prometheus, grafana, loki, alloy and node-exporter ran only from
dankclaw/compose.yaml. Rootless podman does not restart bare containers, so
they did not survive the 2026-09-11 reboot for the amd_iommu=off change and
had to be restored by hand — the same gap that had already cost the fleet
Caddy and Pi-hole, which is why the boot-persistence rule exists.
Each is now a rootless Quadlet unit under dankclaw/observability/quadlet/,
installed and dispatched by deploy_observability in deploy-remote.sh, with
the compose definitions retired so only one owner exists per container name.
Images, mounts, arguments and container names are unchanged, so Caddy's
proxies and Prometheus' own scrape config keep resolving.
Two posture changes, both about the unauthenticated surface:
* The three HTTP UIs published on 0.0.0.0 with no authentication of any kind
(Prometheus even with the lifecycle endpoint enabled). They now publish on
127.0.0.1: the browser path is the guarded franksdank.cloud vhost, Caddy
reaches them by name over dankclaw_default, and the host-side homepage
status timer probes loopback. Nothing legitimately used the LAN port.
* node-exporter bound :9100 on every interface; it now binds exactly its two
consumers, loopback (homepage timer) and the LAN address (Prometheus, which
runs in a container and cannot reach the host's loopback).
alloy gains a reachable health endpoint: its UI listens on the container's
own loopback and alloy 1.x refuses a config block for it, so the compose
service had nothing to probe — the homepage status card for alloy read 'down'
continuously. The unit moves the UI with a command-line flag and publishes
127.0.0.1:12345.
grafana keeps its Authentik OAuth client secret without receiving the whole
.env: systemd expands the value from a [Service] EnvironmentFile, which never
reaches the container.
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.
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.
- deploy_plex(): install unit, stop+mask native plexmediaserver.service on
first cutover (mask, never disable), gate on /identity for 180s
- deploy_tautulli(): install unit, stop+disable snap on first cutover,
seed config.ini with PMS_Web_Host=plex only if absent
- allow-lists (deploy.sh valid_service, deploy-remote.sh service_is_allowed),
planner routing (SERVICE_ORDER, DANKSERVER_SERVICES, quadlet_services),
test-changed cutover case, quadlet seam enumeration + new
userns/PUID=997/PGID=984 ownership-contract test
Seven units installed INSIDE the Mac VM (/home/core/.config/containers/
systemd) by a new deploy_frankbook_stack handler: gluetun (ProtonVPN
WireGuard, env-file credentials, publishes qbit's 8080/6881), qbittorrent
(Network=gluetun.container, verbatim /Volumes data roots, first-boot
config seed with fresh machine-local WebUI password and the Finished
Torrents category), and prowlarr/sonarr/radarr/lidarr/readarr (grab-only,
config migrated from dankserver at provisioning, readarr pinned to
amd64-1.0.980). deploy.sh routes the new target through the ssh-config
alias with REMOTE_SHELL=/usr/local/bin/bash (macOS bash 3.2 lacks
associative arrays); the planner learns FRANKBOOK_SERVICES and the
gluetun->qbittorrent netns pairing; new seam test pins the contract.
Cutover of the six surviving dankserver services from compose-era bare
containers to boot-persistent Quadlet units (WantedBy=default.target; podman
5.x v1 generator honors it at user-manager start).
Units are faithful to live inspect ground truth (image pins = running tags,
not compose inventory):
- romm trio shares one data root: /home/dank/Containers/romm mounted whole at
/romm; mariadb datadir and redis data dir live inside it. Aliases mariadb/
redis preserved on dankserver_appnet via Network=...:alias=. Secrets stay in
the host-local env file (EnvironmentFile + ${VAR} expansion in the generated
ExecStart, gitea precedent). copyparty passes its admin account via
Exec=-a ${COPAY_ACCOUNT}:${COPAY_PASSWORD} (Exec= not Command=: the v1
generator hard-fails on Command=); entropy stays rw only there.
- jellyfin keeps every creation-time env as Environment= lines (zero drift);
Device=/dev/dri + GroupAdd=keep-groups preserve hardware transcoding.
- calibre-web pins the exact running image tag (id 986277563e76 =
0.6.27-ls397), pasta network preserved.
Deployer: first-cutover handlers retire the old container, rescue unshadowed
anonymous-volume content (podman volume export + tar --skip-old-files), mv
data roots on the same fs, then start units in dependency order with health
gates. Re-deploys restart only the selected unit. deploy-plan.py maps compose
keys mariadb/redis to the new unit names; allowlists updated. New seam test
tests/dankserver_quadlet.bats pins boot-persistence + v1-generator contract;
test-changed.sh maps the new dirs to it. Full suite green (209 tests).
The first revision guarded the kfd line with SUBSYSTEM=="misc", which never
matches (misc-class devices carry no subsystem for udev matching), so the rule
was read but never fired and /dev/kfd stayed 0660 root:render. Name-only match
applies 0666 on creation and on trigger.
Also fixes test-changed.sh to exit 0 when changed paths map to zero tests
(udev rules are mapped-but-untestable) instead of invoking bats with an empty
selection.
The comfyui container is spawned by a systemd user unit whose spawn context
carries no supplementary groups, so render-group access to /dev/kfd and
renderD128 was structurally unreachable (keep-groups preserved an empty set;
named group_add 'render' fails name lookup inside the userns). World-mode on
the compute nodes is the only spawn-context-independent grant; display cards
keep their modes. Apply: install to /etc/udev/rules.d, udevadm control
--reload-rules, then trigger by subsystem to re-apply modes to live nodes.
Also maps dankclaw/udev/* in the focused-test selector (not bats-testable).
Bots and AI scrapers hit the SSO-fronted vhosts and eat Authentik auth
work for 403s. Anubis verifies clients first: DENY for known AI scraper
UAs, JS challenge for everyone else; verified traffic resumes the normal
Authentik forward_auth chain on Caddy's internal listener (:8016).
Chain: client -> Caddy (TLS) -> Anubis :8923 (verify) -> Caddy :8016
(auth + routing resumes; Host survives both hops) -> app. Reverse-proxy
through Anubis, not forward_auth: at the pinned tag a CHALLENGE answers
HTTP 200 + HTML, and forward_auth treats 200 as "authenticated" — the
page would pass through unchallenged. Exempt by construction (never
routed through Anubis): plex (plain HTTP legacy), auth.* (IdP login
must be reachable ungated), gitea (git smart-HTTP clients cannot solve
JS challenges), and every app with its own login.
Pinned ghcr.io/TecharoHQ/anubis:v1.13.0 — the tag was source-verified
before pinning: at this tag the policy parser is JSON-only with a
minimal bots[] schema (no imports, no CEL expressions), flags are the
config surface via flagenv (TARGET/POLICY_FNAME map to --target/
--policy-fname), and the image's exec-form HEALTHCHECK is inherited by
the quadlet unit (dodges the v1 generator's HealthCmd space-split quirk).
Rollback nuance: stopping anubis 502s everything behind the chain (the
public listeners proxy through it); a true rollback is reverting the
Caddyfile and redeploying, not just systemctl --user stop anubis.
All in-repo path references (AGENTS.md, README, old scripts, report artifacts,
test code paths) rewritten in the same commit; focused-test map extended for
.gitignore, old/scripts/*, dankclaw/comfyui/*, and report/* per this repo's
own convention ('add one before committing'). Obsidian wikilinks are
title-based and unaffected.
Caddy left compose.yaml for a quadlet unit (caddy.service): joins
dankclaw_default for container-name upstreams, Pull=never for the local-only
image, Porkbun credentials via /home/dank/Containers/caddy/env written by
deploy from .env, bare-IP-catch-all health check. deploy_caddy installs,
enables, and starts the unit after retiring the bare container (state is in
host volumes).
Pi-hole: the repo now owns the sysctl drop-in
(dankclaw/pihole/sysctl/99-dnsmasq.conf, ip_unprivileged_port_start=53);
deploy_pihole installs it to /etc/sysctl.d/, stages conflicting later-sorted
drop-ins in the home trash, and applies 'sysctl --system' (the boot code
path). This fixes the 2026-08-26 crash loop (port-53 bind denied, restart
counter 1645) caused by a second drop-in resetting the value to 80.
Tests: new caddy_quadlet.bats seam; caddyfile/deployment_flow assertions
repointed from the removed compose service to the quadlet; pihole.bats pins
the sysctl drop-in and its deployment; test-changed.sh routes dankclaw/caddy/
and the pihole subtree to their seams. Docs: Caddy, Pi-hole, Dankclaw Stack,
work log.
The pre-commit hook runs scripts/test-changed.sh, which requires a
focused-test mapping for every staged path. The quadlets were moved into
dankclaw/<svc>/quadlet/ but the mapping still only matched top-level
dankclaw/*.container, so any nested quadlet or the pihole addn-hosts/env
data files fell through to the catch-all 'die' and blocked commit.
Add the nested-quadlet mappings (pihole-specific first, then the
dankclaw/*/quadlet/* fallback) plus the pihole data-file paths.
Fan out subagents to compare mainline llama.cpp, charlie12345/ROCmFPX,
and ik_llama.cpp, then add their findings to the project knowledge base:
- docs/Research/Llama Cpp Runtimes.md (positioning + quantization + server fit)
- docs/Research/Llama Cpp Code Diff.md (code-level quant diff, table, recommendations)
- docs/Research/SGLang.md (what SGLang is, comparison, our-boxes fit)
- docs/Research/index.md (Research progressive-disclosure index)
Cross-linked from docs/index.md (root) and docs/LLM/index.md.
AGENTS.md:
- Add Documentation Authoring section: docs/ is an OKF bundle; point doc authors
at the canonical spec in the system-config knowledge base
(~/.pi/agent/docs/references/okf-spec.md), not the orphaned
docs/references/okf-spec.md; consolidate read-index/one-concept-per-file/
progressive-disclosure/citation rules.
- Map AGENTS.md to docs_completeness.bats in the focused pre-commit hook (it was
last committed before the hook existed and had no mapping).
Frank