The 2026-10-08 rename moved the harness model ids and the homepage cards;
the served aliases on the wire stayed frank-primary/frank-large/
frank-secondary. This closes the gap: the alias each endpoint announces is
now the family name, while the services, units, scripts, env files and
runbooks keep the old names (container identity stays stable).
- scripts/frank-secondary.env ALIAS, scripts/frank-large.env
HALOGEN_MODEL_ID, scripts/frank-primary.env FRANK_PRIMARY_SERVED_NAME
(+ the two serve-script defaults/gate messages)
- seams re-pinned: frank_secondary/frank_large/frank_primary unit bats
- fleet harnesses retargeted: bench-probe, deep-probe, calib-push,
fleet-probes-swift15, autoresearch(+measure), bench-threads-batch-http,
bench-decode
- shared/homepage/docs.html: api-id annotations and the "switchover will
rename the ids" footnote removed — the page's names are now the ids;
opencode/Pi/curl examples send frank-zealot
- dankclaw/hermes/config.yaml.example: frank-large -> frank-dragoon and the
live 262144 context (Hermes routes by served id; see Hermes.md)
Consumers with live state re-keyed out-of-band in the same window:
OpenWebUI (model row, access_grant, openai.api_configs model_ids) and the
Hermes config.yaml.
hermes-webui is Network=host, so 8787 is a bare host-netns bind, and netavark
DNATs only *published* ports. From Caddy's bridge netns 192.168.0.143:8787 and
10.89.1.1:8787 are both refused, while host.containers.internal:8787
(169.254.1.2) answers 200 — measured live 2026-09-16 from inside the Caddy
container. The dashboard's published 9119 answers on that same LAN IP, which is
what made the old upstream look sound.
The vhost comment asserted "192.168.0.143:8787 is open" from that bridge; it is
not, so the claim is replaced with the measurement, and the hermes-webui quadlet
comment carries the same correction. The seam guarding this invariant accepted
any numeric upstream, so the LAN IP passed it; it now pins the measured-working
form and fails on the LAN IP (teeth verified by substitution).
I tightened HERMES_WEBUI_HOST to 127.0.0.1 on the reasoning that the compose
service had published loopback and the unit had widened it. That reasoning
missed the consumer: this unit is host-networked (it shares the CDP daemon's
loopback), so Caddy cannot reach it by container name and fronts the guarded
vhost hermes.franksdank.cloud with `reverse_proxy 192.168.0.143:8787` — recorded
in dankclaw/Caddyfile with the same explanation. With the app on loopback that
upstream is dead, so the vhost broke.
The wildcard bind is what serves BOTH consumers: Caddy on the LAN address and
the phone's SSH tunnel on the host's localhost. Controls are the auth chain in
front of the vhost plus the webui password. The unit comment now states this
instead of the incorrect 'as before' claim, and the near-miss is worth the
paragraph: the e2e gate stayed green because no spec covers that vhost.
Two things, found while checking whether the hermes trio still needed migrating.
1. **The phone-facing webui was exposed to the LAN.** Its unit runs with
Network=host, so there is no Podman port forwarder and the app's own bind is
the exposure. The compose service it replaced published
`127.0.0.1:8787:8787` (loopback); the unit bound `HERMES_WEBUI_HOST=0.0.0.0`,
and the LAN address answered 200 — password-gated, but on every interface,
which is not the documented "SSH tunnel is the sole ingress" posture. It now
binds 127.0.0.1, which serves the tunnel just as well (sshd dials
localhost:8787 from the host). The unit comment claiming "LAN-facing as
before" was wrong about "before", and is corrected.
2. **Dankclaw's compose.yaml is retired.** Auditing ownership showed every
running container on that host reports a PODMAN_SYSTEMD_UNIT label — the
hermes trio's units have owned their containers since 2026-09-12 — so the
three service blocks left in compose.yaml were dead weight that could only
create a duplicate container fighting a unit for a name. deploy_hermes was
already fully unit-based. The file is staged in .AGENTTRASH/; the planner
plans nothing for it, an unknown service on that target now errors instead of
silently no-oping through `podman-compose`, and DANKCLAW_COMPOSE_SERVICES is
empty.
The hermes-webui seam now reads the unit — it read compose, which is exactly how
the bind drifted while the test kept passing against a file nobody ran.
The radiance MXFP4 stack cannot run TP=2 on this host. RCCL's collective
kernels carry a hidden hostcall-buffer parameter, and ROCr refuses to
dispatch them on a device without PCIe atomics: the AQL dispatch fails with
hipErrorIllegalState ("the operation cannot be performed in the present
state"), which is what every two-rank collective hit. The second R9700 sits
behind the chipset bridges 05:00.0/06:09.0, which advertise
`AtomicOpsCap: Routing-` — a read-only capability, so no software can enable
atomic routing on that path and the driver's
pci_enable_atomic_ops_to_root() fails for that card. The first card, on CPU
root port 00:01.1, has atomics enabled.
Ruled out: kernel version (7.0.0-28/-30/-31 identical, after a full upgrade),
iommu=pt, P2P hardware (45.3 GB/s between the cards), the shipped librccl (a
from-source rebuild reproduces the failure at the same call path), vLLM and
pynccl (a bare two-rank torch.distributed allreduce fails the same way), all
NCCL transport knobs, and single-rank tests (NCCL short-circuits at
world_size=1, so one-card success proves nothing).
Deployment: three rootless Quadlets — frank-medium-a (:7771, card 1),
frank-medium-b (:7772, card 2), both TP=1 at 114688 context (262144 and
131072 do not fit one card's KV) with vLLM-profiled KV — and
frank-medium-proxy (:7770), a round-robin that preserves the fleet contract
of one endpoint and one served model name. frank-medium.container stays as
the TP=2 target for a host whose second card is atomic-capable; the deploy
handler does not install it and trashes any stale copy.
Measured through the proxy (vllm bench serve, random dataset, --ignore-eos):
conc 1 42.8 tok/s, conc 4 147.6 tok/s, conc 8 230.8 tok/s, 32k prefill at
~2.8k tok/s per card, TPOT p50 23.6-28.8 ms.
Also: healthcheck reads PORT so one probe serves all three units, the hermes
example and the harness models.yml drop to the real 114688 context, and the
runbook records the full evidence chain.
Hermes hardcodes response_format=json_schema on its title call. No local
back-end implements constrained decoding — frank-small and frank-large both
answer 400 'response_format json_object/json_schema is not supported' — so
every session logged a title failure and fell back to a message-derived
title. The NPU endpoint that used to absorb this call was retired on
2026-09-11.
The call now goes out over the Responses transport (the only one that does
not forward response_format) with thinking off. A 64-token cap cannot hold a
thinking pass plus a title: with the default reasoning effort the model spent
all 64 tokens thinking and returned empty content, which is why disabling
reasoning is part of the fix and not decoration.
Verified against the live endpoint with the real prompt and the real
extraction path: raw {"title": "Friendly greeting"} -> title
'Friendly greeting' in 3.4s, where the previous configuration returned 400.
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.
The unit comment always claimed the webui drives the same agent state as
the gateway, but the image bakes HERMES_HOME=/opt/data and no unit
overrode it. Podman auto-creates a fresh anonymous volume at every
image-VOLUME point on container recreation, so each restart reset the
webui's config home to the image-default template (provider: auto ->
openrouter.ai with no API key), while the gateway read the corrected
/data/config.yaml. Pin HERMES_HOME=/data so both processes share one
config/state root and config edits propagate without a recreate.
Live config was still routing on pre-rename aliases (frank-default-large,
frank-default-small) after the 2026-09-03 frank-large/frank-small/frank-npu
rename cutover; hermes-webui resolved those ids to nonexistent models and
requests failed. Live config fixed in place (backup kept on-host as
config.yaml.bak-20260905); this backup now mirrors the live shape: named
providers for aux routes, title_generation/triage/kanban routed to their
actual models, moa + mcp sections, signal disabled.
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.
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).
Repoint Volume=/EnvironmentFile= in the 8 affected quadlet units to the
caddy-established Containers/<svc> layout: gitea (data, postgres, env),
authentik (data, postgres), hermes (data, webui checkout). Data-root mv on the
target happens at deploy time before each group's unit restart; same-fs rename,
instantly reversible. Running containers keep their inode-bound binds until the
unit restart flips them to the new path.
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.
LAN clients now connect directly to 192.168.0.143:8787 (password-gated via
HERMES_WEBUI_PASSWORD); the SSH tunnel via port 22 remains the sole
off-network ingress. Recreation also re-reads the rotated password from
dankclaw/.env via the [Container] EnvironmentFile.
The v1 quadlet generator skips the whole unit when [Container] holds an
unsupported key; the stale key was a leftover of a draft edit. Network=host is
the only host-networking key this generator version accepts.
The v1 generator on this host skips a unit whose [Container] section holds an
unknown key, so the deploy-time regeneration dropped hermes.service entirely
while the container kept running unmanaged. Network=host generates
--network host verbatim (v1 passes extension-less values through).
The gateway unit ran on dankclaw_default and could not reach the host
daemon: from that network only DNAT'd published ports accept connections to
the LAN address. The compose era ran the gateway with network_mode: host, so
the daemon was reachable; the unit silently changed topology at takeover and
broke the adapter. Host networking + a loopback dial removes the dependency
entirely — the gateway is an outbound-only client and publishes nothing.
The trio ran as bare compose containers and died silently at the Aug 26
reboot — nothing restarts compose containers at boot. Each now has a
boot-persistent unit (WantedBy=default.target; the v1 quadlet generator on
this host cannot enable generated units). The deploy handler retires the
compose-era containers only while the units are not yet active, then
(re)starts each unit.
Units run the image under a localhost/hermes-agent:latest alias tag (the
quadlet create path on this host cannot resolve registry-prefixed refs from
local storage); the deploy handler tags first. The gateway's :8090 publish
is dropped — nothing consumes it; the public vhost now routes to the
dashboard's login-gated UI on 9119.
Frank