Commit Graph
100 Commits
Author SHA1 Message Date
vh b001d0cb2e feat(hrafn): author the CI deploy that replaces the hand-rsync path
hrafn was handed to infra-ops for uptime ownership with no CI deploy and
no commit provenance -- the image was always local/hrafn:v1 and the whole
working tree lived in the compose directory.

These two files fix both. They are authored here because infra-ops owns
hrafn's uptime, but they belong in vh/hrafn; claude-bot is not a
collaborator there, so they are handed to the repo holder rather than
committed directly.

- playbooks-deploy.yaml -> vh/hrafn playbooks/deploy.yaml
- gitea-workflows-deploy.yaml -> vh/hrafn .gitea/workflows/deploy.yaml

Design calls recorded in the README: the build context travels as one
tarball rather than per-file upload steps (nevermore's pattern fails open
when a new source file has no matching step), and the playbook refuses to
deploy unless .env exists at 0600 -- a guard prompted by it arriving 0644
with a live bearer token in it.

Validated with `elway --dry-run`, which caught a real interpolation bug
during authoring. No new Actions secrets needed.
2026-08-22 15:26:45 -07:00
vh b6924de728 feat(hrafn): register the browser-fetch service and tighten its env perms
nevermore-claude handed hrafn to infra-ops for uptime ownership. Intake:
verified health independently, brought it into the inventory, and fixed one
security defect found during the check.

- canonicalize stacks/hrafn/ (compose.yaml + .env.example + README)
- list hrafn in the ana-docker running-stacks table
- README records the load-bearing bits: shm_size 1gb is required for
  Chromium, playwright and the base image are version-coupled, SSRF denies
  private targets by default, and restart:unless-stopped does NOT act on
  healthcheck failure

Security fix applied on the host, not in this tree: /opt/docker/compose/
hrafn/.env was 0644 with a live 57-char bearer token in it, readable by
every local account (verified by reading it as `nobody`). Tightened to 0600;
owner unchanged so the deploy path still works, confirmed via `docker
compose config` as lkraven. Container untouched and still healthy.

Known gaps recorded rather than silently accepted: no CI deploy, and the
image builds from an rsync'd working tree living in the compose directory,
so the running image has no commit provenance.
2026-08-22 15:05:11 -07:00
vh 7bf17dd39e fix(filezilla): set restart: unless-stopped and canonicalize the stack
The filezilla container on vm-esh-nas shipped with no restart policy. It
was SIGTERMed during the 2026-08-18 host shutdown and never came back,
staying down four days while dockge/dozzle-agent/beszel-agent all
recovered on their own.

- add `restart: unless-stopped` (applied on the host, container recreated
  and verified serving 200 on :5800 with all four /NAS mounts visible)
- promote the previously un-canonicalized compose into stacks/filezilla/
  so the policy is version-controlled rather than host-only
- record the missing-restart-policy failure mode in the host README
2026-08-22 09:50:51 -07:00
vh 837fa362fc memory: snapshot — sec rebuilt on DFlash2 + newer vLLM; quant tokenizer defect fixed fleet-wide
Rewrites the in-flight section (140 lines to 18) now that the AI-seat work
has settled, promoting the durable calls into the dated decision log where
they will not decay: DFlash2 measured and promoted to sec's compose stack,
the calibration-truncation defect fixed at source in the quant pipeline,
sec retuned after a runtime OOM, the Max-Q spread disproved by telemetry,
ESH dual-stack with the Cityside static proven unprovisioned, and speaches
live with the weak-gate finding.

Carries forward the two things a fresh session must not get wrong: the sec
degeneration question is confounded because engine and drafter changed
together, and neither the 2k nor the 10k observation is evidence.

Auto-archived one entry (Recent decisions: 1) to archival-memory.md.
Eight further candidates were held back by the guards -- open deferred work
or referenced by in-flight state.
2026-08-22 09:46:11 -07:00
vh 6e82899ba7 fix(mog-sec): retune to 0.52/420K after a runtime OOM at 0.55/480K
The 0.55 configuration booted cleanly, passed every startup check, and then
killed the engine on an ordinary request of roughly 20k tokens:
torch.OutOfMemoryError allocating 614 MiB in the GDN causal_conv1d path with
443 MiB free. The container self-recovered via restart: unless-stopped.

Context length was not the cause. gpu-memory-utilization is not a hard
reservation. Weights and KV are reserved up front, but activation memory is
allocated on demand and the profile that sizes it uses dummy data at
max_num_batched_tokens. The profile predicted 3.62 GiB; the process sat about
1 GiB over its entire budget even at idle. With six vLLM containers sharing
GPU1 there was no slack left to grow into, and a modest allocation lost the
race. 0.52 leaves roughly 7.7 GiB free against 4.6 GiB at 0.55.

Records a measurement that governs how max-model-len can be chosen at all:
the KV pool varies between boots. Two consecutive boots at 0.52 produced
425,663 and 453,600 tokens, a 6.6 percent swing, because the pool is sized
from free memory at startup and that depends on what the other tenants hold
at that instant. 420,000 sits under the lower observation so the seat starts
in both conditions. Sizing to the higher one would boot today and refuse
tomorrow, which is why the value was measured across boots rather than
estimated from one.

Concurrency of about 1.0 to 1.08x means one request at full length. Shorter
requests still batch normally, since vLLM schedules by tokens rather than by
max-model-len.
2026-08-22 02:03:24 -07:00
vh 8389470898 feat(mog-sec): promote the DFlash2 configuration into the compose stack
Operator approved after real-use testing. The experimental standalone
container is retired and stacks/mog-sec is canonical again, with
restart: unless-stopped so the configuration survives a reboot.

Cutover verified against the container it replaces: KV pool 526,617 tokens
at 1.10x concurrency, identical; zero restarts; both gateway aliases
serving; DFlash2 confirmed drafting at k=7 with 231 draft tokens over 33
drafts; vision working at 2048x2048.

One variable was deliberately dropped rather than carried over. The previous
stack hardcoded PYTORCH_CUDA_ALLOC_CONF=expandable_segments:True, the
validated container never set it, and the quant playbook records
expandable_segments corrupting retained tensors in another context. The
compose now defaults it empty via MOG_ALLOC_CONF. Promoting the stack as it
stood would have shipped a variable the tested configuration did not have.

The speculative config moves into a single MOG_SPEC_CONFIG carrying the
whole JSON, because the two shapes are not interchangeable: dflash requires
a model pointing at the drafter and MTP must not have one, so a
method-plus-tokens template cannot express both. Also parameterised:
MOG_DRAFT_MODEL, MOG_MM_PROCESSOR_KWARGS, MOG_MAX_NUM_BATCHED_TOKENS.

The mm-processor image cap is now mandatory rather than incidental. The
model's own preprocessor declares 4096x4096, which expands to 16384 image
tokens and kills startup on builds that enforce the image-token count check.

Adds the .env.example this stack never had, carrying the measured rationale
for each value and the one-line rollback.
2026-08-22 01:16:27 -07:00
vh 20ac53052b memory: retract the MTP-head degeneration hypothesis; n=1 was never evidence
Operator ruling: the multi-turn degeneration lives in the un-fixed vLLM, not
in the weights. The hypothesis that sec's stock-graft MTP head causes it is
withdrawn.

Two failures produced it. First, a false dichotomy treated as a deduction:
having verified gen and sec run an identical engine, I concluded config was
eliminated and therefore the weights were responsible. That does not follow.
An engine bug present in both seats is not exonerated by the seats being
identical; it only means the engine cannot explain a difference between
them. It can still explain the failure.

Second, and more instructive, the difference being explained may not exist.
The premise was a single operator observation made during a session with
many concurrent changes. That cannot carry a causal claim, and it became the
load-bearing support for a root-cause narrative it could not hold.

The same caveat now attaches to the coherent-to-10k observation on the new
build: same n, same uncontrolled conditions, opposite direction. The
comparison is weak at both ends, so the file no longer presents either
sighting as a result.

What survives as measured fact is unchanged and still recorded: sec's MTP
head is byte-identical to the uncensored base across all 15 tensors, gen's
was abliterated in-band, and acceptance differs slightly. None of that is
shown to cause degeneration.

Adds the generalisable lesson: an observation made while many things are
changing cannot support a causal conclusion. It is the inverse of the
warning already in the gen-seat compose file, which guards against trusting
a negative result from a synthetic probe; this guards against trusting a
positive sighting from an uncontrolled session.
2026-08-22 00:58:35 -07:00
vh ab3a0ca5bc docs(quant-playbook): acceptance is not throughput -- always run the depth control
Measured 2026-08-22 on one target with one instrument: raising MTP
num_speculative_tokens from 3 to 7 improved accepted length from 2.753 to
3.041 per forward pass while throughput fell from 114.9 to 74.0 tok/s.
Reporting acceptance alone would have recommended a 36% regression.

The cause is architectural rather than model-specific. A single-module MTP
head has no depth of its own, so vLLM runs it autoregressively and k draft
tokens cost k sequential forward passes. Past a shallow depth the drafting
cost exceeds what the extra accepted tokens save.

Records the comparison rule that follows: match k when comparing two
speculative methods, or the measurement is of depth rather than method. A
parallel-drafting drafter at k=7 against an autoregressive MTP at k=3 is not
a method comparison. In the case that produced this, the depth control
showed most of the apparent acceptance advantage was depth, while the
throughput advantage was real and came from parallel drafting -- our MTP was
better at position 0 and still lost overall.

Only the measured, model-agnostic result is recorded here. The
DFlash2-specific findings, the hypotheses that remain unproven, and the
wrong turns taken along the way live in
persistent-memory.d/2026-08-22-dflash2-spec-decode.md with explicit
epistemic labels, deliberately kept out of the playbook.
2026-08-22 00:52:06 -07:00
vh 9f87b7c4e5 memory: DFlash2 spec-decode measured; sec running on it (experimental, confounded)
Records the 2026-08-22 session with measured results, hypotheses, and wrong
turns explicitly separated -- the operator held this back while it was in
flight specifically so conjecture would not enter the record as fact.

MEASURED. DFlash2 works on an abliterated + NVFP4 compressed-tensors target
on Blackwell sm_120, which the model card does not claim (it tests stock
BF16 on H200). gen 2.753 -> 3.254 accepted tok/forward and 114.9 -> 131.9
tok/s; sec 2.676 -> 3.252 and 110.5 -> 130.0. The drafter is model-agnostic
across two different finetunes to 0.06%, but is EAGLE3-style coupled to its
target's hidden states, so the weights file is shareable while the 3.85 GB
of VRAM is per-seat.

The k=7 MTP control is the load-bearing result: raising MTP depth improves
acceptance and collapses throughput to 74.0 tok/s, because a single-module
head run autoregressively costs one forward pass per draft token. Without
that control the obvious recommendation would have been wrong.

CONFOUNDED. sec no longer degenerates at 2k, but the engine advanced 259
commits and the drafter changed at the same time. Isolating it means running
MTP k=3 on the new build. Also recorded: #51113 is present in both builds
and is therefore necessary but insufficient, since sec ran it and still
degenerated.

HYPOTHESES, labelled as such: that sec's stock-graft MTP head causes the
degeneration, and that NVFP4 explains the gap against published acceptance
figures. Neither is proven.

WRONG TURNS, recorded so they are not re-derived: version strings are not
lineage, Docker Hub push timestamps are not source freshness, and the claim
that 1M context needs YaRN absent from config is false for the sec quant.

Operationally important: sec is serving from a standalone container rather
than its compose stack, which is stopped but unmodified. Rollback is two
commands and is written down.
2026-08-22 00:51:28 -07:00
vh 0755ba7d00 fix(quant): stop baking the calibration truncation cap into the shipped tokenizer
load_calib tokenizes with tok(..., truncation=True, max_length=seqlen). For a
fast tokenizer that mutates the Rust backend's truncation state in place, and
the subsequent tok.save_pretrained() persisted it, so every mixed-NVFP4 build
shipped a tokenizer.json carrying

  "truncation": {"direction": "Right", "max_length": 2048, ...}

against a source whose value is null. Every prompt was clamped at the
calibration length, permanently.

It hid because older transformers does not enforce the text-vs-ids count
check. On a newer one the seat dies at startup with a message that names
images and never mentions tokenizers:

  ValueError: Mismatch in `image` token count between text and `input_ids`.
  Got ids=[2047] and text=[16384].

The cap also silently limited image resolution well before it killed
anything -- at 2048 the largest servable image is about 1448x1448, since
(edge/patch)^2 / merge^2 image tokens have to fit under it.

Fix saves a pristine tokenizer re-read from the source rather than the
mutated calibration object, and then asserts truncation is null so the
defect fails the build instead of shipping again.

Playbook gains section 3.14 with the symptom, the cause, the audit one-liner
and a table of which builds were affected, plus a fourth mandatory post-step.
The transferable lesson is called out: this is the third case of an artifact
carrying config authored against an older transformers that a newer one
begins enforcing, so an image bump is a config-compatibility event rather
than just a version change.
2026-08-22 00:32:21 -07:00
vh ad21302474 memory: ESH internal IPv6 live on two LANs; Cityside v4 static proven unprovisioned
Operator-directed IPv6 enablement on ESH-UDMPM: esh-userland (VLAN 10, SSID
PVC) and esh-server flipped from ipv6_interface_type=none to pd against the
delegated 2607:73c0:402:1d00::/56. Verified esh-docker-vm egresses over v6 as
its own address with no NAT, against v4 which still egresses as the shared
CGNAT pool. No disruption through either write; originals backed up.

NH3 stays v6-off deliberately -- its single /64 is reserved for network
meshing, so nh3-dev having no v6 egress is correct rather than a fault.

The v4 static is NOT provisioned, and this is now proven rather than
inferred. A full gateway reboot -- verified by observed down-transition and
an uptime reset from 140,846s to 183s -- forced a fresh DHCP DISCOVER and
Cityside returned the identical address. Recorded alongside it: a DHCP renew
could never have surfaced a new address in the first place, since renewal
preserves the lease by design. Next step is a carrier ticket, not more
testing.

The v6 firewall posture was audited and is correct -- default-deny inbound
for both IP versions, only four hand-written policies, none WAN-facing. My
earlier warning that v6 removes CGNAT's accidental shielding was overstated
and is retracted in the record. The audit's limitation is stated: it read
rules, it never probed from outside, because no v6 vantage exists.

Flat-zone lateral-movement finding parked as id 44 rather than actioned --
operator's call, moot until the mesh and segmentation design settle.
2026-08-21 22:01:08 -07:00
vh c7e21879ae memory: speaches ASR live on irv-ml1 — and no_speech_prob is a weak gate
Records the deployment plus the finding that outlives it: no_speech_prob
alone does not carry a hallucination threshold on this stack. Silence and
room tone both hallucinated 'Thank you.' at no_speech_prob under 0.11,
where a conventional >0.6 gate passes them through; avg_logprob separates
~6x better. Any future consumer asking for a Whisper hallucination gate
should be pointed at the composite, not the single field.

Also banks the digest-pin rationale (the VAD flag is an upstream-declared
unstable variable name, so a floating tag can move gate semantics
silently), the two deployment gotchas, the docker-vs-native GPU index
inversion on this host, and Eyra's future diarization VRAM claim on the
same A6000.

Adds speaches to the irv-ml1 stack table alongside parakeet, with the
reason both exist.
2026-08-21 14:33:08 -07:00
vh aa5863c9a3 feat(speaches): OpenAI-compatible faster-whisper ASR seat on irv-ml1 A6000
Deployed for Eyra (meeting recorder) per the eyra-dev request. Serves
large-v3 (batch tier) + distil-large-v3 (low-latency tier) on :8204,
fp16, both resident, ~5.9 GB VRAM against 20 GB still free.

Sits alongside the existing parakeet stack (:8765) deliberately: parakeet
is a TDT/transducer returning bare {"text": ...} and has no no_speech_prob
concept, so it structurally cannot serve this consumer.

The load-bearing requirement -- segments[].no_speech_prob surviving
response_format=verbose_json -- is VERIFIED on both tiers.

Measured finding worth more than the deployment: no_speech_prob alone is a
WEAK hallucination gate on this stack. Pure silence and pink room tone both
produced the classic Whisper 'Thank you.' hallucination while no_speech_prob
stayed under 0.11 -- a conventional >0.6 threshold passes both through.
avg_logprob separates the same cases ~6x more decisively (-0.11 speech vs
-0.65/-0.72 non-speech) and compression_ratio splits 1.141 vs 0.556.
Consumers should gate on a composite, not no_speech_prob alone. Table in
the README.

VAD pinned OFF at the consumer's request (they VAD-gate upstream on the
capture edge). Consequence stated plainly in the README: with VAD off this
service will transcribe silence into text and is not defending itself.

Image pinned BY DIGEST rather than :latest-cuda, because the VAD-off
setting rides on _UNSTABLE_VAD_FILTER -- a variable upstream explicitly
marks unstable. A floating tag could rename it on any bump, silently
restoring VAD and moving no_speech_prob semantics under a calibrated gate
with no error and no log line.

Two deployment gotchas recorded: PRELOAD_MODELS only loads models already
cached (it does not download -- use POST /v1/models/{id}), and the bind-
mounted cache needs a hub/ subdir or every /v1/models call 500s with
CacheNotFound while /health still returns 200.
2026-08-21 14:31:57 -07:00
vh ff5ce212da memory: OWUI credential state — password reset, admin-scoped API key vaulted (operator-ruled)
Two OWUI credential facts worth surviving a context reset:

  - The reported lockout was NOT a broken account. The vaulted password returned
    200 from POST /api/v1/auths/signin immediately before the reset, so the cause
    was client-side. Test the vaulted credential against signin before concluding
    an account is broken -- this is the second lockout here traced to an assumed
    rather than verified credential.
  - The operator-minted API key is ADMIN-scoped, inherited from the owning user,
    and that is the INTENDED shape per operator ruling: infra-ops manages the
    instance, so the key needs the rights the management work requires. A
    least-privilege dedicated-user split was offered and declined. Do not
    re-propose it.

Both credentials vaulted at esh-docker-vm/open-webui-{admin,api-key}; key verified
against /api/v1/auths/ (admin identity) and /api/models (33 models), with an
unauthenticated 401 control. Plaintext copies shredded.

Also folds in an unadjudicated drift found in passing: the running image is the
floating ghcr.io/open-webui/open-webui:main, not the v0.11.0 the stack notes
claim. Replaces the now-resolved 'operator's OWUI password change' follow-up.
2026-08-21 14:14:44 -07:00
vh b8e5022a1a memory: snapshot — three AI seats settled (orcarouter gen / MeroMero dual-mode RP / sec pen-test), Open WebUI deployed 2026-08-21 13:55:35 -07:00
vh 5e47a59b32 feat(meromero): MeroMero-v2 dual-mode (prose + streaming CoT) live on one seat — no re-quant
The multi-turn Gemma-4 CoT problem is solved. One MeroMero-v2 seat, one weight set,
two aliases: char-rp (prose) + char-rp-reasoning (streaming chain-of-thought).

The winning stack, traced from vLLM source by the four-arm brokkr/dwarf panel:

  - vllm/vllm-openai:v0.26.0 — ships transformers 5.14.1 natively, below the
    head_dim guard, so Gemma-4-31B loads with no pin and no custom image. It also
    carries the #48217 streaming pre-arm fix.
  - A patched chat template whose enable_thinking:true branch force-opens a BARE
    <|channel> (not <|channel>thought\n -- full-open defeats _preprocess_feed's
    injection). --chat-template override, no re-quant.
  - Two served-names char-rp / char-rp-thinking; --reasoning-parser gemma4;
    default enable_thinking:false. LiteLLM char-rp -> prose, char-rp-reasoning ->
    the thinking served-name with enable_thinking:true.

Verified: streaming CoT split 6/6 direct on :8016 and 3/3 through the gateway;
char-rp prose clean on both transports with no trailing-token leak.

Two hard-won facts recorded in persistent-memory:
  - STREAMING ONLY. Non-streaming can't split -- extract_reasoning never receives
    prompt_token_ids so the pre-arm can't fire (a vLLM one-shot bug unchanged
    across v0.24-0.27). Fine here: Lobe/OWUI stream. Upstream PR #49797 fixes
    non-streaming too, landing ~v0.28.0 -- then it's a clean image bump.
  - KEY-NAME TRAP: vLLM streams reasoning in delta.reasoning; LiteLLM normalizes
    to delta.reasoning_content. I lost two false-negative test rounds to this.

Canonical: stacks/meromero-charrp/ (compose + patched_chat_template.jinja) and
stacks/litellm/conf/config.yaml. Rollback is the .env image line + dropping
--chat-template.
2026-08-21 13:03:53 -07:00
vh 76834777a4 feat(open-webui): deploy env-declarative chat bake-off on esh-docker-vm:3211
Stand up Open WebUI v0.11.0 parallel to lobe-chat (:3210) as an
operator-approved candidate replacement. Env-declarative config
(ENABLE_PERSISTENT_CONFIG=False = the deploy is the config source of
truth), model picker auto-tracks the LiteLLM gateway with no pins,
background task model pinned to summarizer, TTS routed direct at the
dots gateway (:8198).

Gates verified on the box: G1 (declarative config, both directions),
G2 (picker == live gateway roster, no hand-listing), G3 (models/sync
genuinely reconciles create+delete), G5 (task model pinned). G4 (TTS)
handed to tts-dev.

Credential posture (G6): fresh capped LiteLLM key open-webui-esh
(all-proxy-models, $50/1mo budget) rather than inheriting the uncapped
lobe-chat-esh key; signup locked off after admin creation. Secrets
vaulted under esh-docker-vm/open-webui-*.

Note: the API-key toggle env var is ENABLE_API_KEYS (plural); a var
only reaches the container if compose names it in environment:.
lobe-chat is untouched.
2026-08-21 09:52:07 -07:00
vh f01ee28cea memory: gemma4 CoT test on v0.27.1 blocked by config incompatibility (reverted)
Tried serving the MeroMero NVFP4A16 quant on vllm/vllm-openai:v0.27.1 to test the
per-request enable_thinking hypothesis. Couldn't even load it:

  - v0.27.1's stricter transformers raised AmbiguousGlobalPerLayerAttributeError
    on the Gemma-4 config's head_dim (now a per-layer attribute).
  - Setting allow_global_per_layer_attribute_access on text_config downgraded that
    to a warning, but then gemma4.py load_weights asserted:
    "Attempted to load weight (512) into parameter (256)". Gemma-4-31B is
    genuinely heterogeneous -- some layers have head_dim 512, not a uniform 256 --
    so forcing the global value built wrong-shaped parameters. The guard was right.

So the MeroMero quant's config was authored for v0.24.0's Gemma4 loader and cannot
load on v0.27.x without a config migration or a re-quant against newer transformers.
The per-request-kwargs hypothesis was never reachable -- the model wouldn't load.

Consequence worth carrying: the eventual gen-seat move to v0.27.2 stable must
re-verify config-compat for any Gemma-4 seat of this vintage.

Fully reverted: config.json restored (flags removed), image back to latest
(v0.24.0), gateway char-rp-reasoning removed, char-rp prose verified. char-rp stays
on v0.24.0; MeroMero CoT remains undelivered. For RP-with-CoT use gen-reasoning, or
re-quant MeroMero against v0.27.x (real work, unproven payoff).
2026-08-21 09:21:25 -07:00
vh 7ebbcec5bb memory: vLLM release status for #51113 — no stable yet; gemma4 CoT is decoupled
Checked upstream. Latest stable is v0.27.1 (Aug 11) and it does NOT contain
#51113 -- the v0.27.0..v0.27.1 compare is only "DSpark Markov heads" plus three
CI commits. The #51113 cherry-pick (khluu, Aug 9, "v0.27.0 cherry picks"
milestone) is staged on the release-0.27 branch but no v0.27.2 stable has been
cut; only v0.27.2rc1 / the pinned nightly carries the fix. So the standing
follow-up (move gen off the nightly) still waits on a v0.27.2 stable cut.

Key decoupling: #51113 fixes the Qwen3.8 MTP + prefix-caching accuracy drop
(#43559). It is irrelevant to Gemma-4 seats, which have no MTP head. So the
meromero/gemma4 CoT test does NOT need the nightly and does NOT need #51113 -- it
can run on the latest stable v0.27.1, which is newer than the seat's current
v0.24.0 and where per-request chat_template_kwargs is expected to work.
2026-08-21 08:37:06 -07:00
vh b84ad888d6 memory: CORRECT the MeroMero-CoT finding — not a hard wall, not MeroMero-specific
My prior entry claimed the gemma4 reasoning parser is process-wide and the CoT
was architecturally blocked. Reading the actual code proves that wrong:

  - Template (chat_template.jinja:347-352): thinking is a PER-REQUEST toggle.
    enable_thinking:false prefills an empty <|channel>thought<channel|> to
    suppress; true omits the prefill so the model can emit a real thought channel.
  - Parser (vllm/reasoning/gemma4_utils.py): splits on <|channel>/<channel|> tag
    presence, "works with or without enable_thinking" -- NOT a process-wide flag.
    The stale compose comment I trusted cited an old parser API (vllm/parser/
    gemma4.py:439) this container doesn't run.

So the mechanism is gemma4-GENERAL (any gemma4 finetune on this template family),
and the two-served-name gen pattern should work. What actually failed the test was
that meromero runs vllm/vllm-openai:latest (v0.24.0), where per-request
chat_template_kwargs.enable_thinking didn't take effect -- whereas the gen seat's
pinned nightly demonstrably applies it. That's a version/plumbing issue, not the
model and not the architecture, and it would hit any gemma4 finetune on that image.

Unverified fix (needs a GPU window): re-serve meromero on the nightly image with no
process default and per-request enable_thinking. Currently reverted to known-good.
2026-08-21 08:25:02 -07:00
vh a260b57974 memory: MeroMero-v2 CoT via vLLM gemma4 parser is not achievable (tried + reverted)
Operator asked to serve MeroMero (char-rp) with reasoning as char-rp-reasoning.
The model genuinely reasons (GRPO-trained with thinking; ships Think/NoThink
SillyTavern presets), but two facts kill the vLLM path:

  - it's byte-identical to the weights we already serve (same zerofata repo,
    chat_template sha 94899c0f matches our on-disk quant), so re-quanting adds
    nothing; and
  - the gemma4 reasoning parser's enable_thinking is PROCESS-WIDE, not per-request.
    The seat's --default-chat-template-kwargs sets the parser state machine; a
    per-request chat_template_kwargs.enable_thinking reaches the template but not
    the parser (unlike the qwen3 parser the gen seat uses). So the two-served-name
    gen/gen-reasoning trick can't work.

Verified empirically: added a char-rp-thinking served-name and removed the process
default; enable_thinking:true per request still produced pure prose, 0
reasoning_content. Per the seat's own comment, a dedicated thinking-on process
dumps all prose into reasoning_content with null content -- no clean split.
MeroMero reasons only client-side in SillyTavern, not through vLLM.

Fully reverted to known-good: single served-name, process default restored,
char-rp prose verified end-to-end. GPU0 both seats healthy, gen untouched.

Kept one change: MEROMERO_GPU_MEM_UTIL 0.52 -> 0.51. 0.52 no longer boots because
orcarouter gen (the GPU0 neighbor) is marginally bigger than the old heresy seat
(free 49.02 < needed 49.38 GiB); 0.51 fits at KV 2.00x @ 262K.

For real RP-with-CoT: gen-reasoning (orcarouter, uncensored, thinks) or a dedicated
Qwen-based RP-thinking seat, which needs a GPU slot.
2026-08-21 08:20:57 -07:00
vh 3d30a6530b feat(lobe-chat): pass every chat-capable model through the picker
Operator: "pass everything through, lobe is a test surface for me." The picker
goes from 11 curated seats to all 25 chat-capable models the gateway serves,
paid passthroughs included.

Membership is derived from LiteLLM's declared `mode` rather than by taste:
chat (15) and completion (1) are in, and the nine GLM/frontier entries whose
mode is unset are chat models in practice. Out: audio_speech (ext-tts, tts-1,
tts-1-hd, gpt-4o-mini-tts), embedding (qwen3-embedding) and rerank (reranker,
reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3) — seven models that cannot answer a chat request at all,
so listing them would recreate the visible-but-dead entry this list just got
fixed for.

Every candidate was probed live from inside the container before being pinned,
which corrected an earlier claim in this file. char-rp and char-rp-reasoning
are NOT retired: they are configured and their upstream seat (ana-ml2:8016) is
refusing connections while under maintenance, which is a 500, not a 400. Both
are retained deliberately — dropping a name because its seat is bouncing makes
the list rot in the other direction. Only char-rp-fable is genuinely gone (400,
absent from model_info). The comment now spells out the 400-vs-500 distinction
so the next editor does not repeat the mistake.

Also corrects the credential-posture header, which still described the key as
scoped to free local models and cited the glm/kimi rejection as current
verification. The key now carries the all-proxy-models access group with no
budget ceiling, so that block had become a false security claim in the most
load-bearing comment in the file.
2026-08-21 08:11:17 -07:00
vh 303fb7a5aa feat(lobe-chat): add the sec seats to the picker, drop two retired ones
Two independent gates kept the new `sec` family out of Lobe, and only one of
them was visible from the symptom.

The picker never auto-discovers. `OPENAI_MODEL_LIST=-all,+<names>` clears
Lobe's built-in OpenAI catalogue and re-adds one model per `+name`, so anything
added to LiteLLM stays invisible until this list is edited and the container
bounced. That pin is deliberate — an unpinned picker offers models that fail on
click — but it means the list rots in both directions, and it had:

- `sec` / `sec-reasoning` missing (hosted_vllm/mog-sec-27b{,-thinking} on
  ana-ml2:8019, added to config.yaml earlier today), and
- `char-rp-reasoning` / `char-rp-fable` still listed after being retired
  upstream, i.e. two picker entries that 400 on click. Verified: a call to
  char-rp-fable now returns 400 Bad Request.

The list is now curated to live, chat-capable, free-local seats — eleven, each
round-tripped through the container after the bounce. The paid family stays out
deliberately; that is now a picker decision rather than a key one.

Which is the other half of this commit: the `lobe-chat-esh` key is no longer
scoped to free local models. On the operator's instruction infra-ops swapped its
explicit array for the `all-proxy-models` access group, so it now reaches the
paid passthroughs with `max_budget: None`. The README documented the old posture
as current, which made it a security claim that was no longer true; it now
carries the change, what it costs, and the fact that the picker is the only
remaining gate.
2026-08-21 08:04:10 -07:00
vh 564f5ae4f6 chore(litellm): rename mog-sec aliases to sec / sec-reasoning
Operator's call: the pen-test seat is reached as `sec` (non-thinking) and
`sec-reasoning` (thinking). Backend and served-model-names (mog-sec-27b[-thinking]
on :8019) are unchanged; only the gateway alias name changes. Old mog-sec /
mog-sec-reasoning now 404.
2026-08-21 07:50:10 -07:00
vh 36c173c6a1 feat(mog-sec): quant + serve M.O.G.-SEC pen-test seat; PPL on gen; retire fable
Autonomous overnight run under the operator's full-autonomy grant. End state:
fleet up, gen seat untouched, a new verified pen-test seat serving where fable was.

PPL on the orcarouter gen seat (fable downed to free GPU1 for a nospec probe,
probe torn down after): mean 7.07 / median 5.76, within noise of heresy 6.910 /
5.625 and identical to our recipe's usual 7.059. The gen-seat search is settled.

M.O.G.-SEC: chose Blackfrost-Research/M.O.G.-SEC-27B-1M-CTX-BF16 (rev deede677)
over the pre-made ModelOpt NVFP4, which was disqualified on W4A4 4-bit activations
(the AEON degradation mode, catastrophic on a 1M-context model), zero MTP tensors,
and ModelOpt format. Pulled, format-screened (P(<think>) 1.11e-05, clean), quanted
in-house to mixed NVFP4+FP8 (23.4 GB, MTP + vision preserved), and served in the
retired fable slot.

  stacks/mog-sec        ana-ml2 GPU1 :8019, KV 418,218 tok / 1.60x @ 262K
  aliases               mog-sec (non-thinking), mog-sec-reasoning (thinking)
  gates                 surface 6/6, MTP 55.3%, format 0/15 leak, vision 7/3/1,
                        capability 4/4 (delivers offensive-security content)

Served at native 262K, NOT the card's 1M -- the 1M needs YaRN (absent from the
weights' config) plus the SGLang/DFlash2 path the repo ships a deployment kit for,
neither of which is our vLLM surface. A real 1M seat is a separate SGLang project.

Retired char-rp-reasoning + char-rp-fable (zero traffic, pointed at the downed
fable :8019; now 404 cleanly, not repointed -- a security model is not an RP model).
char-rp (meromero) untouched. Vision preprocessor built from the model's own
image_processor block, same trick as the MeroMero seat.

GPU0 seats (gen, meromero) were untouched and healthy throughout. The quant ran in
GPU1 free space with no production seat stopped except fable, which was replaced.
2026-08-21 02:47:18 -07:00
vh e4576f0989 test(gen-seat): PPL on orcarouter — mean 7.07 / median 5.76, within noise of heresy
Measured against a spec-decode-free probe on GPU1 (fable downed to free the VRAM,
probe torn down after). eval_quality.py aborts PPL under --speculative-config, so
a nospec probe is the only way to read it.

  orcarouter  mean 7.0655  median 5.758
  heresy      mean 6.910   median 5.625   (+2.2% mean)
  our recipe's usual mixed-quant PPL: 7.059 -- orcarouter is identical to it

So orcarouter matches heresy on fidelity and wins on every other axis: MTP
acceptance 58.4% vs 47.2%, zero think-leak, vision 7/8. The gen-seat search that
ran through Cold-Fusion, heresy, and preetpatel is settled on orcarouter.
2026-08-21 02:06:52 -07:00
vh ce09ac4fa6 test(gen-seat): add a real vision battery — orcarouter scores 7/8
surface_test.py's vision check is one image and one word. It proves the tower
loads; it does not prove the tower works. This battery uses generated images with
known ground truth so every answer is objectively gradeable.

Against orcarouter NVFP4-mixed on the `gen` alias:

  T1  OCR, 5 lines incl. one at 18px          PASS  all 5 exact
  T2  counting + attribute binding            PASS  7 circles / 3 triangles / 1 square
  T3  bar chart, 6 values + max/min           PASS  6/6 exact
  T4b occlusion, star behind rectangle        PASS
  T4c aspect ratio of a 160x140 rectangle     FAIL  called it taller than wide
  T5  two images, which has text              PASS
  T6  four images, the seat's cap             PASS  all four named
  T7  five images, one over the cap           PASS  rejected with HTTP 400

No <think> leak on any vision call.

The single miss is fine-grained relative-dimension estimation on a near-square
shape, and it reproduced across two runs (the longer T4 called the same rectangle
"equal width and height"). Counting, OCR, chart values and occlusion ordering are
all solid, so this is a precise-geometry weakness, not a broken tower. Recorded so
nobody builds a feature on this model judging relative sizes.

T7 earns its place separately: it confirms the per-prompt image cap fails loudly
with a 400 rather than silently dropping the extra image.
2026-08-21 01:52:33 -07:00
vh f85d102813 test(gen-seat): orcarouter passes every gate — in-band MTP head delivers +11 points
Gates run against the live seat while the operator tested in parallel.

  <think> leak (n=30, 4 prompt types + multi-turn)   0/30, 0 empty
  MTP acceptance                                     58.4% @ 117.11 tok/s median
  surface                                            6/6
  abliteration survival                              4/4 compliance
  deterministic quality gens                         coherent and correct
  PPL                                                still blocked

For scale on the leak gate, the abandoned h300 build scored 8/30 on this exact
instrument, and its abliteration-survival samples had 2 of 4 open with
"<think>Ok, let's figure this out:". Orcarouter has none.

The headline is MTP acceptance. 58.4% against heresy's byte-identical base head
at 47.2% is +11 points, and it sits level with our own in-band L35 at 59.1%. That
is the additive in-band-vs-graft delta the entire Cold-Fusion experiment was built
to measure and never cleanly delivered -- orcarouter handed it over for free
because the author had already done the Robinson edit on the head.

Surface 6/6 covers plain chat, vision, tool calling, the thinking split, a
36,042-token long-context retrieval, and streaming.

PPL remains blocked on a spec-decode-free probe seat: it needs ~22 GB and GPU1 has
~16 GB free. Comparison target is heresy at 6.910.
2026-08-21 01:48:09 -07:00
vh ba53c30192 feat(gen-seat): cut over to orcarouter — live, 7/7 aliases, vision intact, no think-leak
Operator directive was seat-first so he can test while the gates run.

GEN_MODEL -> /tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-orcarouter-nvfp4-mixed. Healthy in ~4 min.
KV pool 401,550 tok / 1.53x. MTP drafter detected and wired, sharing embedding and
lm_head with the target. 7/7 gateway aliases 200. Vision correct on the shape
probe. Live decode observed at 102-133 tok/s under load.

Critically, <think> does not appear in the top-20 first tokens on the live seat.
That is the Cold-Fusion failure mode measured absent in production, matching the
pre-quant screen on the bf16 (1.23e-06, rank 52).

Rollback is one line to .env.bak-heresy-restored-20260821.

Full gates were still running when this landed; PPL stays blocked on a
spec-decode-free probe seat, which needs ~22 GB against GPU1's ~16 GB free.
2026-08-21 01:47:28 -07:00
vh c8f128bdff feat(gen-seat): quant orcarouter — its MTP head is already Robinson-abliterated in-band
Pulled orcarouter/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored at rev 9878936b (55.5 GB, gated, our
token has access) and built /tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-orcarouter-nvfp4-mixed
(23.4 GB, mixed NVFP4+FP8). Verified, not yet cut over.

The operator asked whether we could apply the Robinson path to the MTP head. We
cannot, because the author already did. compare_mtp_head.py against the verbatim
base graft: 13 of 15 tensors byte-identical, exactly 2 differ --
mtp.layers.0.self_attn.o_proj.weight and mtp.layers.0.mlp.down_proj.weight, which
are precisely the two residual writers our own abliterate.py targets
(EXPECT_MTP_WRITERS = 2).

Reverse-engineered the edit from the weights alone (mtp_delta.py, added here):

  sigma2/sigma1 = 0.0164 on BOTH tensors    rank-1, a single-direction projection
  |cos| between the two recovered dirs = 1.0000   ONE shared direction
  ||delta||/||W|| = 1.42% and 1.41%         a gentle, consistent projection
  sink energy dim 3994 = 0.0000%            sink-clean; Heretic's was 6.18%

That is the Robinson in-band MTP abliteration, already applied, with a direction
that passes our sink screen outright. Nothing to do but preserve it, and the quant
carries it byte-identically. This is the configuration the entire Cold-Fusion
experiment was designed to test and never cleanly delivered.

The new format screen paid for itself on its first real use: think_prior.py on the
bf16 BEFORE any GPU time gave P(<think>) = 1.23e-06 at rank 52, against
Cold-Fusion stock 0.1850 and h300 0.2216. Roughly 150,000x cleaner.

Two durable findings about the pipeline itself:

The quant needs ~17 GB, not a whole card. It ran entirely in GPU1's spare 16 GB
with ZERO production seats stopped -- the h300 run's "stop BOTH GPU0 seats" was
never necessary, it simply had a free card by coincidence. The first attempt OOM'd
by 2.37 GiB at layer 64 of 65 with 3.57 GiB reserved-but-unallocated, which is
fragmentation, and PYTORCH_CUDA_ALLOC_CONF=expandable_segments:True closed it.

post_quant.py now builds a missing output index from the safetensors headers.
A sub-23 GB quant saves one bare shard with no index, and post_quant needs one;
this has broken three separate rounds and been hand-fixed every time. The header
is read by struct-unpacking the u64 length and parsing the JSON -- never
safe_open, which mmaps the whole 22 GB shard and ENOMEMs on ZFS.

Artifact verified: mixed-precision, 1968 tensors, 15 mtp, 333 visual, re:^mtp.*
present in the ignore list (llm-compressor pruned it as always), preproc restored.
Imatrix deferred per operator; the log confirms the usual uniform-MSE fallback, so
this build stays apples-to-apples with heresy's PPL 6.910.
2026-08-21 01:25:37 -07:00
vh bf65d0254d docs(pfi): evaluate the two gen-seat replacement candidates
preetpatel/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored-NVFP4 is disqualified on two independent hard
failures, both read directly off the artifacts via HTTP Range requests against the
safetensors header (about a megabyte, not a 20 GB download):

  - ZERO mtp tensors. The author's recipe.yaml asks to ignore re:.*mtp.*, but the
    written config.json has no mtp ignore entry while re:.*visual.* expanded to 110
    explicit ones. That asymmetry is llm-compressor pruning a pattern that matched
    nothing, i.e. the MTP head was never loaded. Costs roughly half our decode.
  - NVFP4 W4A4, 4-bit activations. Precisely the AEON failure mode: the fidelity
    gradient is W4A4 < W4+FP8 < W4+bf16, W4A4 drove ~15-20% stochastic degeneration,
    and it collapses past ~30k context. The gen seat serves 262K.

orcarouter/Qwen3.8-27B-Uncensored checks out as a quant source: stock-Qwen base
rather than a reasoning-compression finetune, Arditi-style single-direction
abliteration, 15 mtp and 333 visual tensors verified present, chat template
byte-identical to the heresy build we are serving, and the gate is already accepted
on our token.

Also records the author's FP8 release as a noted-but-not-recommended third option:
far more traction, but 30.9 GB against NVFP4's 22 GB, and on a zero-sum GPU0 that
+9 GB comes out of the KV pool and breaks 262K context.

And states the imatrix constraint plainly. Our recipe has always requested
imatrix_mse and always silently fallen back to uniform MSE; playbook 3.13 warns
against assuming an imatrix would help before verifying llm-compressor can consume
external importance data at all. The W4A16 portions are data-free by construction
and cannot use it regardless.
2026-08-21 00:50:57 -07:00
vh 48410a6a90 chore(coldfusion-abliteration): delete the Cold-Fusion bf16 weights — ~154 GB reclaimed
Operator directive following the decision to abandon the Cold-Fusion base.
Removed with explicit literal paths, one at a time:

  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-bf16                  stock DavidAU base
  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-abliterated-L35-bf16  Robinson L35
  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-h300-mtp-bf16         Heretic-300 + MTP graft
  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-heretic300-bf16       raw Heretic export

Verified against ZFS used, not df: 4.48T -> 4.33T, ~154 GB. No snapshots were
holding the blocks, all four paths confirmed gone, gen seat unaffected.

The last two were hardlink twins -- same inode, links=2, because the MTP graft
hardlinked every unchanged shard -- so deleting only one would have freed
nothing. `du` across several paths in a single invocation dedupes hardlinks and
reported heretic300-bf16 as 2.5K, which would have made a size estimate wrong in
both directions. Check `stat -c %h` before sizing a delete.

Kept deliberately, so the research record outlives the weights:

  qwen38-27b-coldfusion-bf16.PROVENANCE.txt   pinned HF revision 9c44193f
  coldfusion-abliteration/                    harness, 300-trial Optuna
                                              journal, catatonia-T260.json

With those two, every deleted build is reproducible: re-pull stock at the pin and
replay the winning config.

Held back pending an explicit call: the two NVFP4 quants, h300-nvfp4-mixed (the
only remaining servable copy of the Heretic-300 result) and L35-nvfp4-mixed. The
directive named bf16 weights; these are quants, and there is no storage pressure
arguing for haste at 4.26T free.
2026-08-21 00:45:54 -07:00
vh 37e9e1ca7f revert(gen-seat): abandon Cold-Fusion, roll back to heresy — the leak is in the base
Operator directive, given before the result was in: if it's the base, abandon
h300 and the base too. The dose-response said base (18.5% of 22.2%), so it fired.

Live gen seat is /tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-heresy-nvfp4-mixed again, restored
from .env.bak-coldfusion-L35-20260820. The h300 env is preserved at
.env.bak-h300-abandoned-20260821.

The clincher, same probe pointed at heresy:

  Cold-Fusion stock          P(<think>) 0.1850
  Cold-Fusion L35                       0.2048
  Cold-Fusion h300                      0.2216
  heresy (restored)          not in the top 20, <0.002

A >100x gap between the families, which is why no rollback inside Cold-Fusion
would have helped -- stock and L35 leak at nearly the h300 rate.

Verified after rollback: 0/30 leaks and 0 empty on the same instrument that
scored h300 at 8/30, with the EXISTING enable_thinking:false config; KV pool
403,065 tok / 1.54x, heresy's exact documented baseline; 7/7 aliases; vision
intact. No LiteLLM change was needed, so the chat_template_kwargs fix is left
unapplied -- it worked, but it was a workaround for a base we no longer serve.

Cost, stated plainly: 8/100 refusals becomes 29/100, a 3.6x regression on the
axis the whole Heretic-300 run existed to move. Accepted deliberately.

What carries forward is the methodology, none of which lived in the Cold-Fusion
weights: direction_scope=0 beating per-layer on a merged base, aggression not
being the lever, PR #317 silently dropping the MTP head on save, the MPOA and
sink-screen reasoning, the graft/KL/catatonia/export harnesses, and the finding
that a pristine MTP graft accepts as well as an in-band edit.

New acceptance gate earned here: run think_prior.py on a candidate's STOCK
weights before committing GPU time. It is a ~10s CPU measurement and it would
have disqualified Cold-Fusion before the 300-trial study ever started. Heretic's
objective has no format-compliance term at all -- the same blindness that removed
the self-harm guardrail.

Nothing deleted. Every Cold-Fusion artifact, the 300-trial Optuna journal and
catatonia-T260.json remain on disk. Abandon means stop serving, not rm.
2026-08-21 00:40:23 -07:00
vh 5ee2325820 feat(coldfusion-abliteration): dose-response settles the <think> leak — base 83%, our abliteration 17%
Answers "how likely is it that our abliteration caused this?" with a measurement
instead of a prior. P(<think>) at the first generated token, template rendered
enable_thinking=false so the prompt already carries a CLOSED think pair -- the
exact event behind the leak. Raw softmax, bf16, CPU-only, one process per model.
Deterministic: stock reproduced to 17 significant figures across two runs.

  coldfusion-bf16                  none (stock)          0.1850   rank 3
  coldfusion-abliterated-L35-bf16  Robinson L35, mild    0.2048   rank 2
  coldfusion-h300-mtp-bf16         Heretic-300, heavy    0.2216   rank 2

The stock, untouched base already puts 18.5% of first-token mass on opening a
think block the template had closed. Abliteration adds a real, monotonic,
dose-dependent +3.7 points -- a nudge on a pre-existing base, not the cause.
Cold-Fusion is a reasoning-token-compression finetune, i.e. a model trained to
think briefly, and the leak's text shape agrees: a compact correct trace with a
trained transition marker, which is trained behavior rather than damage.

This changes the options. Rolling back to L35 or stock does NOT fix the leak --
at 18.5% under temp 0.7 / top_p 0.8 they leak at nearly the h300 rate. Only
leaving the Cold-Fusion family escapes it, at the cost of the 8/100 refusal
result. The chat_template_kwargs fix is the correct lever.

Durable methodology point: a forward-KL budget cannot catch this. Heretic
minimizes forward KL(stock||abliterated), which is near-blind to the model
putting new mass on tokens stock barely used -- that is reverse KL's job, and we
measured exactly that asymmetry on L35 (reverse 1.43 vs forward 0.70). h300's KL
of 0.0136 is not evidence of innocence. For any "did the abliteration break
behavior X" question, measure P(token) directly.

Ran CPU-only deliberately: 96 EPYC cores and 265 GB of RAM make a 27B forward
pass cheap, so this cost no GPU window and no seat downtime, where the obvious
route was stopping both GPU0 seats.

Also normalizes two more abliteration output dirs from root-owned 0600 to
llmuser 0664. The unreadable-model failure surfaces as FileNotFoundError rather
than a permission error, which is worth knowing before it wastes a run.
2026-08-21 00:22:11 -07:00
vh 91f4cf22e1 fix(gen-seat): diagnose the unterminated-<think> leak — model defect, temp-triggered
Operator reported the new Heretic-300 gen seat "sends CoT but never completes
the turn" through Lobe. Diagnosed; not yet fixed (the fix changes gen's
semantics, so it is the operator's call).

The Qwen3.8 chat template appends a pre-closed <think>\n\n</think>\n\n when
enable_thinking is false. The h300 model opens a fresh <think> anyway and never
closes it. Because the prompt already closed the block, vLLM's qwen3 reasoning
parser is not in reasoning state, so the tag passes through as ordinary text --
reasoning_content empty, reasoning_tokens 0, and the whole reasoning-plus-answer
blob lands in content. Lobe then correctly treats the unterminated tag as
still-thinking and renders no answer. The client and the serving stack are both
behaving correctly; the model is not.

The trigger is TEMPERATURE, not presence_penalty (n=12 per arm):

  temp 0.7, pp 1.5  (current gen)   4/12
  temp 0.7, pp 0.0                  4/12
  temp 0.7, pp 0.5                  3/12
  temp 0,   pp 1.5                  0/12

That falsifies the standing hypothesis, recorded in the litellm config comment
and in the operator's own 2026-08-16 note, that presence_penalty 1.5 is the
first dial to move. It is not this bug's cause.

It also explains the blast radius: only the two temp-0.7 aliases leak, `gen`
and `summarizer-large`. summarizer, classifier, image-judge and qwen-image-bench
all run at temp 0 and are clean, so nevermore's summarizer path is unaffected.

Candidate fix, validated n=30 over 4 prompt types plus a 3-turn conversation:
chat_template_kwargs {enable_thinking: true, reasoning_effort: low} takes 8/30
leaks to 0/30, at ~+27% completion tokens and a ~3% empty-content residual.

The tell appears in eval_coldfusion_h300.json and in none of the aeon, heresy,
mixed or w4a16 evals, so it is new with this build -- but L35 was never evaled,
so this does not separate a Cold-Fusion base trait from a Heretic-300
abliteration artifact.

Reproducers and the full method land in bench/think-leak/. Note in particular
that the 7/7 alias smoke test run at cutover structurally could not catch this:
trivial prompts never invite reasoning, so they never sample the leaking token.
2026-08-21 00:12:30 -07:00
vh 1d3b80169a fix(nevermore): repoint onto live aliases — its LLM pass had been dead 8 days
nevermore pinned LLAMA_SWAP_MODEL=granite-4.1-8b, an alias retired with the
granite seat on 2026-08-12. Every summarization call since then failed: 67
consecutive status=failure rows, 0 tokens, twice daily, entirely silently. The
briefing had been rendering with no LLM pass at all. Nothing alerts on
status=failure in the spend logs, so it took an unrelated question about
reranker VRAM to surface it.

It was also pinned to NEVERMORE_RERANK_MODEL=qwen3-reranker -- the incumbent
Brokkr R43 measured harming 80/90 fleet queries -- and was its ONLY caller,
while the production `reranker` alias sat at 0 calls for 4 days. The R43
cutover repointed the alias but never moved the consumer.

  nevermore/.env  LLAMA_SWAP_MODEL       granite-4.1-8b -> summarizer
                  NEVERMORE_RERANK_MODEL qwen3-reranker -> reranker
                  (server-only; .env is excluded from the mirror both ways)

Verified against nevermore's exact call shape: summarizer returns clean content
with 0 reasoning chars at temperature 0.2 / max_tokens 4000; reranker scores
0.95 on-topic vs ~1e-5 off-topic; embedding returns dim-1024.

Retired alongside it:

  vllm-rerank    :8002  Qwen3-Reranker-0.6B + the qwen3-reranker alias
  vllm-rerank-a4 :8014  gte-reranker-modernbert + its alias
  vllm-granite   :8004  Exited 8 days, dead service block

and vllm-rerank-a3 was promoted from a throwaway `docker run` into this stack
(the selection ledger's own open follow-up). Healthy in 55s. It keeps the
bake-off arm name so the ledger, memory and R43 record stay valid.

VLLM_VERSION is pinned latest -> v0.24.0. Every service in the stack shares that
one variable, so a bare `compose up -d` could have silently upgraded all of
them at once; both tags resolved to the same local image (4091d5593f77), so the
pin changed nothing at runtime.

GPU1 is down to 81,448 of 97,887 MiB -- 13.9 GB reclaimed tonight.

Correction: an earlier claim that A4 had no gateway alias was wrong. It did.
LiteLLM serves both config-defined and DB-defined models -- live showed 32
against config.yaml's 26 -- and grepping the file cannot see the difference.
/v1/models and /model/info (which flags db_model) are the ground truth. DB
models delete hot via POST /model/delete with no restart.

Left alone: reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3, a zero-call duplicate of `reranker` on the
same backend. It is Brokkr's cutover-verification handle -- redundant rather
than broken, and another agent's tooling is not mine to delete unilaterally.
2026-08-20 23:50:53 -07:00
vh b990951d80 chore(vllm): retire LFM2.5-2.6B permanently; audit finds nevermore on the harmful reranker
Operator directive: lfm2.5-2.6b goes down permanently.

  - stacks/vllm/compose.yaml   vllm-lfm25 service removed (replaced by a
                               tombstone comment), pushed live to ana-ml2
  - ana-ml2                    container docker rm -f'd, 8,721 MiB freed on GPU1
                               (95,388 -> 86,667 of 97,887)
  - litellm config             lfm2.5-2.6b alias deleted, live + canonical,
                               28 -> 27 models

It was an EVAL-ONLY bake-off seat against granite-4.1-8b that never received
the operator ruling it was pending; the comparator was retired from the roster
on 2026-08-15; it was deliberately never wired into any default or fallback
routing chain; and spend logs show 0 calls in the 4-day window to 2026-08-21.
Weights stay in the shared HF cache -- nothing deleted from disk.

The gateway restart that makes the alias deletion take effect is HELD so it can
batch with a pending reranker change. Until then the name is still routable
in-memory and will error against a dead backend.

Auditing the three reranker seats while answering "why do we have three" turned
up a real problem. The design is one production, one rollback, one fallback --
but the traffic is backwards:

  :8013 A3 bge-v2-m3      PRODUCTION, backs `reranker`     0 calls / 4 days
  :8002 Qwen3-Reranker    RETIRED incumbent, rollback only 7 calls, 12-hourly
  :8014 A4 gte-modernbert "fallback"                       no alias at all

nevermore is hard-wired to the incumbent by name (NEVERMORE_RERANK_MODEL=
qwen3-reranker), so the R43 cutover never moved it -- the cutover repointed the
`reranker` alias and correctly left `qwen3-reranker` naming the Qwen model.
Brokkr R43 measured that model harming 80/90 fleet queries, so nevermore's
twice-daily rerank pass is likely degrading its own briefing.

Fix is one line in nevermore's .env plus a nevermore restart, and it must land
before :8002 is retired. Recorded in persistent-memory with the A4 alias also
noted as absent (global CLAUDE.md names reranker-a4-gte-modernbert; it does not
exist).
2026-08-20 23:23:22 -07:00
vh e3ce713f7f feat(gen-seat): cut over to Heretic-300 — 7/7 aliases, vision intact, MTP 59.7%
Live GEN_MODEL is now qwen38-27b-coldfusion-h300-nvfp4-mixed (ana-ml2 GPU0
:8015). Served-name left unchanged so all 7 LiteLLM aliases route without a
gateway edit.

Verification:
  KV pool            401,550 tok / 1.53x   (baseline 403k / 1.54x)
  LiteLLM aliases    7/7 green
  vision             3/3 shapes, colour+form+position correct
  MTP acceptance     59.7% median @ 118.37 tok/s
  quality gens       4/4 correct
  abliteration       4/4 compliance
  PPL                NOT measured (see below)

The roadmap predicted ~47% acceptance for a pristine MTP graft versus L35's
59.1% in-band edit. Measured 59.7% on the same harness: there is no acceptance
penalty, which removes the throughput argument for reimplementing MPOA.

A single long-prose generation read 47.5% off the same counters -- below the
8-run minimum of 49.0% -- and would have "confirmed" the prediction by
coincidence. Acceptance must be read from quickbench.py, never one sample.

PPL is blocked on VRAM, not on the model: eval_quality.py aborts with
"prompt_logprobs look uniform" under --speculative-config, and the probe-seat
workaround needs ~22 GB while both cards sit at ~96% committed.

Also normalizes the quant dir from root:0600 to llmuser:llmuser 0664 to match
every other model dir, and records that config.json sha256 is byte-identical
across the h300 and L35 quants and is therefore useless for confirming which
weights are mounted (mtime and a head-hash are the discriminating views).

Rollback is one line to .env.bak-pre-h300-20260820.
2026-08-20 23:13:15 -07:00
vh 407ca017ae memory: snapshot — Heretic-300 built, quantized and verified; gen-seat cutover is the next step
8/100 refusals at KL 0.0136, hand-verified coherent, beating the absolute-heresy
bar 3.6x. NVFP4 quant complete: 21 GB, 1968 tensors, MTP head grafted back after
PR #317 dropped it, and re:^mtp.* re-injected into quantization_config.ignore
after llm-compressor pruned it. Self-harm guardrail is gone on this build and is
the operator's own next work item; the four-dwarf panel is stood down.
2026-08-20 22:54:32 -07:00
vh f90a5025de feat(coldfusion-abliteration): Heretic-300 — 8/100 refusals at KL 0.0136, beats the heresy bar 3.6x
Ran Heretic v1.4.0's 300-trial TPE search on Cold-Fusion. Best trial scores
8/100 refusals at KL 0.0136 against a 98/100 base, versus absolute-heresy at
29/100 and our hand-tuned Robinson L35 at 72/100 / KL 0.0116 — i.e. 64 fewer
refusals for the same damage. Hand-verified coherent: correct arithmetic with
shown working, clean code, 66-167 word prose across nine probes.

Durable findings:

- direction_scope=0 (single shared direction) is decisive on this merged base:
  n=129, best 8/100. Per-layer directions n=131 never beat 52/100 despite a
  better median. Points against the multi-direction intuition for a diffuse
  direction (our two-template |cos| is 0.62 vs Robinson's 0.99 on stock).
- Aggression is not the lever. r(KL, refusals) = -0.561 over 261 trials; the
  KL<0.02 band contains both the worst results (median 87/100) and the single
  best. A KL 0.3554 trial scored worse than one at 0.0193.
- PR #317 confirmed: Heretic silently drops the MTP head on save. Source 1199
  tensors -> export 1184, all 15 mtp.* gone, vision 333/333 intact, exit 0, no
  warning. This is also why absolute-heresy ships a byte-identical MTP head —
  a bug, not a design choice. Always diff tensor keys after a Heretic export.
- Heretic's recovered direction carries 6.18% of its energy in sink dim 3994,
  versus 0.094% for our L35 and 1.97% for the L39 we rejected as brick-inducing.
  It survives that only because of magnitude-preserving ablation
  (row_normalization=FULL); our plain projection has no such protection, so the
  sink screen correctly refused the in-band MTP graft. Same direction, different
  operation. MPOA is the prerequisite for in-band MTP on a Heretic trunk.
- Heretic's edit is recoverable from weights: delta is rank-1 (s2/s1 ~ 0.010),
  SVD gives the direction, norms give per-layer weights (1.08 -> 1.34, i.e.
  over-projection). Cross-layer |cos| agreement 0.9903 independently confirms
  the single-direction result.

New tooling in services/coldfusion-abliteration/:
  kl_divergence.py    first-token KL, class-split, zero noise floor
  catatonia_gate.py   12 probes x 220 tokens, prints every completion
  heretic_export.py   PTY driver; selects by measured value, never by menu
                      position — Heretic's resume prompt puts "delete the
                      checkpoint and all results" one arrow-key from the target
  graft_mtp.py        recovers the trunk direction by SVD; --pristine for the
                      safe path when the sink screen refuses

Also adds quant playbook 3.13: the NVFP4 recipe sets observer="imatrix_mse" but
llm-compressor has always silently fallen back to uniform MSE for want of
importance data — on this build and on the incumbent. Existing A/B comparisons
stay valid since every build shares the fallback. Parked as id 42.

Guardrail note: this build has lost the self-harm guardrail that the Robinson
L35 build retained. Restoration is the operator's own work item.
2026-08-20 22:51:56 -07:00
vh 78484ac87d memory: GPU0 seat boot order is part of the state — restore rule + KV-pool baselines
vLLM sizes --gpu-memory-utilization against total VRAM but gates startup on free
VRAM, so the GPU0 pair coexists only in its original boot order. Records the
restore sequence (meromero to healthy first, then gen), the observed-not-slept
rule, and the KV-pool baselines to verify a restore against — nvidia-smi used-MiB
is the wrong check, it swings ~7 GB on allocator slack at identical capacity.
2026-08-20 13:09:21 -07:00
vh a9d73dad41 fix(coldfusion-abliteration): GPU0 seat restore order is load-bearing — correct the claim and the runbook
Restoring the two GPU0 seats with `start meromero; sleep 10; start gen` put
meromero into a 7-restart crash-loop:

  ValueError: Free memory on device cuda:0 (35.3/94.97 GiB) on startup is less
  than desired GPU memory utilization (0.52, 49.38 GiB).

The previous commit's README claimed restore order "is not actually load-bearing"
on the grounds that both seats pass --gpu-memory-utilization as a fraction of
total VRAM. That is half right and the wrong half mattered: the fraction sets the
target, but vLLM gates startup on FREE VRAM and refuses to start unless the whole
target is available. GPU0 runs at ~96.4/97.9 GB with roughly 0.4 GiB of slack, so
the seats coexist only in the order they were originally brought up, and meromero
is the one that does not fit in the remainder. The pre-existing auto-memory note
("gen takes a fraction of free VRAM at startup and will starve meromero") was
pointing at the real effect.

Also: "first" means healthy, not ten seconds earlier. A sleep 10 against a
two-to-three minute weight load is simultaneity, not ordering — gate on observed
state.

Recovery applied: stop gen, wait for meromero healthy, start gen. Verified
against the pre-window baseline rather than against "both green":

  gen KV       14.36 GiB / 403,065 tok / 1.54x  ->  14.34 GiB / 401,550 tok / 1.53x
  meromero KV  542,202 tok                      ->  542,202 tok
  RestartCount 0 on both; summarizer smoke-tested through LiteLLM

Note for the next reader: raw nvidia-smi used-MiB is the wrong check here. It
reads 89,503 now vs 96,376 before, which looks like a 6.9 GB regression and is
allocator slack — serving capacity is unchanged. The anomalous boots were the
high ones (34.95 GiB KV), where gen came up on an empty card mid-window.
2026-08-20 13:08:56 -07:00
vh 1b3fb270e7 feat(coldfusion-abliteration): first-token KL measured — 28.4x selectivity, harmless median 0.0211
Adds `kl_divergence.py`: first-token KL(stock || abliterated) over the full
248,320-token vocabulary, bf16 vs bf16, scored separately for held-out harmless
and reserved-harmful prompts.

Result (L35, 256 harmless / 104 harmful, answer mode):

  harmless  median 0.0211  mean 0.0364  top-1 agreement 89.8%
  harmful   median 0.5996  mean 0.6992  top-1 agreement 55.8%
  selectivity 28.4x (72.8x in think mode)

Self-KL noise floor is exactly 0.0, and all 720 per-prompt values are
bit-identical between a single-process and a two-process run, so the figures are
signal rather than bf16 jitter. Reverse KL on harmful/answer is 1.43 vs forward
0.70 — the mass-where-stock-had-none asymmetry expected of a refusal-direction
removal. Against the Heretic reference figures (0.1191 prior seat, 0.0759 the
live absolute-heresy seat) this is materially gentler, but those are the other
tool's optimizer output on a different base with its own harmless set and
template — order-of-magnitude, not head-to-head. KL remains a fidelity number;
the viability gate is still MTP acceptance (59.1%).

Method notes:
- Prompt classes are reported separately by design. A single averaged KL over a
  mixed corpus is close to meaningless, since the metric is meant to be large on
  harmful prompts and small on benign ones; the ratio carries the information.
- The harmless evaluation set is drawn from the alpaca pool minus calibration's
  own draw, reconstructed by replaying that draw rather than remembered, and
  asserted disjoint on text. The harmful set is the reserved test split.
- `render` is imported from abliterate.py rather than copied, so the measurement
  cannot drift from the rendering the direction was captured against.
- Batch size 1 with logits_to_keep=1: no padding semantics, ~0.6 MB of logits.

Three corrections to the runbook, each of which cost time:
- "bf16 is 50 GB, only gen must go" was 50.10 GiB mislabelled. Text-only weights
  are 51,300 MiB; freeing either GPU0 seat alone leaves ~50,933 MiB. Both must
  stop. VRAM is now sized from the safetensors headers at run time.
- A 27B model cannot be released in-process: `del` + gc + empty_cache left free
  VRAM at 45,287 MiB, and so did confining the model to an inner frame that
  exits. Only process exit returned the card (96,689 MiB). The first run
  completed only because the allocator hit OOM, collected, and retried. Each
  model now gets its own process, handing log-probs to disk between stages.
- The residency gate read hf_device_map, which transformers leaves empty when the
  model fits on one device — it reported "(unsharded)" whether or not anything
  was wrong, so it could never fail. It now reads parameter devices directly.

Model-agnostic lessons promoted to the quant playbook (new 3.12).
2026-08-20 13:00:39 -07:00
vh 8c354a0e79 memory: snapshot — Cold-Fusion thesis PROVEN (MTP 59.1% > incumbent 47%)
Flip the Cold-Fusion in-flight line to thesis-proven: L35 quantized to mixed
NVFP4, MTP acceptance 59.1% median beats the incumbent Heretic graft's ~47%,
abliteration survives quant. Not cut over — cutover is a separate operator
decision. Records the two env foot-guns hardened (quant venv config-delegation
drift; single-file no-index quant needs a header-built index).
2026-08-20 10:19:09 -07:00
vh 725c8fdf9e feat(coldfusion-abliteration): THESIS PROVEN — in-band-abliterated MTP head accepts 59.1% (beats incumbent ~47%)
Quantized the L35 abliterated model to mixed NVFP4 and measured MTP acceptance
end to end. The experiment's whole premise: Heretic (the incumbent gen seat)
leaves the MTP head a byte-identical base graft its wrapper never loads, whereas
Robinson abliterates the MTP head in-band — the question was whether that in-band
edit survives well enough to spec-decode. It does, better than the graft:

  MTP acceptance  59.1% median (51-65%, 8 cache-busted topics)  vs incumbent ~47%
  decode          118.7 tok/s median (faster; image-confounded, read as not-worse)
  abliteration    survives quant (creative refusals drop, self-harm guardrail
                  intact, coherent)

Output at /tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-coldfusion-L35-nvfp4-mixed (22.5 GB). Result
JSON in bench/. NOT cut over — the incumbent seat is untouched; making L35 the gen
seat is a separate decision needing the full Stage-3 gate + real multi-turn hold.

Two env foot-guns hardened along the way:
- quant_mixed_nvfp4.py now promotes text_config attention fields
  (num_attention_heads etc.) to the top-level config for the oneshot, then
  restores. transformers 5.10 / llmcompressor 0.12 (this venv moved under us
  since the Aug-15 heresy quant) no longer delegate the top-level lookup, so
  oneshot raised "Cannot determine num_attention_heads". Same "the fight is the
  environment" pattern as the abliteration capture.
- a sub-~23GB quant saves as a single model.safetensors with no index, so the
  post_quant MTP graft needed an index built first — from the safetensors header,
  not safe_open (which mmaps the whole shard and ENOMEMs on ZFS).

post_quant grafted the abliterated MTP (15 tensors, 849 MB) and re-injected
re:^mtp.* into quantization_config.ignore (llm-compressor pruned it again — the
two-rounds-lost 0%-MTP bug, fired and repaired as designed). Probe served on the
pinned nightly (#51113 qwen3_5_mtp fix) to match the live seat's vLLM.
2026-08-20 10:18:48 -07:00
vh c55b1390b7 memory: snapshot — Cold-Fusion abliteration LANDED at layer 35
Flip the in-flight status from 'capture done, calibration expansion next' to
'landed, works'. New detail file captures the three corrected diagnoses (layer-
selection metric, sharding/allocator misdiagnosis, corpus-size falsified) and the
verify/quant work still owed. Supersedes the -capture.md detail file's framing.
2026-08-20 08:47:47 -07:00
vh e9dbc8660b feat(coldfusion-abliteration): abliteration LANDS at layer 35 — separation selector, shard-surgery write, three false diagnoses corrected
The abliterated model works. A/B vs stock on a matched greedy battery: explicit
sexual + graphic torture (the measured stock refusal surface) go from refused to
complied/engaged, held-out AdvBench prompts loosen, the self-harm guardrail
survives, coherence intact — the Robinson design point exactly. Output at
/tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-coldfusion-abliterated-L35-bf16, verified bitwise:
131/131 targets changed, 333/333 vision byte-identical (delta 0.0), 735/735
others untouched.

Getting there corrected three diagnoses the prior session had backwards.

1. The layer-selection metric was wrong, and that was the whole ballgame. The
   recipe picks the abliteration layer by peak two-template |cos| agreement. On
   this heavily-merged base that metric is anti-correlated with efficacy: its
   argmax (layer 18) is the WORST-separating layer in the window (Cohen's d 5.51
   vs 9.89 at the peak), and abliterating there was a measured behavioral no-op —
   stock and "abliterated" refused all six probes identically. Cause: the two
   renderings end in different generative modes (</think> vs <think>), so |cos|
   scores answer-vs-reason mode, not refusal, and on a merge the mode term
   dominates. Replaced selection with harmful/harmless SEPARATION (Cohen's d /
   AUC of the direction's projection), gated on the sink screen since separation
   and sink-energy both climb with depth. Picks layer 35 (d 9.35, AUC 0.9997,
   sink 0.094%). Agreement is kept as a printed diagnostic.

2. The "bf16 NaNs, use fp32" rule was a misdiagnosis. The NaN was never
   precision — it was multi-GPU sharding (the residual stream zeroes two layers
   past the GPU0->GPU1 boundary; the first capture's layer 22 happened to sit in
   the healthy region, which is why it looked fine) plus
   PYTORCH_CUDA_ALLOC_CONF=expandable_segments (corrupts retained tensors; the
   corruption MOVED between bit-identical forwards, the tell that it was memory
   not math). On one GPU with a plain allocator, bf16 full-64-layer is exactly
   deterministic and coherent, at 50 GB and 4.3x the throughput of the 111 GB
   fp32 it replaced. Both defects are now hard gates (residency exit 8, allocator
   exit 9); capture pins CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES=0.

3. The corpus-size hypothesis was falsified. 52x more calibration data (8->416,
   mlabonne/harmful_behaviors = the recipe's actual AdvBench split, already on the
   box) moved agreement 0.594->0.624 — nothing. Kept the 416/416 corpus anyway
   (calibration.py); it gives the clean separation signal. The held-out 104-prompt
   test split is reserved and asserted disjoint.

Also: the --out write is now shard-level surgery (reads/writes the 18 safetensors
directly, no model object, no GPU). This is correctness, not thrift —
AutoModelForCausalLM resolves to the TEXT model, so save_pretrained would drop all
333 vision tensors AND skip the MTP head (the in-band MTP edit is the entire point
of the Robinson formula). Neither failure raises. Shard surgery makes vision and
the other 1068 tensors byte-identical by construction.

Batched capture with a dtype-aware equivalence gate; hidden states captured via
forward pre-hook (reading output_hidden_states off the returned object is unsafe
here — buffers get recycled). Sharding/allocator lessons promoted to the
quantization playbook (model-agnostic, sections 3.9-3.11 + superseded table); the
selection-metric lesson added to the recipe doc.

The dead layer-18 no-op checkpoint was removed (52 GB, confirmed identical to
stock). Incumbent gen seat untouched. Full canonical refusal-probe re-profile and
MTP-acceptance-on-quant still owed before this becomes a gen-seat candidate.
2026-08-20 08:46:21 -07:00
vh f714f28195 feat(coldfusion-abliteration): Robinson's real 416-prompt corpus, batched capture, two new gates
The 8/8 calibration set gave |cos| agreement 0.594 against the recipe's 0.9925.
This wires in the corpus the recipe actually used and makes a capture at that
scale affordable.

Corpus (calibration.py, new). The recipe's "held-out train/test split of 416/104
with overlap 0" names mlabonne/harmful_behaviors exactly — 416 train / 104 test,
AdvBench-derived — and it plus harmless_alpaca were already staged in ana-ml2's
HF dataset cache. Read via pyarrow, no datasets dependency, no hub access.
Harmful is order-deterministic (no seed), so a re-capture is reproducible from
the flags alone. The 104-prompt test split is reserved as the held-out
generalization probe and asserted disjoint, so the post-write re-profile cannot
silently become in-distribution. --calib builtin reproduces the legacy run.

Batched capture. 832 prompts x 2 templates = 1664 forwards. Padding is on the
RIGHT: in a causal stack nothing after position t reaches position t, so
trailing pads cannot touch the token read, whereas left padding feeds pads into
the DeltaNet recurrence ahead of the prompt — the path whose torch fallback
already NaN'd once here. Means accumulate in float64; the direction is a
difference of means, which is where cancellation lives on this model.

Gates added, both protecting numbers rather than tensors:
- batch-equivalence: proves padded-batch == single-prompt (rel 1e-3) before
  spending the capture window.
- surgery pre-check: aborts if any of the 131 targets is absent or on the meta
  device. orthogonalize_ edits in place, and an in-place write to an
  accelerate-offloaded tensor is a silent no-op — that ships a half-abliterated
  model past a smoke test.

Fixed a reporting bug: the agreement line printed the global agree.max() beside
the window's argmax layer, so the first capture read as 0.8538 when the real
in-window number was 0.5944. The global peak sits in the early layers where the
dim-3994 massive activation inflates agreement for reasons unrelated to refusal.
Now prints window max, a top-5, and labels the global figure informational.

--max-layer truncates the decoder for capture. Exact, not approximate: a causal
stack's layer-N state cannot depend on layers above N, so any value above the
window top leaves the direction bit-identical while cutting fp32 residency and
forward cost. 46 drops 18 of 64 layers and is what keeps fp32 off CPU offload.
Refused on the write path, where it would emit a truncated checkpoint.

Verified on ana-ml2 without the GPU: dry-run still 1:1 (131 tensors, all
coverage gates), calibration loads 416/416 deterministically with its guards
firing, both --max-layer guards exit as designed. Also confirmed against
chat_template.jinja that enable_thinking=True does resolve reasoning_effort to
xhigh, so the two renderings are the recipe's — template selection was not the
cause of the low agreement.

The re-capture itself is unrun: it needs the fp32 VRAM window and therefore
production seat downtime.
2026-08-20 07:52:37 -07:00
vh 530f1452e8 memory: snapshot — Cold-Fusion abliteration in flight, capture done
Captures the session's real work as the in-flight focus: abliterating
DavidAU Cold-Fusion with the Robinson formula. fp32 capture succeeded
(finite direction, layer 22, sink-clean) but two-template agreement is
0.59 vs Robinson's 0.99 — calibration-set expansion is the next step.

New detail file records the full saga including the transformers/DeltaNet
bf16-NaN fight (fp32 fix, the causal-conv1d kernel gap, the seat-restart
VRAM-greed gotcha). Supersedes the earlier "watch for DavidAU's heretic
build" posture — we abliterate it ourselves.

Auto-archived 4 closed entries (Recent decisions: Booth-3-features 08-05,
worldtree-sdk 07-31; Tried and abandoned: containerd-race 08-03,
mv-rename 08-02) to archival-memory.md; the rest of the over-cap entries
are held back by the <14-day and open-deferred guards. Index 331 -> 327.
2026-08-20 07:36:15 -07:00
vh 7abd3011f7 fix(coldfusion-abliteration): capture works — fp32 forward + finite-gate
The --capture forward NaN'd repeatedly. Root cause: transformers' Qwen3.5
DeltaNet linear-attention needs the causal-conv1d fast-path kernel, which
can't be built here (no nvcc, no prebuilt wheel). Its torch fallback produces
nondeterministic all-NaN hidden states in bf16 -- same 11-token input finite
on one forward, NaN at layer 4 on the next. bf16 and fp32 share exponent
range, so it's precision-driven catastrophic cancellation, not overflow, and
fp32 resolves it.

Fixes:
- --capture now loads fp32 (the write/surgery path stays bf16 -- no forward,
  no NaN). attn_implementation=sdpa pinned.
- A finite-gate aborts on a non-finite direction. The sink screen alone can't
  catch this: nan > threshold is False, so a NaN direction "passed" it and got
  saved silently on the first run.

Capture result (fp32, full GPU): refusal direction finite, unit-normed, layer
22, sink energy 0.0008% in dim 3994 -- clean, not sink-dominated. Saved.

Caveat recorded: two-template |cos| agreement is 0.59 at layer 22 vs Robinson's
0.99, almost certainly the small 8/8 calibration set vs their 416/104. Valid
but noisier than ideal; the README flags expanding the sets before the write.

README documents the three environment gotchas (fp32-for-capture, the seats
that must be stopped for the 110GB fp32 VRAM and how to restore them, and the
fla side-dir PYTHONPATH) so the next run doesn't rediscover them.
2026-08-20 07:20:38 -07:00
vh b56cb0db13 docs(coldfusion-abliteration): dry-run passed — recipe maps 1:1 (131 tensors)
Dry-run against the fully-staged bf16 confirms the Robinson recipe transfers
onto the DavidAU Cold-Fusion checkpoint with no name drift: 1199 tensors, 333
vision preserved, down_proj=64/o_proj=16/linear_out=48/mtp=2/embed=1, coverage
gate 6/6, exactly 131 tensors to orthogonalize. Harness verified-ready; the
destructive write still gates on operator go.
2026-08-20 06:53:59 -07:00
vh 1857a8eb81 feat(coldfusion-abliteration): Robinson-formula harness, gated, staged
Harness to abliterate DavidAU/Qwen3.8-27B-Cold-Fusion-GAIN-V1.1 using the
MTP-aware, vision-preserving recipe in docs/pfi/abliteration-recipe-qwen38.md.

Motivation is measured, not assumed: the stock model's refusal profile
(probed 2026-08-19, hand-verified) is ~33% on creative content, concentrated
on explicit-sexual and graphic-torture, with 4/5 hard-harm refused, self-harm
guardrails intact, and zero benign over-refusal. So there is a real
creative-content refusal surface. The Robinson formula is chosen specifically
because it abliterates the MTP head IN-BAND -- which the current gen seat's
Heretic pass does not (its MTP head is a byte-identical base graft the
Qwen3_5 wrapper never loads). That in-band MTP edit is the additive delta.

The script refuses to brick the model. Two hard gates from the recipe halt
before any write: the coverage identity o_proj(16)+linear_out(48)==64 (catches
a tensor-name mismatch that would ship a half-abliterated model), and the
attention-sink screen on dim 3994 (orthogonalizing a direction living there
produces a model that loads, runs, and emits garbage). The direction is
captured from two chat templates and the layer auto-picked by peak |cos|
agreement in [18,45]. Classification is suffix-based and name-agnostic so it
survives minor drift; the coverage gate is the backstop.

Modes: --dry-run (enumerate + gate, no forward, no write), --capture
(direction + sink screen, no write), default (write to --out). The README
sequences dry-run -> capture -> write -> verify, and names the post-checks
(vision byte-identical, refusal re-profile via services/refusal-probe/, MTP
acceptance on the quant, PPL/coherence).

bf16 staged to ana-ml2:/tank/aimodels/qwen38-27b-coldfusion-bf16 (pinned
9c44193, provenance recorded). The destructive run is NOT executed here --
dry-run verification and operator go gate it.
2026-08-20 06:50:48 -07:00
vh ccb56a0a51 docs(pfi): capture the RobinsonLabs Qwen3.8-27B abliteration recipe
Reference recipe (not a deployed artifact) for MTP-aware, vision-preserving
single-direction abliteration of Qwen3.8-27B -- the base family the gen seat
runs. Captures the two things this recipe gets right that naive abliterations
of this architecture miss:

- The MTP head is abliterated in-band (its two residual-write matrices, glue
  left alone), so speculative acceptance does not collapse on the prompts
  abliteration exists to fix -- directly relevant to the gen seat's MTP>=40%
  gate.
- The vision tower is preserved byte-identical (333 tensors, max delta 0).

Plus the two calibration traps specific to this base: the twice-captured
refusal direction (layer 26, |cos| 0.99) and the attention-sink dimension 3994
that bricks the model if orthogonalized out. Documents the coverage gate
(o_proj 16 + linear_out 48 == 64 layers) that catches a half-abliterated
model before it writes a byte, and the foot-gun that the GGUF imatrix does not
cover the MTP block. Links into model-quantization-playbook.md for the quant
half of the pipeline.
2026-08-19 22:02:14 -07:00
vh 7010f9a1da feat(booth): render .md/.txt/.log inline in the gallery, collapsible + closable
Docs used to render as a clumsy link that navigated to a separate page. They
now render in place: build_gallery pre-renders each doc (markdown -> HTML,
plain text raw) and the gallery shows it inside a native <details open>
disclosure that spans the full grid width so prose has a readable measure.

The doc bar carries: a collapse chevron (the whole <details> summary toggles,
works with JS off), a full-page link (still reaches the standalone viewer), a
download link, and a session-close ✕. The ✕ needed stopPropagation +
preventDefault because it lives inside <summary> — otherwise its click would
toggle the disclosure instead of hiding the item. Close is JS (progressive
enhancement); collapse is native.

Two design points:
- Plain text is returned RAW from build_gallery and escaped by the template
  inside <pre>. Pre-escaping in Python plus Jinja autoescape would
  double-encode angle brackets; a test pins the single-escape.
- Inlining is bounded by DOC_MAX_BYTES. A doc over the limit keeps the old
  link-out behaviour rather than being rendered into every index load; a test
  covers the fallback.

The shared .markdown-body / .textview typography moved from doc.html's scoped
<style> into base.html so the inline body and the full-page view render
identically; doc.html keeps only its page-layout wrapper.

Updated the pre-existing test_gallery_links_docs_to_view: it asserted the old
link-out behaviour the operator asked to change, so it now asserts the inline
render plus the surviving full-page and download affordances. 61 pass.
Verified live: markdown renders with headings/table/blockquote/code, txt
preserves whitespace and single-escapes, collapse and ✕-close both work.
2026-08-19 11:06:36 -07:00
vh 40257247b0 memory: IPv6 plan settled — endpoints not internal numbering; ESH has a /56
Corrects three claims that had been standing in the fleet IPv6 notes and that
sent a three-arm research effort after a problem that did not exist:

- ESH was recorded as having no IPv6. It has a /56 delegated and a routable
  WAN GUA -- substantially more prefix than NH3's single /64.
- The mesh was recorded as broken by ESH's CGNAT. It is not and was not down;
  ESH is outbound and working. CGNAT on v4 alongside generous v6 is just the
  modern ISP pattern, not an outage.
- IPv6 was framed as the escape hatch for that outage. The actual plan is that
  IPv6 carries tunnel ENDPOINTS for Site Magic and WireGuard, and LANs are not
  numbered in v6 at all.

NH3 internal v6 was brought up on the delegated /64 and verified end-to-end
(global GUA on nh3-docker, zero loss to Cloudflare and Google v6, un-NATed
source address seen from outside), then reverted on operator direction: one
/64 lights exactly one VLAN and that is not worth the split-brain.

The AT&T prefix research is kept as reference rather than deleted -- the /60
is real but undelegatable, the living multi-prefix mechanism is multiple
IA_PD in one solicit rather than the VRRP/multi-MAC recipe we were handed,
and the UDM SE can express neither. That is the answer if NH3 LAN-side v6
ever earns a maintenance window; it is not on any critical path now.
2026-08-19 10:44:56 -07:00
vh 6770ba26d6 feat(booth): kept boards — a .forever sentinel and a standing link board
Agent sessions hand the operator URLs and they drown in terminal
scrollback. The Booth is the right home for them — it already has the one
property that decides adoption, which is that a session can publish with
mkdir and cp, no API key, no schema, no deploy — but everything in it dies
in 24h.

So: a booth containing `.forever` is never swept, and renders in its own
Kept lane at the top of the index. Opt-in per booth, so the ephemeral
default is untouched and nobody inherits a cleanup chore. `rm` the
sentinel and the board rejoins the sweep; the CLI verbs are sugar over
exactly that, which keeps the filesystem-is-the-state model honest.

The pin is deliberately NOT wired into is_expired(). That stays a pure age
question feeding the `expires_in` countdown; only sweep_once() honours the
sentinel. Keeping expiry arithmetic and reaper policy apart means they
cannot drift into each other.

Kept cards are visually separated per Australis: a 2px top edge in aurora
blue, the one accent border the system sanctions. They show "kept" instead
of a countdown, and they deliberately lose the one-click wipe button — a ×
next to the durable stuff is a footgun, so removing a kept board is a
two-step act.

`booth link <url> [description]` appends to the standing `links` board,
creating and keeping it on first use. Entries carry provenance (handle or
hostname, plus a timestamp) because a bare URL is unreadable three days
later. The append is one printf of one line to an O_APPEND fd — atomic
under PIPE_BUF on POSIX — which matters because many agents post to one
board and interleaved half-lines would be the obvious failure mode.

Seven tests cover the sentinel: detection, survival of a sweep that wipes
its neighbour, the deliberate is_expired/sweep_once split, the listing
flag, the sentinel not inflating item counts, and both lane-rendering
directions. Two of them originally asserted on the bare strings "Kept" and
"kept-grid", which passed for the wrong reason — those also appear in the
inlined stylesheet served on every page — so they now assert the full
class attribute. 55 pass.

Also corrects the Homepage card's description, which advertised a flat 24h
TTL that is no longer the whole story.
2026-08-19 09:34:53 -07:00
vh 23cccf5f53 fix(homepage): force the canvas clear of the cached wallpaper div
Removing the `background:` block from settings.yaml was not sufficient.
Homepage server-renders the wallpaper as an INLINE style on
`<div id="background">` and Next.js caches the rendered page, so the aurora
survived both the config removal and a container restart. Only a full
recreate clears that cache, and recreating this container costs an hour of
missing tab bar and i18n before it heals itself.

Adding `#background` to the canvas reset is deterministic and immediate,
and it also keeps the canvas correct if the setting is ever re-added by
accident. The existing selector missed it: the DOM is
body > div#__next > div#background, so `body > div` matched the Next.js
root, not the wallpaper layer.

Verified live rather than locally: the served page now reports no
background image, with all three canonical faces loaded and the group
eyebrows rendering as JetBrains Mono in Australis cyan.
2026-08-19 09:17:37 -07:00
vh b271db1f44 feat(homepage): rebuild the theme on canonical Australis tokens
The predecessor theme was ugly for two structural reasons, not one.

It did not use the design system's colours. It built a parallel OKLCH
palette "derived from the Australis philosophy" and swapped the canonical
typeface for Supreme -- a fork, not a theme. Every hex here is now copied
verbatim from ~/.claude/skills/australis-design/colors_and_type.css, and
build.py re-checks all 19 against that file at build time and warns on
drift so it cannot quietly fork again. Type is the canonical stack: Space
Grotesk / Inter / JetBrains Mono, vendored as latin-subset VARIABLE woff2
(one file per family, 102 KB total against 56 KB for three static Supreme
cuts, and no Google Fonts request at page load).

It also carried a generated full-bleed aurora image behind the entire
dashboard. Canon forbids exactly that -- "solid fills only on chrome, no
full-bleed photography, no decorative gradients", and the aurora motif
"never as a background fill behind text". The predecessor knew, said so in
its own header, and dialled the opacity down rather than dropping it. The
image is gone; the aurora survives as a 1px accent edge under the tab bar,
which is where canon sanctions it. The asset stays in images/ in case it
is ever revisited.

Direction is instrument panel. Group headings become the Australis mono
eyebrow with a hairline to the right edge -- canon calls the eyebrow a
system signature, and it turns the groups into register bands instead of
headings floating over a grid. Status stops shouting: the filled emerald
chips read louder than the service names they annotated, so they are now a
semantic dot plus a mono micro-label at tertiary contrast. Cards are
bordered and opaque, per canon's border-over-shadow rule for chrome.

Alignment, per operator feedback that pills and cards did not line up:

- The status cluster is centred on the service name's line rather than
  parked in the card's top-right corner, where Homepage's `absolute top-0`
  left it floating ~7px above the title's optical centre. The offsets
  reconstruct the title line box and are documented as moving together.
- Descriptions get a two-line minimum, so the common one-line/two-line mix
  bottom-aligns across a row. This is what made the grid look ragged.
  useEqualHeights stays false: it inflated short cards to match a widget
  card twice their height, which was the worse failure.
- The status dot is flex-centred rather than nudged with vertical-align,
  so it stays centred if the type scale changes.

Retires the Skyfall sources and the Supreme faces; theme/ now has one
source of truth.
2026-08-19 09:14:13 -07:00
vh b92097688c fix(esh-pve): hardware watchdog, and close the single-resolver DNS SPOF
esh-pve hard-froze at 03:34 on 2026-08-19 and stayed frozen ~4.5 hours
until a manual power cycle. No panic, no OOM, no MCE — the journal stops
mid-operation. The whole ESH site lost DNS with it, because esh-userland
(VLAN 10, the PVC SSID and wired userland LAN) was handed exactly one
resolver: 10.0.50.45, AdGuard on esh-docker-vm, on a different VLAN, with
no secondary. Internet and routing were healthy throughout.

Two fixes.

1. DNS: 10.0.10.1 (the gateway, verified resolving) added as secondary on
   esh-userland via the UDM Classic API. Note this is degradation cover,
   not clean failover — clients that query resolvers in parallel will
   bypass AdGuard for a share of lookups.

2. Watchdog: softdog -> iTCO_wdt under systemd (RuntimeWatchdogSec=60),
   watchdog-mux masked. The box looked watchdog-protected and was not: a
   software watchdog cannot fire when the kernel it lives in is wedged,
   and watchdog-mux only pets the device while an HA client is connected,
   which never happens on a cluster with no HA resources. Firmware does
   not block the TCO timer here, checked before committing to it.

Also pins VM 102 off (onboot: 0). It starts with full GPU passthrough and
vfio-pci enabling that device is the last thing the kernel logged, 39
minutes before the freeze. The other suspect is the kernel itself: the
host ran 4.5 months on 6.8.12-16, took 6.8.12-42 in an apt batch on
08-18, and died 20 hours into the first boot on it. 6.8.12-16 is still
installed as the rollback.

The playbook is idempotent — a second run skips all six steps and passes
all six verifies. The watchdog is confirmed armed (identity=iTCO_wdt,
state=active, held by PID 1) but has NOT been observed firing; proving
that needs a deliberate wedge.

Memory also corrects two wrong mid-incident calls: the mgmt VLAN is
routed over the site tunnel and is not firewalled off — both symptoms
were the dead host generating ICMP unreachables.
2026-08-19 09:05:52 -07:00
vh 059f963118 docs(waterland-studio): note why an adopted job shows as failed
waterland-dev confirmed the mechanism: adoption marks a job failed on a
sidecar saying running/queued, or on a directory with no plate.png. The
pre-header-fix renders died 1.7s in with a source and no plate, so they
land in the second branch. Recorded so nobody investigates adopted
history as a live fault.
2026-08-19 01:40:52 -07:00
vh e6907819b0 feat(waterland-studio): deploy b72425b — all three upstream findings fixed
One update.sh run on irv-ml1 carried both open upstream PRs, per the
operator's green-light on the job-store fix:

- #5 (464dfc2) declares cupy-cuda12x[ctk] on the gpu extra and takes uv
  out of the render path (sys.executable -m waterland.cli), retiring the
  runtime prune trap at the source.
- #6 (b72425b) rehydrates the job index from the data volume at startup,
  fixing the unbounded store growth reported from this side.

Verified after the update rather than assumed: healthy on backend cupy;
/api/jobs went 1 -> 16 against 16 directories on disk, so API and volume
agree for the first time; nothing wrongly reclaimed, correct since 16 is
under RETAIN=40 and adoption only makes them visible; a real 256^2 plate
render completes warm, so the kernel-cache volume survived the image swap.
A subsequent render took both counts to 17.

The image keeps its explicit [ctk] install and UV_NO_SYNC/UV_OFFLINE pins
even though both are now redundant. The header requirement is a property
of this slim base, not of the upstream extra, and the cost is measured
rather than assumed: uv sync satisfies it first, so the line reports
"Audited 1 package" and adds 0.3s to the build. The env pins are now
cheap defence-in-depth against any future path that re-enters uv.

Docs corrected in place: the README's upstream-finding section is now a
resolved-finding record, and the two "bounded ~500 MB" claims say which
commit made that bound hold across restarts rather than only within a
process. Comment-side changes pushed to the live compose dir; no restart
was needed for them.
2026-08-19 01:39:13 -07:00
vh a2b6bf409e memory: waterland-studio upstream fixes landed, container stays pinned
waterland-dev merged PR #5 (main now 464dfc2), fixing both landmines at
source: the gpu extra declares cupy-cuda12x[ctk], and the renderer spawns
sys.executable -m waterland.cli instead of re-entering uv mid-job.

The running container deliberately stays on 8025366. Its own [ctk] install
and UV_NO_SYNC/UV_OFFLINE pins already neutralise both defects, so a rebuild
would buy reliability that is already present — and the project is in
wind-down. Both guards are kept rather than dropped: the header requirement
is a property of this slim image, not of the upstream extra, and the uv pins
are now cheap defence-in-depth against any future path that re-enters uv.

Also records waterland-dev's confirmation of the unbounded job-store growth
and the operator's green-light on their startup-rehydrate fix. That PR
merging is the rebuild trigger: one update.sh run lands the rehydrate and
464dfc2 together. Marks the inbox drained.
2026-08-19 01:26:32 -07:00
vh bc3aada73a memory: snapshot — .internal DNS live, waterland containerised, homepage themed
Captures a long infra session: fleet *.internal DNS (git-sourced, 42 names,
three resolvers including a new colo one), waterland studio containerised on
irv-ml1, Homepage cleaned up and themed with Australis Skyfall over an
Arbo-generated background, and four unmanaged stacks adopted into stacks/.

Four detail files added. Auto-archived 4 entries to archival-memory.md
(Recent decisions 2, Tried and abandoned 2); 5 held back by the open-deferred
guard rather than moved.

Also records three operator-owned open items: the colo DNS repoint, the
static-v6 convention, and the deliberately belayed AI-tab Dormant regrouping.
2026-08-19 01:20:53 -07:00
vh b8003c73ae feat(dns): fleet .internal naming — git-sourced, agent-managed, three resolvers
Names for fleet hosts so addresses stop needing to be memorised. Built because
IPv6 makes that hopeless — and, more to the point, because v6 addresses are
derived rather than assigned, so they cannot reliably be written down once and
trusted either.

  dns/internal.yaml     source of truth: 38 hosts + 4 service aliases
  scripts/dns-sync.py   reconciles AdGuard resolvers against it
  stacks/adguard-ana/   the colo's resolver, which did not exist

Naming is <host>.<site>.internal with sites ana/esh/nh3 (operator's call).
.internal is ICANN-reserved for this; .local is reserved for mDNS, which is
why searxng.pfi.local was a collision that merely happened to work.

Same posture as deploy-stack.sh: file is intent, resolvers are derived state,
you see a diff before anything changes. Every name is published to every
resolver, so the site label says where a host IS, not who knows about it.

Two properties that matter:
- Authority is scoped to the ZONE, not the resolver. ESH carries hand-made
  esteban.net rewrites predating this; they are read, ignored and preserved.
  Resolver-wide authority would have silently deleted them.
- Within .internal it IS authoritative, so UI-added names get removed. That is
  the point — one place to look.

Colo gap closed: ana-docker had no resolver at all (hosts went straight to
1.1.1.1). Its AdGuard runs API on 8053 because 8080/3000 were taken, so the
port is carried per-site in the yaml rather than assumed by the script. It
ships with no blocklists — a false positive on a server network breaks
service-to-service calls for no upside.

Auth is a dedicated infra-ops AdGuard user, not the operator's account,
password vaulted at nh3-dev/adguard-infra-ops-password. Pre-change configs
backed up on each resolver. Both resolvers stayed answering across the restart.

searxng.pfi.local -> searxng.ana.internal, with the old Host() kept alongside
so nothing breaks mid-migration. matrix.pfi.local deliberately NOT migrated: a
Matrix server_name is baked into every user id, room id and signing key, so
renaming it rebuilds the homeserver's identity rather than changing a DNS name.

The v6 column is empty and correct — no fleet host has a global v6 address
yet. The file documents why addresses must be pinned statically before they go
in, since a record that silently stops matching is worse than no record.
2026-08-19 01:10:55 -07:00
vh 8189076daf docs(waterland-studio): claude-bot read grant wired, and an upstream store-growth finding
Operator granted claude-bot read on vh/waterland; verified scoped correctly
(admin false, push false, pull true). Token is on irv-ml1 at
/root/.config/waterland-studio/git-credentials, 0600 root-owned, wired as a
REPO-SCOPED credential helper rather than a global one, and .git/config holds
no token so the remote stays clean in any diff or backup. The vh site-admin
token was used only for the initial clone and the grant itself and was never
written to disk on that host.

update.sh now runs end to end: fetch, rebuild, recreate, health. Verified the
kernel-cache volume survives a recreate (warm 256^2+anim render 6.6s straight
after) and the job store survives with all 16 directories intact.

Records an upstream finding surfaced by that check: JobStore._jobs is
memory-only and nothing scans the data dir at startup, so after a restart the
API lists only new jobs while old ones persist on disk — cosmetic — but the
RETAIN=40 eviction only sees in-memory jobs, so restart-orphaned directories
are never reclaimed. The handover's ~500 MB bound holds per process lifetime,
not across restarts. Reported to waterland-dev; upstream's call to fix.
2026-08-19 00:47:38 -07:00
vh a2b5b58eee feat(waterland-studio): containerise the GPU render service on irv-ml1
Replaces a bare nohup on irv-ml1:8410 that would not have survived a reboot,
handed over by waterland-dev. Tracks vh/waterland @ main (PR #4 merged; main
HEAD is exactly the pinned 8025366).

Build context is a checkout at /opt/waterland-studio/src, deliberately OUTSIDE
the compose dir — deploy-stack.sh rsyncs stacks/<stack>/ with --delete and
would otherwise eat it. The Dockerfile is passed out-of-context.

Three landmines, all measured:

1. Both uv extras are load-bearing at build AND run. jobs.py shells the
   renderer out as a literal  with no --extra flags, so uv
   would re-sync at runtime and prune cupy — silently dropping to the numpy
   path at ~21x wall time. UV_NO_SYNC pins it; UV_OFFLINE makes any failure
   loud instead of quietly slow.

2. cupy needs CUDA HEADERS for its NVRTC compile, not just the driver and the
   wheel's runtime libs. The host has a system CUDA toolkit so the nohup
   process found them by accident; a slim image does not, and every render
   died 1.7s in with 'Failed to find CUDA headers' printed through argparse's
   usage banner — which reads like a CLI bug, not a missing toolkit. Fixed
   with cupy-cuda12x[ctk] (hundreds of MB, vs ~6 GB for a -devel base).

3. The A6000 is host device 1 but container device 0, since compose exposes
   exactly one GPU. CUDA_VISIBLE_DEVICES_TARGET=0 inside; copying the host's
   value selects a device that does not exist.

/root/.cupy is a volume because the NVRTC compile costs ~17s: verified at
23.3s cold vs 6.1s warm, and re-verified across a restart (23.2s on a fresh
cache volume, 6.0s once populated). Warm 256^2+anim beats the 7.4s recorded
against bare metal, so containerising cost nothing.

Job store seeded with the 4 jobs from the displaced instance. Serial by design
(one replica, one card) and unauthenticated, so it stays LAN/WireGuard-only.
2026-08-19 00:42:12 -07:00
vh df68dd2753 style(homepage): tone the stat values down, run the aurora through the page
Two operator corrections in one pass.

Stat values overshot: the previous commit took them from font-thin 13px to
bold 22px in heading white, which went from whisper to shout. A stat only has
to out-rank its own label, not the service name above it — now --text-md at
medium weight in cyan, which clears the label but sits below the card title
where it belongs.

Colour lift, staying inside the system rather than around it: Skyfall names
Aurora (blue, cyan, green) the PRIMARY families, 'used generously, in that
order', while Dawn (amber, red, violet) is semantic-only. So group markers now
cycle blue -> cyan -> green down the page — icons at full strength, names at
0.72 — service icons take a single cool wash, header resource icons go cyan,
and latency tags move to the info family so 'how fast' stops looking like
'is it alive'. No Dawn colour is used decoratively anywhere.

Also fixes selectors that never bound: Homepage emits docker-status-<state>,
not status-<state>, so the green pills up to now were stock colouring rather
than this file. Both forms are matched and the trap is commented.

README records the iteration loop that would have caught the overshoot: CSS is
served per-request, so it needs a reload, not a recreate and not the layout
warm-up — and candidate CSS can be injected into the live page for a
seconds-long feedback loop instead of a 10-minute one.
2026-08-19 00:25:02 -07:00
vh f38cf69fe4 fix(homepage): invert the widget stat hierarchy — numbers lead, labels recede
Stock Homepage builds each stat as a font-thin (weight 100) 13px value above a
font-bold 12px uppercase label, so the number you actually came to read is the
quietest thing in the card while its label shouts. Skyfall's rule is that
hierarchy comes emphatically from weight AND size, and that numbers are data.

Value now renders at --text-xl bold in tabular mono at --text-heading; label
drops to a --text-2xs tracked eyebrow at --text-faint. The well itself moves to
--surface-input, one step DOWN from the card it sits on, so stats read as inset
data rather than as another floating surface — a recess, so it takes the
hairline without the shadow.

Also drops .service-block from the generic .service-tag rule, which was what
pinned every number to --text-2xs in the first place.

Visible on Plex, Jellyfin, PaperlessNGX and Uptime Kuma.
2026-08-19 00:07:20 -07:00
vh dc3e47b3a2 feat(heretic2-charrp-reasoning): track the NVFP4+MTP reasoning seat
The char-rp-reasoning seat on ana-ml2 GPU0 — NEO-CODE Heretic2 27B at modelopt
NVFP4 with a grafted BF16 MTP head, ~77 tok/s via qwen3_5_mtp spec-decode,
replacing the retired GGUF seat. It had been running untracked.

Includes conf/mtp-workaround/sitecustomize.py, which is not optional: vLLM
0.24.0 does not propagate modelopt exclude_modules to the spec-decode DRAFT
model, so the BF16 MTP head gets quantized and the engine dies at load. The
shim force-skips mtp.* in is_layer_skipped. Both the mount and PYTHONPATH are
load-bearing.

Adds the two files house convention expects and the directory lacked: a
.env.example naming every knob (all values are the compose defaults; the live
host overrides only the three VRAM ones) and a README that points at
docs/runbooks/heretic2-nvfp4-mtp-seat.md rather than duplicating it.

No secrets: API_KEY is empty by default and the real .env stays on the host.
2026-08-18 23:53:59 -07:00
vh 45c1995d7a feat(homepage): Australis Skyfall theme + Arbo-generated aurora background
Replaces the previous theme attempt, which was built on a misread: the ask was
to use Arbo as an IMAGE-GEN ENGINE for the background, with the operator's
Australis Skyfall design system supplying the palette.

theme/ holds the source — colors/layout/typography vendored verbatim from the
Skyfall handoff bundle, Supreme 400/500/700 woff2, the Homepage bindings in
skyfall.css.in, and build.py which inlines fonts + tokens into
conf/custom.css. custom.css is GENERATED; edit the .in file and rebuild.

The build exists because Homepage serves only custom.css and custom.js out of
its config dir, so a @font-face pointing at a vendored woff2 would 404 — the
face has to arrive as a data: URI. The background image takes the other route:
/app/public/images is a real static route, so compose.yaml now mounts
images/ there read-only and settings.yaml points at /images/.

Bindings map Skyfall's semantic layer onto Homepage's DOM: Sea surfaces, the
depth recipe (hairline AND two-layer shadow, never one alone), uppercase
eyebrow group headers, the sanctioned accent-rail on the active tab rather
than a glow, and semantic status colour so a green pill means the service is
actually serving.

Background generated by Arbo (irv-ml1:8201) workflow t2i-ui-background, job
13f0891f4e42, seed 26, flux2-klein-9b, 2048x1152 — abstract, no subject,
cool-temperature aurora. 1.6 MB PNG -> 22 KB WebP.

Two deviations are documented rather than hidden: Skyfall forbids imagery
behind body text (held at opacity 30 as mitigation), and service icons stay
full-colour vendor logos.

NOT DEPLOYED — live still runs the old theme. Prototype on :5199.
2026-08-18 23:30:27 -07:00
vh c3de7dbd58 feat(homepage): add Arbo 'Raven' theme to custom.css; correct the tab-bar note
Ports Arbo's design tokens (irv-ml1:8201) into conf/custom.css — flat raven
ink #021425, card surface #112333 on #1B2E3D borders, Manrope, and mint
#2FFC89 reserved for signal so a green pill means the service is actually
serving. Values read off Arbo's running :root custom properties rather than
sampled from a screenshot. CSS rather than settings.yaml because Homepage's
color: setting only accepts built-in Tailwind ramps.

NOT YET DEPLOYED — live still runs the stock theme pending an A/B decision.
Prototype is at 10.0.50.45:5199; shots in ~/booth-data/homepage-cleanup/.
Promoting it also means dropping the background: block from settings.yaml.

Also corrects the previous commit's tab-bar claim. It is not a fixed few
minutes of warm-up: a fresh container was still tab-less at 4m30s twice, and
recovered on its own about an hour later. Cause remains unpinned; the README
now records the measured timing and the four ruled-out causes.
2026-08-18 22:38:21 -07:00
vh 42c594c29f fix(searxng,seafile): repair wget healthcheck argv, restore seafile after 3-month outage
searxng: the healthcheck passed '--tries' and '--spider' as separate argv
entries, so wget consumed '--spider' as the value of '--tries'. Spider mode
never engaged and every 30s probe downloaded the response to disk; the
container's working directory had accumulated 295,287 healthz.N files since
April, and the directory scan to pick the next free filename is what
intermittently blew the 10s timeout and flapped the dashboard card to
UNHEALTHY. Restored '--tries=1'. The junk was in the writable layer, so the
recreate cleared it. Now healthy, fails=0, 200 in 0.16s.

seafile: none of the three services declared a restart policy, so Docker
defaulted them to 'no'. The daemon stopped all three within 200ms on
2026-05-06 and nothing brought them back — a three-month outage whose only
trace was an EXITED card. Exit 255 is what a container ignoring SIGTERM
reports when the daemon stops it, not a crash. Added restart: unless-stopped.
Stack is back up; mysql gates on its healthcheck as designed and seahub
started without the race. 302 -> login page.

Both stacks were running unmanaged on ana-docker and are now tracked here.

homepage: AI tab reordered by clickability per operator — chat frontends,
ComfyUI and the control plane on top; vLLM /docs seats and TTS endpoints
below. Corrects the previous commit's UNRESOLVED tab-bar section: it was
warm-up time after a recreate, not a defect.
2026-08-18 22:27:15 -07:00
vh 9d92c4bd21 fix(homepage): pin UltraSeedbox to one tab, dedupe Uptime Kuma, size columns to members
UltraSeedbox had no layout: entry, and Homepage renders an untabbed group on
every tab — eight full-width bookmark bars repeated four times. Pinned to Main
with a row layout.

Uptime Kuma rendered twice: a manual services.yaml block under Monitoring plus
homepage.group=Apps on the container. Dropped the manual block, moved the
label to Monitoring, added homepage.siteMonitor. Adopted the previously
unmanaged uptimekuma stack into stacks/ so the label is version-controlled.

Column counts declared more columns than groups had members, leaving the last
row of several groups mostly empty. Columns now track member counts.

Also records an UNRESOLVED regression: since the container was recreated the
client render has lost its tab bar, wallpaper and i18n. Ruled out the config
changes (committed pre-cleanup config reproduces it) and v2.0.0 (v1.13.2
reproduces it). Server HTML still carries the tab markup, so the loss is
client-side. Details in the stack README.
2026-08-18 19:12:02 -07:00
vh 084ad924f0 memory: snapshot — ESH fiber live, esh-pve-nas migrated+patched, v6 mapped
Session captured: ESH cut over to Cityside 2Gb symmetric fiber and was
fully provisioned on it; esh-pve-nas completed its ZFS-root migration off
the USB DOM and took its 225-package security backlog with the reboot
deferred; ESH<->colo IPsec was rebuilt as a dialup tunnel with NAT-T after
CGNAT broke the statically-pinned one; IPv6 was mapped across all three
sites.

Auto-archival fired at the soft cap: 7 entries moved to
archival-memory.md (Recent decisions 3, Tried and abandoned 4), all
verified-complete arcs, with two detail files moved and removed. The
remaining pre-Aug-05 entries were held back by the open-deferred-work
guard, so the index stays slightly over cap at 313 lines rather than
losing a live pointer.

Also records the one self-inflicted outage of the session (missing
--make-rslave on a chroot rbind) and that three long-dead things
surfaced incidentally: pvestatd down 82 days, a vzdump hung 126 days,
and a VM sitting in prelaunch for four months.
2026-08-18 16:36:13 -07:00
vh 34d3f42bf5 docs: park the BGW210 v6 work pending the Device Access Code
Operator will retrieve the BGW210 Device Access Code from the NH3 office
and vault it, after which the IPv6 LAN settings page can be driven
remotely.

Parked on the henge as reclaim-nh3-s-7-unclaimed-ipv6-64s-from-the with
everything needed to resume cold: the verified facts about the /60 split
and the seven unclaimed prefixes, why AT&T cannot fix it, the exact page
to start at, what to look for in priority order, the other settings
pages behind the same login, and the wpa_supplicant fallback with its
warning about modifying NH3's only uplink.

Suggested vault path unifi/bgw210-nh3-device-access-code, matching the
existing unifi/* credentials.
2026-08-18 16:29:39 -07:00
vh 57e080319b docs: NH3 v6 root cause is the BGW210, and seven /64s are unclaimed
Operator suggested checking the BGW on its 192.x management address,
which turned out to give the whole picture from unauthenticated status
pages.

The CPE is a BGW210-700 on firmware 4.28.7 at 192.168.1.254. AT&T does
hand it a /60 -- c110 through c11f. The BGW keeps c110-c117 for itself
and re-delegates up to eight individual /64s on c118-c11f, top-down. Our
UDM holds c11f, delegation number eight.

So the earlier conclusion that AT&T only grants a /64 was right about
the symptom and wrong about the cause. Seven further /64s are available
and simply never solicited, because UniFi exposes a single
wan_dhcpv6_pd_size integer with no field for how many prefixes to
request. The documented workaround is repeated -P flags to dhclient,
which the UniFi UI cannot express.

This also settles that an AT&T ticket cannot help: the rationing is CPE
firmware behaviour, not provisioning. Records the two real options --
accept one /64, or bypass the BGW entirely with wpa_supplicant EAP-TLS
on the UDM to negotiate the full /60 -- with the warning that the latter
modifies NH3's only uplink and needs a planned window.
2026-08-18 16:27:09 -07:00
vh 1b6c26ce58 docs: AT&T PD is a hard /64 at NH3, tested on the wire
AT&T support guessed 'I do not believe att will do that' from a DNS
provisioning desk. The guess was correct, but it needed proving rather
than accepting, so the UDM solicited DHCPv6-PD at /48, /56 and /60. All
three returned the same single /64. This is not a case of nobody having
asked -- the ask was made three ways.

Proven by temporarily enabling PD on nh3-iot, the only NH3 VLAN with
zero clients, then setting ipv6_pd_prefixid to 0, 15 and 16. All three
returned an identical c11f prefix, which only happens when exactly one
/64 is delegated; with a larger block the prefix-id moves the LAN within
it.

Records a mistake worth not repeating: I first read the gap between the
WAN address (c110) and the delegated prefix (c11f) as evidence of a /60.
It is not -- AT&T assigns those from different parts of their pool and
the spread means nothing.

NH3 was fully restored afterwards, with rollback artifacts kept. Also
captures the concrete ask for AT&T Business, phrased as something their
provisioning team can verify against their own DHCPv6 logs, and the
consequence if refused: NH3 can host exactly one v6 segment against
ESH's 256.
2026-08-18 14:41:29 -07:00
vh fddf7f587f docs: record the pending Cogent IPv6 provisioning request for the colo
Operator opened a ticket with Cogent for v6 at Anaheim, which closes the
one thing tonight's investigation could not resolve from our side.

Captures the diagnosis so the ticket has evidence behind it: a single RA
in 90 seconds of sniffing wan1, from fe80::ea0a:b9ff:fe3b:2c16, proving
an IPv6-capable router sits one hop away on the circuit terminating
38.120.12.42/29 -- but SLAAC obtained no global address across multiple
RA intervals and ping6 to Cloudflare and Google both returned 100% loss.
Router present, circuit unprovisioned.

Also records that the FortiGate v6 config was fully reverted after
testing, the FortiOS gotcha that SLAAC is 'set autoconf enable' rather
than an ip6-mode, and the ask to make when it lands: a /56 or better,
since NH3 only receives a single /64 from AT&T.

Notes the consequence worth planning around -- once provisioned, the
colo becomes the only site with both a static public v4 and routable
v6, which makes it the natural v6 hub given ESH is CGNAT'd and NH3 is
prefix-constrained.
2026-08-18 14:20:15 -07:00
vh fb91ea759e docs(pfi): lesson 10 -- v6 collapses two exposure controls into one
Operator's framing, and it is a better argument than the terminology
correction that preceded it. Under v4, exposing a host needed two
affirmative acts -- a DNAT and an accept rule -- so missing either left
the host dark. There is no v4 misconfiguration that exposes an internal
host by accident. NAT was load-bearing security whether or not anyone
designed it that way.

v6 removes the first control entirely. The path exists inherently, so
the firewall is the only thing left, and the failure mode inverts from
fail-closed to fail-open. Rule-ordering slips, rulesets that silently
match only one address family, new VLANs added without policy, and
re-delegated prefixes unmatching address-literal rules all become
exposure events rather than no-ops.

Records the practical consequences: key rules on interface/zone rather
than address literals, treat enabling v6 on a segment as requiring
policy to exist first, and verify default-deny from off-net rather than
by reading the ruleset -- which is lesson 3's assert-the-effective-value
discipline applied to firewall policy.

Also corrects my own claim from the previous commit that the pending
firewall pass was 'smaller' than I had implied. It is not smaller, it is
different in kind.
2026-08-18 13:41:23 -07:00
vh 707a8cbcce docs: correct addressable vs reachable in the ESH v6 entry
I wrote that enabling SLAAC would give LAN devices 'globally reachable
addresses'. Wrong word, and the wrong word in a persistent-memory entry
a future session inherits as fact.

Addressable is a property of the address. Reachable is a policy decision
the firewall makes. v6 removes NAT; it does not remove the firewall, and
treating those as the same thing is exactly how v6 gets mischaracterised
as automatic exposure.

Records the operator's position while correcting it: no 1:1 inbound
pass-through. The pending firewall-policy pass is about writing explicit
default-deny inbound rules per v6 segment, not about deciding what to
expose.
2026-08-18 13:39:40 -07:00
vh 8be8a51437 docs: re-gloss esh-iot, re-spell esh-mgmt
esh-iot keeps the identical eight digits -- 4DBAD107, rendering
4dba:d107 -- and only the reading changes: 4 is FOR rather than A, so it
parses 'FOR DA BAD IOT', which describes what the segment is actually
for.

esh-mgmt genuinely changes: 115D:B055 becomes 15DA:B055. The leading I
is dropped and DA is spelled in full, giving 'IS DA BOSS' with the
network as subject rather than speaker. Still eight digits. DA written
out needs no substitution since D and A are both native hex; spelling it
as a single D the way esh-iot does would have yielded seven digits and
broken the house pattern.
2026-08-18 13:33:12 -07:00
vh 18c683b399 docs: reserve 4411:DBAD for a future DMZ
'FOR ALL DA BAD' -- 4=FOR, 411=ALL, D=DA, BAD=BAD. Eight digits, house
style, renders 4411:dbad.

No DMZ network exists on the ESH UDM today; this is a name claimed
against the day one is built. Pairs deliberately with esh-iot's
4DBA:D107 -- IoT is 'a da bad', the DMZ is 'for all da bad', which is
the correct relationship between the two segments.
2026-08-18 13:31:02 -07:00
vh 959bb6ee05 docs: server network gets 4411:B105 -- ESH v6 naming scheme complete
'FOR ALL BIOS' -- 4=FOR, 411=ALL, B105=BIOS. Eight digits like the rest.

Completes the set. All six ESH networks now carry an 8-hex-digit phrase
in a consistent first-person/declarative voice:

  Default       4BA5:3417   A BASE FOR IT
  esh-mgmt      115D:B055   I IS DA BOSS
  esh-server    4411:B105   FOR ALL BIOS
  esh-userland  CAFE:4411   CAFE FOR ALL
  esh-iot       4DBA:D107   A DA BAD IOT
  esh-cameras   1533:FACE5  I SEE FACES

Still a documentation convention rather than wire-level configuration --
UniFi has no static-v6 client assignment and the gateway address is
platform-fixed -- but these are the values to use whenever ESH LAN v6 is
switched on and hosts get hand-assigned addresses.
2026-08-18 13:30:27 -07:00
vh a264e001ae docs: default network settles on 4BA5:3417
Same phrase, 'A BASE FOR IT', but written as a plain 8-digit string
rather than forcing the article into its own group. 4=A, BA53=BASE,
4=FOR, 17=IT renders as 4ba5:3417 -- two groups, matching every other
network in the scheme, with the words straddling the colon exactly the
way 4DBA:D107 does.

Corrects the previous commit, which claimed this needed nine digits and
a third group. It is eight, and always was.
2026-08-18 13:27:12 -07:00
vh e5bba048c8 docs: revise default network to A:BA53:0417
'A BASE FOR IT' -- the article makes it a full sentence, matching the
voice of the other five. BA53 uses 3=E rather than the 5E spelling used
in the previous BA5E version.

Nine hex digits rather than eight, so unlike the others it does not fit
two groups and renders across three as a:ba53:0417.
2026-08-18 13:26:23 -07:00
vh 309a240fa8 docs: default network gets BA5E:0417
'BASE FOR IT' -- BA5E=BASE, 4=FOR, 17=IT. The foundation segment
everything else hangs off, which is what the default network is, and it
doubles as 'base for IT'.

Note the trailing group zero-pads: it renders as ba5e:0417, not
ba5e:417.
2026-08-18 13:25:36 -07:00
vh e58cfde7fd docs: userland network gets CAFE:4411
'CAFE FOR ALL' -- CAFE, 4=FOR, 411=ALL. Eight digits like the others,
and the only one so far that splits on its own phrase boundary, so it
renders legibly as cafe:4411.

Bonus reading: 411 is US directory assistance, which is a fitting second
joke for the segment the humans actually live on.
2026-08-18 13:24:04 -07:00
vh ab8481907d docs: iot network gets 4DBAD107
'A DA BAD IOT' -- 4=A, D=DA, BAD=BAD, 107=IOT. Eight hex digits to match
the cameras and mgmt picks.

Worth noting it renders as 4dba:d107, so unlike the other two the phrase
does not split on its word boundaries and reads as noise unless you know
it is there -- which is arguably right for the untrusted segment.
2026-08-18 13:22:22 -07:00
vh 805fa6ff22 docs: mgmt network gets 115D:B055
'I IS DA BOSS' -- 1=I, 15=IS, D=DA, B055=BOSS. Eight hex digits like
the cameras pick, so it renders as 2607:73c0:402:1d??::115d:b055 with
the same two-group split and room for host numbering.

Pairs structurally with 1533:FACE5 on cameras: both eight digits, both
first-person, and the network that is actually in charge gets to say so
to the one that is merely watching.
2026-08-18 13:18:32 -07:00
vh 35e7ecbadb docs: cameras network gets 1533:FACE5
'I SEE FACES' -- 1->I, 5->S, 3->E, 3->E then FACES. Eight hex digits
splitting cleanly across two groups, so it renders as
2607:73c0:402:1d00::1533:face5 with room left for host numbering.

Still a documentation convention rather than anything on the wire, per
the constraints recorded in the same entry, but this one is good enough
that it should survive to whenever ESH LAN v6 actually gets switched on.
2026-08-18 13:16:56 -07:00
vh fe3d765873 docs: record the ESH IPv6 naming scheme as a docs convention, not wire-level
Picked six hexspeak names for the ESH LANs during a wind-down moment
(FACE/B055/B105/CAFE/DEAD/BASE), then checked whether any of it could
actually land on the wire before implementing anything.

It can't, for three independent reasons: a network's only nameable slot
is its /64 prefix id, which is 2 hex digits and can't spell a 4-char
word; the gateway's own address is fixed at ::1 by the UniFi platform
with no field to override it; and UniFi has no IPv6 equivalent of
use_fixedip/fixed_ip, confirmed directly against the client schema, so
individual devices can't be pinned to a chosen v6 address either --
SLAAC devices self-assign via EUI-64 or privacy extension.

So this stays a documentation mnemonic. Recorded as such rather than
implied as something live, since I'd already started suggesting a
static-camera-assignment plan that the schema check ruled out.
2026-08-18 11:09:14 -07:00
vh 50d13f57cb docs: park the ipsec_local_ip watcher until ESH fiber is up
The ESH<->colo tunnel is restored and the FortiGate end is permanently
address-agnostic, but the UniFi end still needs a literal ipsec_local_ip
and so drops on any ESH WAN change -- Cox reclaiming WAN1, the fiber
cutover, or a DHCP renewal.

Operator's call not to build the self-healing watcher yet, which is
right: it would be written against the 5G failover address, which is
about to be replaced, and the fiber may reshape the topology anyway.
Parked as self-healing-ipsec-local-ip-watcher-for-the-esh with the
trigger recorded, plus the follow-up to retire the old ana-to-eshudm
tunnel whose distance-10 route would otherwise reclaim traffic if Cox
returned on the old address.

Records the manual stopgap in persistent memory so the gap is cheap to
cover by hand in the meantime: read wan_ip from the UDM's health
endpoint, PUT it into esh-ana.ipsec_local_ip.
2026-08-18 08:21:03 -07:00
vh 8a742f59b8 fix(ana-gw): restore ESH<->colo IPsec as a dialup tunnel with NAT-T
The link died when ESH lost its public IP during the fiber cutover. Two
independent causes, and the second would have defeated the obvious fix:

- phase1 ana-to-eshudm was type static, pinned to 70.181.90.232, an
  address that no longer exists.
- nattraversal was disable, so ESP could not have crossed NAT even with
  the peer IP corrected. pfi-ana-nh3 shares that setting and survives
  only because NH3 is publicly addressed, which is why the two tunnels
  diverged.

FortiOS refuses `set type dynamic` on an existing tunnel -- "Cannot
change tunnel type once configured" -- and rolled back cleanly, so the
fix could not be an edit. Rather than delete and recreate, which
cascades into the phase2, two static routes and ten policies, the
replacement was built alongside: new phase1+phase2 ana-eshudm-dyn
(type dynamic, ikev2, aes256-sha1, dh14, NAT-T on, PSK read from the ESH
UDM API so neither side needed a new key), static route id 10 at
distance 20, and two consolidated multi-zone policies 73/74. The old
tunnel is left in place, dead and harmless, as rollback.

Verified up: ana-eshudm-dyn_0 97.170.236.56:4500 selectors 1/1 -- the _0
suffix is a dialup child, :4500 is NAT-T, and the address is the
carrier's, which is precisely what could never have been pinned. ESH
reaches all four colo hosts at 40-56ms, the colo reaches all three ESH
hosts, and traceroute drops from eight hops leaking into the carrier
network to three hops fully encapsulated.

Config was backed up before any write (1.17MB, 36903 lines, off-box).

Residual fragility recorded: the UDM's ipsec_local_ip demands a literal
address -- empty is rejected as api.err.InvalidPayload -- so it still
needs updating when the fiber changes ESH's WAN address. The gateway end
is now address-agnostic; the UniFi end is not.
2026-08-18 08:12:35 -07:00
vh 9407e7f144 docs: correct the persistent-memory IPv6 entry to match the evidence
The prior edit missed its anchor and left the over-broad version in
place. The entry now separates the two inter-site links rather than
treating them as one: Site Magic (WireGuard, NH3<->ESH) survives
arbitrary NAT and is proven to; IPsec (colo<->ESH via ana-gw) does not
and is currently down, with traffic leaking unencapsulated to the
carrier. IPv6 keeps its justification on the IPsec link specifically.
2026-08-18 07:47:33 -07:00
vh dec4ba45db docs: scope the NAT refutation to WireGuard; IPsec to colo is broken
Correcting an over-generalisation from earlier today. Proving that NAT
does not break Site Magic, I wrote it up as "no addressing outcome
threatens the inter-site tunnel." That is wrong: the fleet has two
inter-site links with opposite NAT behaviour.

- NH3<->ESH is Site Magic, i.e. WireGuard. It survives arbitrary NAT,
  proven live on RFC1918 double-NAT (192.168.200.111) with nh3-dev and
  nh3-docker reachable at ~40ms. It dials out to NH3's public edge and
  never needs inbound reachability.

- colo<->ESH is IPsec on the ana-gw FortiGate, and it is broken right
  now under those same conditions. ana-docker, pfi-pve and pbs-ana all
  fail from esh-pve-nas, and traceroute shows packets for 10.250.x
  leaving the UDM to the 5G modem and then wandering the carrier network
  before dying -- not encapsulated at all, so no SA is up and the
  traffic falls through to the default route. Site-to-site IPsec pins a
  peer IP and ESH no longer has a routable one.

So the IPv6 work keeps its justification, but on the IPsec link
specifically rather than on the tunnels generally. Operator caught the
over-generalisation.

Adds lesson 8 -- a result proven for one protocol does not transfer to
another -- and corrects the superseded-claims row rather than replacing
it, since the original claim was half right and the halves are the
point. Also records my own over-broad claim as its own superseded row.
2026-08-18 07:47:10 -07:00
vh 40a4121a43 docs(pfi): add lesson 7 — test a 'this will break X' premise before building on it
Seeded by the Site Magic / CGNAT premise, which justified a body of IPv6
work and turned out to be false the first time anything actually tested
it. The mechanism was discoverable in advance: Site Magic is WireGuard
and the far side has a public endpoint, so the NAT'd side dials out and
never needs inbound reachability. NAT breaks inbound; it does not break
outbound-initiated tunnels with keepalives.

Also fills the first row of the superseded-claims table, which is what
that table exists for -- the claim is corrected with a date rather than
quietly deleted, so older references to it resolve instead of misleading.
2026-08-18 07:44:25 -07:00
vh 78cc760ef6 docs: refute the CGNAT-breaks-Site-Magic premise with a live test
The fleet IPv6 work was justified primarily by the expectation that ESH
fiber landing behind CGNAT would break Site Magic on IPv4, making v6 the
escape hatch. The fiber cutover provided a free natural experiment and
the premise does not hold.

Cox was unplugged, ESH failed over to the 5G WAN (already configured
failover-only, so this needed no intervention), and the resulting WAN
address is 192.168.200.111 -- RFC1918, double-NAT, no inbound path at
all, which is strictly worse than the CGNAT that was feared. Site Magic
stayed up throughout: all four ESH hosts reachable, ssh and command exec
working, 20MB pulled over the tunnel, latency 15ms -> ~46ms as expected
for cable to 5G.

The mechanism is visible on the device: magic_site_to_site_vpn holds
only `enabled` plus a WireGuard keypair, with peer orchestration in the
UniFi cloud and no WAN binding of any kind. NH3's edge is publicly
reachable, so the NAT'd side dials out and never needs reachability.

Consequence: no addressing outcome on the new fiber -- public, CGNAT or
double-NAT -- threatens the inter-site tunnel. IPv6 stays worth doing on
its own merits but stops being urgent, and stops gating anything.

Also worth recording that Site Magic cannot be pinned to a WAN. It rides
whichever uplink is active, so the only lever is failover priority --
which moves all site traffic, not just the tunnel. The existing
failover-only config on WAN2 already handles a primary-WAN outage
correctly and needed no change.
2026-08-18 07:44:06 -07:00
vh 668b63a398 feat(esh-pve-nas): install the 225-package backlog; reboot deferred
pve-manager 8.4.11 -> 8.4.20, corosync 3.1.9 -> 3.1.10-pve2, and kernel
6.8.12-42 staged on the /boot LV. dpkg clean, nothing outstanding for
apt -f install, all PVE services active, cluster quorate, no unapplied
conffiles. Reboot deliberately deferred at operator request, so the host
still runs 6.8.12-13 until a chosen window.

This validates the GRUB fix from 061c4b7 under the exact condition it
was written for. update-grub regenerated entries for the new kernel and
entry 0 -- what GRUB_DEFAULT=0 selects -- is now
/vmlinuz-6.8.12-42-pve with root=ZFS=nvme/ROOT/pve-1, supplied by the
grub.d drop-in since grub-mkconfig cannot derive the pool name itself.
The old kernel keeps correct entries as a fallback and the ext4 rollback
entry is untouched. Had the fix not landed first, saved_entry would
still be pinned to 6.8.12-13 and the host would boot the old kernel
indefinitely -- 161 security updates installed and never run.

/boot holds both kernel sets at 176M used of 488M, confirming the 512M
LV carved out of swap was sized correctly.

Adds a ZFS snapshot step to the upgrade playbook, taken automatically on
ZFS-root nodes before any package lands. That is the first real use of
the boot-environment upside the migration was meant to unlock: rollback
for this upgrade is now `zfs rollback -r
nvme/ROOT/pve-1@pre-upgrade-20260818T141652Z && reboot` rather than
archaeology in dpkg. Also documents that the corosync bump restarts
corosync mid-upgrade, which on a 2-node cluster is a brief quorum event.
2026-08-18 07:21:40 -07:00
vh 0559e12a2d docs(pfi): add an ops-lessons playbook for the transferable failures
Sibling to model-quantization-playbook.md, and it exists for the same
reason that one does: hard-won lessons were dying inside per-host
runbooks where nobody finds them until after repeating the mistake.

Six entries seeded from the esh-pve-nas migration, all of which would
bite identically on any other host:

1. mount --rbind into a chroot needs --make-rslave, and losing cgroup2
   impersonates failing root-disk I/O closely enough that it was
   misdiagnosed as exactly that.
2. A reboot is not confirmed until the host is observed DOWN; "never
   rebooted" and "rebooted fast" are indistinguishable otherwise.
3. Assert the effective value, not the presence of a substring. Grep
   proves presence; only evaluation proves effect.
4. Ask the server who its clients are -- documented dependent lists rot.
   Plus the corollary that an idle hard NFS mount blocks and resumes, so
   quiescing means stopping consumers, not always unmounting.
5. The scoped-looking command can be the dangerous one; setting a ZFS
   cachefile on one pool of three would have stopped the other two from
   importing at boot.
6. Long uptime hides breakage, and a forced look is worth more than it
   appears -- one migration surfaced an 82-day-dead pvestatd, a 126-day
   hung vzdump, a VM in prelaunch for four months, and an undocumented
   cluster, none of them caused by the work.

Carries a superseded-claims table so corrections are dated rather than
silently edited, same discipline as the quantization playbook. The ESH
runbook now links here so the general rules are reachable from the
specific story and vice versa.
2026-08-18 07:14:48 -07:00
vh 7d27ec9d41 feat(esh-pve): upgrade to 8.4.20 and reboot onto 6.8.12-42
171 packages, pve-manager 8.4.11 -> 8.4.20, kernel 6.8.12-16 -> 6.8.12-42,
corosync 3.1.9 -> 3.1.10-pve2. dpkg clean, no unapplied conffiles, no
failed units, cluster quorate with both nodes visible after the reboot.

Adds a reusable pve-node-upgrade playbook (upgrade only -- reboot stays a
separate deliberate step, since it has cluster and NFS consequences the
playbook cannot see). It guards on quorum and free space, snapshots
/etc/pve and friends first, uses --force-confdef/--force-confold, and
surfaces any .dpkg-dist files that policy left unapplied so they are not
silently ignored.

The reboot needed a forced guest stop, operator-authorised after the risk
was surfaced. Two obstacles, only one of them ours:

- A vzdump had been hung since 14 April -- 126 days, stalled at 0% of
  256 GiB -- holding lock: backup on VM 102, which had therefore been
  sitting in QEMU prelaunch that entire time. Killed by explicit PID; 102
  is now cleanly stopped rather than half-alive.

- esh-vm-db would not shut down: its guest agent had died and ACPI went
  unanswered. Most likely ours -- it hard-mounts /mnt/backup from CT 103,
  which we deliberately left mounted through the NAS reboots.

PostgreSQL survived the hard stop. It had checkpointed five minutes
prior, so recovery replayed 56 bytes of WAL in 0.02s and came up ready;
all four databases present and queryable. That was lucky timing as much
as anything -- a hard stop mid-checkpoint on a busy database would not
read the same way.

The reboot also repaired esh-vm-db, which had silently lost sshd, mongod
and its guest agent. All three are back.
2026-08-18 07:11:06 -07:00