Prime, 2026-09-25: TEI serves embedding + reranking for esh-ml1 and the fleet
from now on; fv-ml1 retires both once esh-ml1 is up.
- stacks/embed-rerank: vLLM -> TEI 1.9.4 (89- Ada build), same ports
8001/8013, fail-closed truncation (--auto-truncate false; embed
--max-batch-tokens 32768).
- litellm: qwen3-embedding -> esh-ml1 only (hosted_vllm/, unchanged address);
reranker -> huggingface/ provider at :8013 (hosted_vllm/ 422s on TEI's
`texts` body). DB alias reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3 patched to the same target.
- Verified via the gateway against the retiring fv-ml1 seats: embed cosine
median 0.999927 (n=203); rerank top-1/top-3 29/30.
- stacks/vllm: vllm-embed and vllm-rerank-a3 removed (containers retired on
fv-ml1, GPU 1 freed ~6.1 GB); reward + coder unchanged.
- Bake-off record moved to docs/pfi/embed-rerank-tei-vs-vllm-bakeoff.md;
CLAUDE.md gains the TEI convention.
esh-pve: NVIDIA 580.178.04 (open modules, DKMS) installed on the host from
NVIDIA's .run and loaded live, no reboot. nvidia-persistenced unit creates the
device nodes before pve-guests; the T400's vfio-pci ids and `blacklist nvidia`
retired. playbooks/esh-pve-nvidia-host.yaml.
esh-ml1: CT 110, unprivileged Debian 12, 10.0.50.80, GPU nodes via devN,
NVIDIA userspace from the same .run (--no-kernel-modules), docker-ce +
nvidia-container-toolkit (no-cgroups). playbooks/esh-ml1-lxc.yaml. Not in the
vzdump job on purpose. DNS esh-ml1.esh.internal.
stacks/embed-rerank: Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B :8001 + bge-reranker-v2-m3 :8013 on
the same vLLM v0.24.0 digest and flags as fv-ml1. Measured parity: embed
cosine FV-vs-ESH median 0.999908 (min 0.999772), inside both self-noise
floors; rerank max |delta| 0.000145 vs floor 0.000181, identical ranking.
litellm: qwen3-embedding and reranker gain an esh-ml1 deployment at order 2
behind fv-ml1 (order 1). Order fallback proven with throwaway groups:
refused primary +0.15 s, host-down primary ~18.7 s per call, dead-only 500.
Also: repaired the DB-only alias reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3, dead since the
fv-ml1 relocation (still named 10.250.50.54); documented the third
unkillable homepage wedge on esh-docker-vm.
vh