Ledger confirms the change landed: "3 slot(s) over one 524288-position pool",
"slots: 1 -> 3 POOLED, 111.0 MiB each", held 103.5 -> 103.4 GiB.
Recorded the oversubscription nuance that the old row missed: the slots were
never the binding constraint on context. 4 x 262144 exceeds the 524288 pool,
so admission was pool-bound all along -- two full-length conversations, or
four at 131k. Lowering the cap trims simultaneous requests, not capacity.
Raised /swap.img from 8 GiB to 64 GiB on Dankclaw. Host-level state with no
repo file, so it was invisible to the repo until now: fstab line 12 drives the
generated swap.img.swap unit, ext4, fallocated hole-free, swappiness 60,
zswap off. 748 GiB still free on /.
The reusable part is the ordering. The old file held 4 GiB of live pages and
MemAvailable read 73 GiB while only ~5 GiB was genuinely free -- the pinned
model weights are counted as reclaimable page cache, so the headline lies by
the size of the model. Swapping off before the replacement is online would have
pushed those pages into RAM that does not exist. Creating and enabling the new
swap first let them migrate instead: swapoff took 65 s and the host never
wobbled.
New page serverAppConfigs-docs/Dankclaw/Swap Configuration.md, linked from
the index, plus a pointer in the AGENTS.md memory-model section so nobody
reasons about headroom without checking swapon.
Old 8 GiB file staged at dankclaw:~/.AGENTTRASH/20260912-swapfile-8g/
pending approval to purge.
Seven restarts measured. New section "The reserve cannot buy air": reserve 16
was deployed and held exactly what 15 holds — 103.5 GiB, 7.1 GiB left to the
host. The flag is a term in the fit-check inequality, not a reservation, so it
has only two regimes: below the pool's requirement it changes nothing
observable, above it the pool silently disappears.
Sizing rule now defers to the engine's printed requirement (budget >= 36.5 for
524288 at max_tok 32768, from "need ~35.0 GiB plus 1.5 of margin") over my
modelled 37.0, and the ledger table carries the reserve-16 row.
Ledger confirms the doubled pool is actually reserved (524288, 13312.0 MiB)
at max_tok 32768 with no clamp and no WARNING: 38.5 budget vs 37.0 needed.
Recorded the cost honestly. The server now holds 103.5 of 121.2 GiB and the
engine reports only 310 contiguous 2 MiB blocks / 7.1 GiB left for everything
else (24-reserve baseline: 2081 blocks / 12.1 GiB). All 28 co-tenants stayed
up, but the engine volunteers a new note: when memory runs out, frank-large
AND its neighbours "can stall for minutes at a time at full CPU with no disk
activity and no output, which is not a crash and needs no restart". That is
the least diagnosable of the three failure modes seen today, and `free` hides
it — MemAvailable still reads ~74 GiB because the pinned weights count as
reclaimable page cache.
Sizing rule now expresses the budget as a function of reserve, shows both
endpoints (24 -> 29.5, 15 -> 38.5), and the max_tok ceiling is labelled as
reserve-conditional (<= 18,130 at 24; <= 35,700 at 15).
Deployed HALOGEN_MAX_TOK=32768 by operator call (upstream default, full prefill
speed) and confirmed the prediction from the ledger:
kv pool: 524288 positions need ~35.0 GiB ... LOWERING THE POOL TO 262144 (~27.8 GiB)
memory: 68.0 weights + 7.2 KV pool + 21.1 working = 96.3 GiB in all
so the effective pool is 262144 again and the doubling this task set out to do
is not in force. Healthy, completion verified. Left the pool requesting 524288
deliberately: with KV_POOL_FIT on that is a grow-if-RAM-frees-up declaration,
not a mistake.
Two corrections to what I wrote earlier today:
1. The engine's sizing block, and its "WARNING even 262144 ... host RAM cannot
spare it" line, print ONLY when the fit check had to clamp something. The
09-11 baseline boot prints no kv pool: sizing lines at all. So the absence
of a warning in old logs was never evidence of headroom.
2. The budget needs a vision term. Actual need is pool + arena + 1.97 GiB of
vision tower, not pool + a 1.5 GiB nominal margin. That makes the ceiling
for a doubled pool max_tok <= 18,130 rather than 19,115, and it means the
32768/262144 corner this box has run in since 09-11 is ~0.3 GiB OVER its own
stated budget -- and has been the whole time. It boots and serves with
12-14 GiB genuinely free because the 24 GiB reserve is generous. A soft
floor, not a wall.
The arena model also reproduces upstream's three published "on the device"
figures exactly (35 / 42 / 41 GiB), confirming they are pool+arena totals at
the default max_tok and not pool-only -- which is the misreading that made the
doubling look affordable in my first estimate.
Raising HALOGEN_MAX_TOK to 65536 did not shrink the pool, it OOMed the boot:
the arena alone (37.3 GiB) exceeds the 29.5 GiB device budget, so even the
minimum pool faulted and dmalloc failed at 39.97 GiB. Rolled back to 16384,
which restored the 524288 pool and a clean completion.
The three measured arenas are exactly linear in the flag — 3.80 GiB base plus
8.40 GiB per 16384 tokens, predicting all three to 0.1 GiB. That gives a real
sizing rule instead of guesswork, and it says the deployed 16384 is the
CEILING, not a conservative choice: 29.5 - 1.5 margin - 14.4 pool leaves 13.6
for the arena, i.e. max_tok <= 19,115.
The corner check falls out of the same model: set max_tok back to 32768 and
only 7.4 GiB remains for the pool, ~269k positions, which is precisely the
262144 config this host ran before. The two corners of the feasible box are
the only two points it has ever served.
No functional change — the quadlet edit is comments only; the running service
is already at 16384 from the rollback deploy (258cccb).
The first draft of these notes estimated the doubled pool at 103.5 GiB
held / ~5 GiB host remainder. Both numbers were wrong — they costed the
KV alone and ignored that the arena shrinks when MAX_TOK drops. Measured:
pool 262144 / max_tok 32768 -> 96.3 GiB held, 12.1 GiB host left
pool 524288 / max_tok 16384 -> 94.6 GiB held, 13.8 GiB host left
The doubled pool is 1.7 GiB cheaper overall. Also records the failed
first attempt verbatim, since the silent-revert failure mode is the thing
a future operator most needs to recognise, and adds the HALOGEN_MAX_TOK
row to the deployed-flags table (the "baked 32768" line it overrode was
stale).
HALOGEN_KV_POOL_POSITIONS 262144 -> 524288, which is upstream's own
default (2 x HALOGEN_CTX). The old pool was the binding constraint on
concurrency, not context: a request reserves prompt + max_tokens against
the pool, so with pool == CTX four concurrent 65k chats were contending
for one full-length conversation's worth of positions. Two full-length
conversations, or four at 131k, now stay resident.
Cost is ~7.2 GiB more device RAM (measured 28 KiB/position), taken from
the page cache the 47.7 GiB n-gram lookup table reads through. Live
startup ledger for the prior config: 68.0 weights + 7.2 pool + 21.1
working = 96.3 GiB held, 12.1 GiB left on the host. The doubled pool
puts the remainder near 5 GiB against a ~4.3 GiB co-tenant working set,
and cache at ~69 GiB -- still above the lookup table, so the table can
stay hot. Compensating lever if long prompts start crawling:
HALOGEN_MAX_TOK=16384, which frees 8.3 GiB of prefill arena for ~8%
of prefill throughput.
Docs updated to match, including the admission-trap paragraph, which was
only true while pool == CTX.
Documents the root-cause chain for the marreta.franksdank.cloud login wall:
null invalidation_flow (outpost serde crash) -> missing flows -> and the real
blocker, ProxyProvider.application=None so the embedded outpost's
filter(application__isnull=False) never loaded the provider. Notes the
providers are live-only (no repo blueprint) as a provenance gap.
Deployed live at 91e9410 (gluetun+marreta+caddy), authentik provider pk 13,
guard chain verified end-to-end. Documented that Laravel APP_KEY must carry the
base64: prefix — a bare base64 key 500s every app route with 'Unsupported
cipher or incorrect key length' while /up still passes.
Verbose engine logging is the vendor's first-line evidence for load,
allocation and admission questions; shipping it on means an incident
report already carries the full startup account instead of needing a
restart-into-debug. HALOGEN_DMALLOC_LOG stays off (every alloc >64MB is
steady-state noise on a shared host). Doc updated with the rootless
podman-logs-vs-journalctl retrieval note.
Rewrites the [[Observability]] umbrella page and the five component pages for
what is actually deployed: rootless Quadlet units instead of compose services,
the loopback-only publish posture (node-exporter's LAN binding explained), the
loki healthcheck living in its image because the image has no shell, and the
Home=/root trap that killed the first grafana start.
Adds the note that matters most to a reader: the stack is installed, healthy
and UNCONFIGURED. Grafana reports zero datasources and zero dashboards with an
empty provisioning directory; Prometheus has no rule files and no Alertmanager;
Loki is configured but has no reader; node-exporter runs its default
collectors. Alloy is the only configured piece. Metrics and logs are collected
and retained, and nothing is visualized or alerted on.
AGENTS.md's boot-persistence gap note is replaced by the resolution.
frank-large moves from the kingjones30/ROCmFPX llama.cpp build to
peonist-ai/halogen-flash-server 0.5.8 serving Qwen3.8-Flash-Next (w4b
.hgn 115.55 GiB + quality overlay). Upstream measures this engine at
roughly 4x the prefill throughput of the llama.cpp family on the same
gfx1151 silicon, and prefill dominates any prompt with real context.
Shape: a rootless Quadlet container (dankclaw/frank-large/quadlet/),
engine on container loopback :8730 (never published), OpenAI front-end
:8731 published as host 7770, HALOGEN_MODEL_ID=frank-large so no client
renamed anything. Context 262144, KV pool 262144 positions (~7.2 GiB,
conservative for a shared 121 GiB host), 4 slots, host reserve 24,
vision tower on, weights pinned, all other flags at vendor defaults.
Weights are fetched by HALOGEN_DOWNLOAD on first start into a writable
/home/dank/models/halogen.
The llama.cpp era (unit, env, serve script) is staged in .AGENTTRASH/
rather than deleted; the STRIX payload and the ROCmFPX build stay on
disk as the rollback target. deploy_llm_large becomes a user-quadlet
handler: it retires the old ROOT unit (moving its checkout symlink into
the home trash, never rm) and gates the first start on the download
rather than reporting a failure for a fetch that is working exactly as
designed.
frank-npu is retired in the same change. The kernel cmdline moves from
iommu=pt to amd_iommu=off for the 13-16% of prefill upstream measured,
and that takes the XDNA2 NPU with it: without PASID/SVA the driver
cannot open /dev/accel/accel0 (err=-19). Its five dependent routes are
repointed (Hermes vision -> frank-large, Hermes title generation ->
frank-small, harness vision -> frank-large, tiny -> frank-small, task ->
frank-large:medium) and its provider blocks are removed from both the
harness config and Hermes's live config. Audio input leaves the fleet
with no replacement; image input survives on halogen's vision tower.
Docs: new halogen-flash-server runbook, new IOMMU decision record, and
frank-npu rewritten as a retirement record. AGENTS.md topology, runtime
sections, benchmarking policy (frank-large is a user unit now) and the
harness model-config section are corrected.
Flip the homepage Sonarr card from the user category to admin and repoint
its link at the LAN-direct port (192.168.0.112:8989). Retire the unguarded
public vhost sonarr.franksdank.cloud (direct reverse_proxy, no auth) and its
post-auth @sonarr handler from the Caddyfile; drop the Pi-hole addn-hosts A
record with it. No public Porkbun record ever existed (NXDOMAIN at the zone),
so after this there is no WAN path to Sonarr: users request TV via Seerr
(guarded), admins reach Sonarr's own UI from the LAN only.
Fixes the seerr/sonarr mix-up from 19b2589/e0bade6.
Mechanical identity rename across the knowledge base, AGENTS.md, README, the
hermes config example, and homepage services.json. No behavior change; served
aliases on the LLM endpoints change with the deploy of commit 69f87c8.
frank-default-large -> frank-large (Dankclaw :7770), frank-default-small ->
frank-small (Dankserver :7770), frank-default-sightsound -> frank-npu
(Dankclaw :7771). Units, env files, serve scripts, deploy-plan mappings,
deploy-remote dispatch (stop/disable old units + relink + enable new), and the
test seams move together. Retired frank-default-npu.* artifacts moved to
scripts/.AGENTTRASH/ (tracked-in-history; ignored on disk).
Served aliases become frank-large / frank-small via --alias; the NPU endpoint
serves the whole FLM registry, so its rename changes no served tags.
Post-change doc reconciliation for the hermes vhosts + DNS deletion batch:
- Hermes-Dashboard.md: access is now the hermesadmin.franksdank.cloud vhost
(direct Caddy proxy to 192.168.0.143:9119, no guard chain — exempt because the
dashboard enforces its own basic-auth login), plus the raw LAN port. The old
text claimed an Authentik-guarded public vhost, which was decommissioned.
- Hermes-WebUI.md: description updated — the webui is now also reachable via the
unguarded hermes.franksdank.cloud vhost (its own password auth is the gate).
- LAN-DNS.md: "add a name in two places" corrected to a two-or-three-step
decision; internal-only names (prometheus/loki/grafana/seerr) deliberately get
no public A record and resolve on the LAN only, and DNS-01 issuance is
unaffected because the challenge is a TXT record in the same zone.
- Seerr.md: DNS row corrected — addn-hosts only since 2026-09-02; NXDOMAIN on WAN.
- hermes-dashboard.container: unit comment no longer claims Authentik termination.
No behavior change in this commit; tests 233/233 green (docs-completeness seam included).
New page Architecture/Container Network Namespaces.md: which local services are
addressable from which Podman network namespace on Dankclaw (rootless podman +
netavark). Verified live 2026-09-02: gateway/webui/CDP run in the host netns and
dial loopback; hermes-dashboard is the only Hermes container on a bridge network
(dankclaw_default, 10.89.1.0/24 gw 10.89.1.1) and can dial published ports only —
unpublished host-netns listeners (signal-cli :8080, webui :8787) are refused from
that namespace even though both bind 0.0.0.0.
Corrected while verifying the above:
- Hermes.md: data root is /home/dank/Containers/hermes/data (not the retired
/home/dank/hermes-data); gateway dials the Signal daemon on loopback; the
daemon itself is a host user unit (signal-cli-daemon.service) bound to
0.0.0.0:8080, so the Signal HTTP API is LAN-reachable.
- Hermes-Dashboard.md: it is a Quadlet unit (Network=dankclaw_default), not a
compose service; data root + /opt/data anonymous volume corrected.
- Hermes-WebUI.md: binds 0.0.0.0:8787 in the host netns (verified: unauthenticated
GET /health from another LAN machine returned 200) — the SSH tunnel is an access
path, not a containment boundary; HealthCmd and data-path corrections.
- Network Architecture.md: no hermes vhost exists in either the tracked or the live
Caddyfile (hermes.franksdank.cloud resolves but routes nowhere); SearXNG exits the
tunnel via the shared named network searxng.network, not service:gluetun.
Docs only — deploy is a no-op for this change.
- tautulli.container: HealthCmd switches to the repo's proven curl pattern
(jellyfin unit) — quadlet's systemd-style value parsing mangles embedded
double quotes; PublishPort=8181:8181 restored (a mis-aimed line edit
replaced it; the PublishPort seam test caught the regression)
- deploy_plex readiness gate: 36x5s -> 120x5s; the 2026-09 cutover showed
the first container boot of a years-old library runs ~10 min while PMS
pre-binds 32400 and empty-replies; 180s failed the gate twice with a
healthy, still-booting service
Evidence from the failed first cutover: podman top shows container root
maps to dank (1000) under UserNS=host rootless (subuid range 100000:65536
cannot express 997), so PUID=997 fell back to root and PMS crash-looped on
write access to its 997:984-owned data root. Fleet model instead: PUID=0/
PGID=0 (container root = dank, same as jellyfin/copyparty data roots) and
deploy_plex chowns /var/lib/plexmediaserver to 1000:1000 inside the
first-cutover block. Zero bytes moved; rollback regains one chown -R
997:984 step, documented in Plex.md. Seam test pins PUID=0/PGID=0 and the
absence of any userns key.
podman 5.7 podman-user-generator on dankserver hard-fails the whole unit on
the unknown key ('unsupported key UsernsMode in group Container'), so the
first cutover attempt masked the native unit and then found no plex.service
at all. Swap both units to UserNS=host (same --userns=host flag), update the
ownership-contract seam test to pin the exact key, and correct both docs.
Pin the seam: the v1 generator rejects unknown Container keys silently at
deploy distance — the test now pins UserNS=, not the misspelled alias.
- runtime rows: podman quadlet under the systemd user generator, pinned
image digests, in-place bind mounts, identity model, appnet aliases
- cutover/rollback section on Plex.md (mask-native-unit lever, decommission
gate); drop the false 'updates are apt-only' and 'snap refresh' gotchas
- update path is now deploy.sh dankserver --service plex|tautulli
The loki/grafana/seerr proxy providers were script-provisioned with no
flows and no Application: null flows made the embedded outpost's Rust
deserializer reject the whole config (all guarded vhosts down after any
outpost reload), and the missing apps bounced post-login to authentik's
user UI instead of the app. Backfilled both live; documented the two
provisioning rules and updated the provider inventory. SSO e2e now
asserts the app landing (pathname leaves /if/, no IdP markers in body)
instead of only the hostname.
- qB 5.x's 204 login breaks Readarr's retired client at runtime; 4.6.7 answers
legacy 200+Ok. Pin recorded in the unit and documented.
- Prowlarr download client created via schema template; all five clients test
200 through the podman gateway.
- PBKDF2 gotcha: qB 5.x conf rewrite left a hash 4.6.7 rejects; fresh rewrite
of the same line restored login.
- E2E: torrent through the Panama tunnel at ~17 MB/s, completed into Finished
Torrents, deleted with data.
Document the Mac *arr/qBittorrent stack (VM placement, gluetun credential
gate, socat LaunchAgents, PBKDF2 qB seed) and log the day: dankserver
recovery + full quadlet cutover of the six media services, the frankbook
skip-propagation/PBKDF2 handler fix, the 7-service frankbook deploy, and
the jellyfin GPU-parity finding.
Phase 1/2 of the podman standardization plan: service pages updated to the
quadlet reality (units, Containers data roots, env-file secret convention,
the v1-generator findings each caught live), Storage Policy documents the
two rootless ownership regimes and the merge-move migration, Deployment
Flow's service-manager table no longer claims dankserver media is bare
inventory-only. Bundle change log entry added.
-v /w::A granted anonymous full rwmda on the LAN (verified: anon PUT -> 201,
PROPFIND -> 207). New perms ::r:ra,dank: browse/download for anonymous
(required by the guarded files.franksdank.cloud chain), admin for dank,
no w/m/d for anyone. Runbook corrected with the --help-accounts semantics.
Adds a digest-pinned headless-shell Chrome DevTools Protocol daemon as a
boot-persistent quadlet unit (chrome-devtools-protocol.container). The
entrypoint override drops the image's socat front so the CDP endpoint binds
loopback-only on 127.0.0.1:9222 in the host network namespace; only the two
host-network consumers (Signal gateway, webui server) can drive it.
hermes-webui flips Network=dankclaw_default -> Network=host so its agent
process shares the daemon's namespace (0.0.0.0:8787 bind is LAN-facing as
before; no exposure change). deploy_hermes installs the new unit and starts
it if inactive without restarting in-flight browser sessions.
Verified live 2026-08-31: guarded path serves the Anubis JS challenge at
HTTP 200 to non-browser API clients (status-only consumers silently get
HTML); direct published port 8081 from pass_ip sources returns real JSON.
Decision: no second agent-only instance — same engines and same
rate-sensitive VPN exit IP would see double request volume for zero gain.
Server-side implementation landed on Dankclaw: dedicated 'tunnel' account
(nologin shell, password-locked, key-only auth), sshd drop-in
99-tunnel.conf scoping AllowTcpForwarding to that user with PermitTTY off,
and permitopen="localhost:8787" key-option guidance so a leaked tunnel key
can only forward to the webui port. WebUI stays loopback-only published.
Token exchange chain verified end-to-end in-process on the live provider
(pk 9): authorize -> ORM-minted code -> form-encoded token exchange with
Basic client auth -> userinfo. Key findings documented:
- Application row + grant_types must exist before authorize can complete
- token endpoint consumes form-encoded bodies only (JSON body => no
grant_type parsed -> unsupported_grant_type); client auth is Basic-only
- PropertyMappingEvaluator.evaluate(*args,**kwargs) forwards kwargs to
BaseEvaluator.evaluate(expression_source), so context kwargs become the
expression source and every evaluation raises a swallowed exception;
userinfo therefore answers sub-only claims for every provider in this
fork. Scope granting filter (provider= M2M descriptor) is always empty.
- Grafana identity = sub hash until the evaluator bug is fixed upstream.
Env file is the source of truth (unit ExecStart runs the serve script which
sources it); serve-script default and the deployer health-gate URL flipped in
lockstep so the post-restart health gate polls the new port. Docs, fleet table,
and both index bullets updated to match.
Prior docs claimed unknown tags silently serve llama3.2:1b. Live probes on the
live endpoint disprove it: /v1/chat/completions answers HTTP 200 with a flat
{"error":"Failed to load <tag> model!"} body and no choices; /v1/completions
answers a nested OpenAI-shaped server_error (code 500) under HTTP 200. Valid
tags route per-request to the named model (response echoes the requested tag);
no restart needed to switch between registry tags. Corrected in the runbook,
the AGENTS.md runtime section, the serve-script header comment, and the
historical FastFlowLM incident note.
frank-default-sightsound (FLM v1.0.1, XDNA2 NPU, port 52626) is live on
Dankclaw. Documents the first-deploy crash-loop root cause: iommu=off on the
kernel cmdline breaks the XDNA2 SVA bind (amdxdna_drm_open ret -19), so every
/dev/accel/accel0 open fails with ENODEV; fixed with iommu=pt + reboot.
Whole-registry single-port serving with per-request routing by exact FLM tag;
unknown tags fall back to llama3.2:1b (no 404). Health = GET /v1/version.
Vision + audio towers proven live (image_url color probe; audio control-pair
token-count probe). Updates AGENTS.md fleet table + runtime section, both
index pages, and the change log.
- kingjones-strix-rocmfp4 reactivated as the ACTIVE large runbook:
runtime build recipe (WEBUI=OFF gotcha), deployed serving profile,
fa-on-works-unpatched evidence, MTP heads documented unloadable,
swap procedure + 2026-08-30 validation record
- agentionai-fast-imatrix marked RETIRED (rollback record kept)
- freetoken-frank-default-small: model/lineage/template sections now
Huihui abliterated FP8; new operational quirk: chat API 422 without
explicit model field
- LLM index + AGENTS fleet table/runtime sections current; both
services' history chains fixed (small was still Tiel in AGENTS.md)
- worklog entry added; models.json contextWindow for large corrected
to the real per-slot 131072 (llama clamps n_ctx_train/parallel)
Frank