containerfile.engine ran `adduser --system …`. The pinned
ubuntu:24.04 base ships no adduser, so the build died at that RUN line with
crun's "executable file not found in $PATH".
Verified in the base itself on Dankclaw, 2026-10-18: `command -v adduser`
prints nothing, and the exact replacement line — `useradd --system --uid 10000
--home-dir /app --shell /usr/sbin/nologin tts` — answers `uid=10000(tts)
gid=999(tts)`. Same account as before: numeric uid/gid 10000, non-login shell,
no password entry. Its one warning ("uid 10000 is greater than SYS_UID_MAX
999") is cosmetic and is what keeps the uid equal to the façade's, so the
comment says so before someone "fixes" it by dropping --system.
Stage 2 of the voice stack. Repo state only: nothing deployed, no host touched,
no container started.
- `frank-tts` is now registered everywhere a dankclaw service has to be:
`SERVICE_ORDER` (after `frank-tts-engine`, before the consumers), the planner's
dankclaw set, `deploy-remote.sh`'s allowlist + dispatch + a
`deploy_frank_tts` handler, and `deploy.sh`'s dispatch regex — plus the
`build_compose_image` arm naming `dankclaw/voiceservice/Containerfile`, without
which the build silently returns 0 and the unit's `Pull=never` tag never
exists.
- The unit joins TWO networks, in order: `dankclaw_default` first (default route,
where consumers and open-notebook live), then the voice bridge. `TTS_UPSTREAM`
moves from `host.containers.internal:8880` to `http://frank-tts-engine:8880` —
the actual fix for a shape that could never work, since a bridge container
cannot reach a host-loopback bind and the engine publishes nothing at all.
- `Wants=`/`After=` on the engine, never `Requires=`: the `llama-tts-cli` rollback
backend needs no upstream, so a broken engine may delay this endpoint but must
not take its unit down.
- The handler installs the engine's quadlet pair too, because a referenced
`Network=` file the generator cannot find means no façade unit is produced at
all, and `--only frank-tts` has no other way to get it. It creates
`/home/dank/voices` as the deploy user (rootless podman would auto-create a
missing bind source root-owned, which reads as "no voices"), and gates on
podman's recorded health.
- Voice naming is now written down where it can be found: a voice is a lowercase
directory name matching `^[a-z0-9][a-z0-9._-]*$`, at most 64 chars. That shape
is the intersection of two rules that disagree — the shim would accept mixed
case, the engine lowercases names — so a mixed-case pack resolves on one side
only, and the boot warmer refuses it loudly. `narrator1/2/3` are load-bearing
for open-notebook.
- Homepage card for the pair, `wip: down` and hidden, probing `127.0.0.1:7772`;
the engine gets no card because it publishes nothing and could never be probed.
- **No Prometheus job, deliberately.** No `/metrics` exists on the shim, this
Prometheus 3 refuses HTML/JSON bodies (the existing `comfyui` and `services`
probes are documented down for exactly that), and `LlmEndpointDown` is scoped
`up{job=~"frank-.*"}` — so a `/health` job would page on Signal for a healthy
endpoint. Recorded in the page instead of quietly skipped.
- Vault: new [[Frank TTS]] page linked from the index; [[Frank TTS Engine]] now
points at it for the pair's public signal; log entry for the day.
- Seam grows to 25 tests: the generator's rendering of the pair (both
attachments, first-network order, one publish, Wants-not-Requires, bounded
per-unit blocks), the env file's upstream checked as a network JOIN rather than
a string, planner separation and order, the handler's steps, the card's gating,
routing that selects both seams for either deployable.
Repo state only: nothing deployed, no host touched, no container started.
- `frank-tts-engine` on Dankclaw: `qwentts.cpp` commit
5916bf7c79dbb4e66fc059cdc507a79a23a28bb4, resident `tts-server`, 1.7 B base
talker Q4_K_M + Q8_0 tokenizer, container port 8880. It is deliberately NOT a
fleet endpoint — `frank-tts` on 7772 is the endpoint consumers address.
- Publishes NOTHING. A host-loopback publish would have been useless to the
façade (netavark DNATs published ports only, so a bridge container cannot
reach a host loopback bind — the shape that 502'd hermes) and would have been
the one LAN-reachable surface of an unauthenticated synthesiser. Both voice
containers sit on one committed quadlet network, `frank-tts-engine.network`
pinned to 10.89.5.0/24 (next free /24 after open-notebook's 10.89.4.0/24), and
peers address the engine by container name. Diagnostics and the deployer's
health gate run inside the netns (`podman exec`, `wait_container_healthy`).
- Cold-voice law honoured in the unit: the first request for a registered voice
decodes its whole reference to snapshot codec state (6.2-8.0 s, first audio
byte 5 530 ms), later ones restore in 0.5 ms, and the registry is memory-only.
`ExecStartPost=-/usr/bin/podman exec frank-tts-engine /app/warm-voices.sh`
with `TimeoutStartSec=900`; the `-` prefix keeps a failed warm from
crash-looping the endpoint under `Restart=always`. It logs cold=/warm= per
voice, so the under-a-second second request is proven on every boot.
- Thread law recorded: `tts-server` has no `--threads`; src/backend.h uses
hardware_concurrency()/2, so a cpuset pin silently changes the thread count.
- Image builds from the pinned commit with the proven line (GGML_BLAS=OFF
forced by this host, every GPU backend off, -j 8, no -DGGML_NATIVE because
ggml defaults to -march=native for the building host). Two stages; the runtime
stage COPYs both the entrypoint and the warmer, because a container that
publishes nothing is reached with `podman exec`, not a port.
- `scripts/download-frank-tts-engine-qwentts.sh` fetches the two GGUFs with byte
and LFS-oid checks (talker 1 219 245 248 B, tokenizer 291 150 624 B); the
deployer gates on --verify-only instead of pulling 1.4 GiB mid-deploy.
- Registered in SERVICE_ORDER, DANKCLAW_SERVICES, the deploy-remote.sh dispatch,
its pre-deploy requirement, deploy.sh's regex, the planner's path map (the
whole `dankclaw/voiceservice/` tree mapped to nothing before this), and
test-changed.sh ABOVE the `dankclaw/*.container` case whose `*` crosses `/`.
- New seam tests/frank_tts_engine.bats (19): the Quadlet generator's own output
for network/publish/boot/warm shape, entrypoint argv driven from the tracked
env file, the warmer against a stub tts-server over a real socket
(registration keys, ref_text absent, late engine, hung synthesis, name
refusal), the fetcher's verifier, the pinned cmake line, and both routing
tables. Suite: 422 passed.
- Vault: [[Frank TTS Engine]] linked from the index; log.md entry for the day.
The page a new operator needs: what the three required files are and who
reads each one, how a pack is built (with the extractor's usage text
verbatim, because the flags are not guessable and there is no -o), the
10-second gate and where it fires twice, how to add a fourth voice
including the warm hook that registers a pack without restarting the
engine, and the engine-bump procedure for when the artifact sizes move.
Plus the host census as of 2026-10-18 — the trial packs carry no
artifacts and their manifest is the trial's own schema, so the builder's
first real run is a --force migration — and the three gaps left open on
purpose: no curated ICL transcript, no 16 kHz variant, no loudness pass.
Linked from the Dankclaw services list; log entry appended oldest-first.
scripts/voice-packs.env carries the decisions worth a diff and nothing
else: the pack list, each voice's source file, crop offset, crop length
and pinned source digest, the extractor path with its engine repo and
commit, and the artifact arithmetic. Paths and numbers only — the pack
directories themselves stay host state under /home/dank/voices.
tests/voice_pack_unit.bats pins behaviour, from inputs to observable
output: a crop inside the first ten seconds exits nonzero naming the
invariant and creates nothing, a legal one builds the whole pack, the
reference comes out 24 kHz mono inside 18-25 s (ffprobe, on a locally
generated tone), the manifest round-trips through jq with offsets and a
sha256 that matches the source bytes, a re-run without --force leaves
every byte untouched, --force retires rather than deletes, --dry-run
needs no extractor at all, and a stub extractor that changed its artifact
size cannot publish a voice. No engine binary, no GPU, no network, no
fleet host: qwen-codec is stood in by a stub with the real tool's I/O
shape, the way frank_tts_unit.bats drives its backends.
test-changed.sh routes both new paths to that seam instead of letting
them land on the generic scripts/* syntax fallback.
Turns a source recording plus a crop offset into the pack frank-tts
resolves by name: reference.wav (24 kHz mono pcm_s16le, 18-25 s), the
engine's own reference.spk / reference.rvq made from it, and manifest.json
provenance (source path + sha256, crop start/end, sample rate, duration,
tool, engine commit, voice name).
The extractor is qwen-codec from the pinned qwentts.cpp tree, and the
flags are its own usage text, not a guess: --model <codec gguf>, --talker
<base talker gguf>, -i <wav>, optional --device; there is no -o, so it
names both artifacts next to the input with the extension swapped, which
is why the pack's WAV is staged under its final stem.
The 10-second source-material invariant is enforced, not annotated: an
offset inside the forbidden region exits 1 before a directory is created,
and the gate is asserted a second time from the manifest that was just
written, together with the recorded sha256. Artifact sizes are checked
against the codec's own arithmetic (8,192 B x-vector; 22 B per 12.5 Hz
frame), so an engine bump fails the build instead of shipping a pack the
engine rejects at synthesis time — and the crop is refused up front when
it is too short to fill the .rvq window.
reference.wav is the file the façade gates on, so it lands last, after
the artifacts and the manifest: a voice name never exists on disk without
its artifacts behind it. Nothing is ever deleted — an existing pack is
refused unless --force, which retires it whole to .AGENTTRASH/ — and
--dry-run runs every step except the extractor, so the seam can test the
gate without the engine.
Frank heard every audition pair and passed it, so likeness stopped being the
tiebreak and the engine was picked on the live-output criterion: arm A
qwentts.cpp 5916bf7, resident tts-server, 1.7 B talker, llama-tts-cli kept as
the rollback. Records the discriminators (first audio byte, warm RTF, spread),
the three consequences that are configuration (boot-warm every voice, no cpuset
pin, WAV-only registration), the two follow-ups left open on purpose, and the
corrected addressing law: a host-loopback publish is unreachable from a bridge
container, so the pair shares one quadlet network.
Mirror of command-center clarification: first dogfooding round stamped the
build worktree instead of the session's own working directory. Rule text
now says which one, and to note the build worktree in the body.
Mirror of dank/command-center's rule (there: PR off docs/session-trailer-rule).
Every agent-opened issue/PR body ends with cwd + omp session id so machine-filed
artifacts trace back to the box and session that produced them.
Refs #11 (command-center tracker)
The env file first landed with ESPERANTO_TTS_TIMEOUT equal to SHIM_TIMEOUT=600.
Equality is a race: both budgets expire at the same instant, so the case the
number existed to prevent — the worker abandoning a synthesis frank-tts is still
finishing — is exactly what happens on the tail of a long line. Nested budgets
go inside-out, which is the rule scripts/frank-tts.env states for its own
LLAMA_TIMEOUT; the client waits one round-trip longer than the server, so a
frank-tts give-up arrives labelled as frank-tts's error. 660.
The seam's assertion moves from equality to `>` for the same reason, and now
also holds ESPERANTO_LLM_TIMEOUT under upstream's 600 s web-UI patience — above
it the failure surfaces as a UI timeout with no name on it. The scriptwriting
number itself stays at the app's 180 s default: frank-zealot answers an outline
or a transcript well inside it, which corrects the earlier commit message's
claim that both timeouts were raised past upstream's 300 s.
Page registered in the vault index (the docs-completeness seam fails an
unregistered page) and logged in the bundle change log.
What the page owes the reader: the provider contract (frank-zealot for scripts
with a /v1 base URL, frank-tts for voices with 1-4 speakers mapped to the
narrator1/2/3 voice packs typed as free text), why Test Connection and Discover
Models fail cosmetically against frank-tts rather than being a fault, the
encryption key as the precondition for saving any credential, and the honest
blocker — frank-tts is not deployed and nothing listens on 7772, so a generation
run writes its script and fails on the first voice.
Episode destination is stated as interim and cites Gitea issue #7 (human-only,
agents must not work it): the app keeps its named volume, one bind mount puts
finished MP3s under /home/dank/media/podcasts, and deleting that one line is the
whole rollback. Rollback section also covers the full undo, including that the
podman network only disappears once the units are gone.
Structure only: what the units declare and how the scripts route them, never how
the app behaves inside a container. 19 tests.
The ones carrying real weight: the app unit has no publishable 8000 anywhere and
the database unit publishes nothing at all; the API remap off host 5055 is only
correct if API_URL names the same host port, so the seam parses the PublishPort
and compares; each unit reads the repo tunable file before the host secret file,
because podman's last-match-wins makes the order load-bearing; both health
probes are argument-only (a shell string there is a unit that starts dead); the
database password appears only as an env reference, never in Exec=; and the
episode host bind appears exactly once, since a second mount would silently
shadow the first.
The deployer assertions read the functions themselves: the gate URL path is
/health on the remapped port and must not name 5055, and the seed function
contains the blank-secret refusal plus the no-clobber test. No test asserts a
made-up endpoint or a cloud URL, and nothing touches the network.
The case has to sit where it does: the dankclaw/*.container glob's `*` crosses
`/`, so placed below it, dankclaw/open-notebook/quadlet/open-notebook.container
matched that generic case and ran the open-webui/pihole/searxng seams instead of
its own. Same reason the env path is grouped here — scripts/*.env would otherwise
send it to the generic env seams.
Internal-only: port 8502 direct, no vhost field, no Caddy change — exposure
stays behind an explicit decision, and the app carries its own password.
urlStatus=hidden is deliberate: the homepage probe runs on the gateway and the
pair is not deployed, so a live card would render dead on day one. Flipping it
to live is the only homepage change the deploy needs; the seam asserts the
hidden state while the service is repo-only and requires the required card
fields either way.
mono-on.svg follows the mono-* icon set the sibling cards use, so the card does
not fall back to the generic dot.
Registration is load-bearing, not cosmetic: deploy-plan.py refuses any service
it does not know, so SERVICE_ORDER + DANKCLAW_SERVICES are what let `--only` and
`--auto` address the pair at all; the dispatch case in deploy-remote.sh runs it;
the requirement in check_prerequisites gates a manual deploy; and the dispatch
regex in deploy.sh's host-mode branch decides whether a changed path dispatches
a service or falls through to "no service mapped" — an omission there is silent,
which is exactly how the AGENTS.md deployer-registration law was earned.
The deploy seeds /home/dank/Containers/open-notebook/env (0600) from the host
env and refuses to start the pair while OPEN_NOTEBOOK_ENCRYPTION_KEY or
OPEN_NOTEBOOK_PASSWORD is blank: without the key no provider credential saves
and without the password the API — including the episode-audio route — is open
to the LAN with no auth. A seeded file is never rewritten, so re-deploying
cannot clobber a rotated key, which would silently make every stored credential
undecryptable. SURREAL_PASS is derived from SURREAL_PASSWORD in the same write.
The gate names paths that answer, not invented ones: the database is judged by
its own container health status (/surreal is-ready, verified against the pinned
digest) and the app by wait_for_health on /health at the published 5056 mapping —
the route is upstream's and is on the auth middleware's exclude list, so it
stays 200 after the password is set. 180 s covers Next.js build + startup and a
degraded-but-listening first boot, matching the sibling LLM deploys.
Both digest pins are checked against local storage before restart, because
Pull=never means a missing image would otherwise surface as a unit stuck in
"Start request queued" (the 203/EXEC trap's sibling). The interim episode
directory is created before the app starts: a missing bind source makes podman
create it as root-owned and the app's mkdir would then fail.
The two knobs that keep the box alive: TTS_BATCH_SIZE=1 and
OPEN_NOTEBOOK_WORKER_MAX_TASKS=1. Upstream ships 5 x 5; frank-tts spawns one
~8 GiB, 8-thread engine process per synthesis request on a machine that also
serves two LLMs, so a five-way fan-out is a self-inflicted shutdown. The worker
knob is real, not decorative: the image's supervisord expands
${OPEN_NOTEBOOK_WORKER_MAX_TASKS:-5} into the worker command
(supervisord.conf:25).
Both ESPERANTO_* timeouts go above upstream's 300 s defaults, sized for CPU
synthesis (SHIM_TIMEOUT=600, LLAMA_TTS_THREADS=8) — one episode is dozens of
per-line /audio/speech calls and a timeout kills the episode, not the line.
API_URL is forced for the 5055 -> 5056 remap; SURREAL_URL addresses the database
by container name; CORS_ORIGINS is origin-form (scheme://host:port), the form
the app compares against. OPEN_NOTEBOOK_PASSWORD stays absent here on purpose:
the app treats a set-but-empty value as auth-on.
Secrets stay placeholders in the tracked file and in dankclaw/.env.example, which
lists SURREAL_PASSWORD rather than SURREAL_PASS — the deployer derives the
surreal CLI's spelling from it when it seeds, so the app and the database cannot
be handed different values.
Two containers, because that is what upstream runs (docker-compose.yml:6,13):
the app image under supervisord, plus SurrealDB. The `v1-latest-single` tag is
not in play — it bundles its own database, is deprecated upstream, and would
give the host a second hidden DB.
Both images are digest-pinned with Pull=never and a documented one-time pull,
the frank-dragoon posture: a Quadlet on :latest re-resolves on the first restart
after an unrelated daemon-reload, and the failure is silent.
Port map paid for by what is already on the host: seerr holds 127.0.0.1:5055
(since 2026-10-14, live `ss -ltn` agrees), so the API leaves on 5056 and the env
file has to set API_URL to match, because the frontend derives the API URL from
the window origin when it is unset. 8502 publishes on 0.0.0.0 — the service
carries its own password and the episode-audio route is unauthenticated. 8000 is
published nowhere, where upstream exposes it on loopback with root credentials.
The app joins dankclaw_default first and the private systemd-open-notebook
second: it reaches the published fleet endpoints through the former
(host.containers.internal, the arrangement Prometheus is proven against) and
finds its database by container name through the latter. Generated --network
flags keep file order, so the tunable file is listed before the host secret file
in both units — podman applies last-match-wins.
No UserMapping: the app runs as root in its namespace (no USER in the Dockerfile)
and writes only paths owned by that root. Exec= carries no database credential —
`exec start --user --pass` puts it in world-readable argv; the image's own
entrypoint passes it on stdin, so only the container env holds it.
Both candidate :8880 engines were measured on Dankclaw's CPU (no GPU,
no container, nothing deployed). arm A qwentts.cpp 5916bf7 resident at
RTF 0.55-0.57 warm / 0.67 ICL / 1.65 cold; arm B mainline llama-tts at
0.93-0.99 with a +-0.25 spread. Records the four configuration laws the
trial produced (boot-warm every voice, .spk+.rvq replay is byte-identical,
streaming != buffered, /v1/audio/voices rejects a lone spk_b64), the
likeness measurement's resolution limit, and re-keys the stale
8890/voiceshim shape on that page to frank-tts on 7772. The engine pick
stays open: the likeness metric cannot rank clones, so the audition clips
decide.
The section mandated a source-test-push loop but never stated a branch
regime - agents pushed straight to main. Fleet alignment (operator
decision 2026-10-18, mirrors dank/command-center): main is the only
long-lived branch; branch fresh off origin/main per work item; PRs
target main with --no-ff; merge only on Frank's explicit OK; tags on
main. Their tests/run.sh suite: ALL TESTS PASSED before push.
The dragoon-window provenance bullet still said the zealot arm owed a
measurement — it does not: the numbers are recovered and in the fetch script and
runbook. Adds the frank-tts phase-1 entry (naming law, port 7772, voice-pack law,
384/384 suite, PR #4 merged as 49c4e19, and the measured Gitea merge-field law).
Frank
dank