esh-ml1 is outside vzdump, so augaman's face gallery reaches backup only
through restic. New playbooks/esh-ml1-restic.yaml installs restic 0.14.0 (the
same Debian package as the other ESH hosts) and resticprofile 0.33.1 (pinned,
sha256-checked). It uploads configs/restic/esh-ml1/ and schedules a daily
0100 PT backup plus a Sunday 0500 PT check to rest-server-ana. The CT runs UTC,
so both schedules name the zone explicitly.
pre-backup.sh is fail-closed: it runs augaman's own backup CLI, and any failure,
including a stopped container, aborts the run. Tested with a stub docker that
exits 1: the run returned 1, and neither the snapshot count nor last-success
moved. The restore was verified at identity level against augaman-dev's
public-domain canary (snapshot fd3061a1: the restored copy's digest over
identities and samples matches the live gallery). That meets the operator gate
for real enrollments.
The repository URL is read through repository-file rather than restic.env.
resticprofile schedule copies env-file values into world-readable systemd
units, which publishes the rest-server password on the env-file hosts
(observed on esh-docker-vm). This is recorded in the backups runbook under
Known gaps, and the playbook verifies no generated unit contains the URL.
esh-ml1 is added to the freshness check's expected ana-side repos and to the
runbook tables.
augaman moves to v0.1.2 (dependency layer keyed on the lock without the
project; per-crop embedding). pytest -m gpu tests/vision passes 3/3 on the
card, and the canary survived the container recreate.
Mirror pfi/augaman deploy/compose.yaml as stacks/augaman, with an .env.example and
a README carrying the biometric backup gate. The image is built on esh-ml1 from a
git archive of the release tag, because the box holds no gitea credentials.
Serving on CUDA and visible in nvidia-smi. The gallery backup is not wired yet
(esh-ml1 has no restic), so only public-domain fixtures may be enrolled.
The on-box gpu test fails its batch-vs-single tolerance 3/3; reported to
augaman-dev, who owns the contract.
For ha-dev (operator-approved 2026-09-26). CT 111 on esh-pve at 10.0.90.20:
Matter/Thread IPv6 (Echo ULA + RA route-information) is link-only, so the
server sits on esh-iot and HA reaches it over routed IPv4 ws :5580.
- playbooks/esh-matter-lxc.yaml: kernel RA (accept_ra=1,
rt_info_max_plen=64), forwarding off, Docker ip-forward/iptables off;
nftables admits 5580 from HA 10.0.50.46 only and SSH from mgmt ranges;
the CT is added to esh-pve's vzdump job (fabric credentials).
- stacks/matter-server: ghcr.io/matter-js/matterjs-server:1.4.0 (digest),
host networking, /data on the CT.
- Acceptance: fdad:: SLAAC, ping6 thermostat, 2 Thread RIO routes learned, ws
server_info from inside the HA container; 5580 refused from 10.0.50.45,
nh3-dev and a temporary VLAN 90 netns vantage.
- qwen3-embedding and reranker: second deployment on nh3-ml1 (config);
reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3: second DB deployment via /model/new.
- router_settings.enable_weighted_failover: true. Only the three
multi-deployment groups are affected.
- Measured by stopping nh3-ml1 TEI: without failover 7/40 embeds 500'd;
with it rerank 80/80, embed 38/40 at onset and 60/60 over a 34 s outage;
nh3 rejoins rotation after restart. Split 12/28 embed, 22/18 rerank.
For brokkr's dataset foundry (operator-approved 2026-09-26, relayed).
- stacks/lfm-vl-seat: llama.cpp server-cuda b11176 (digest-pinned), Q5_K_M +
mmproj Q8_0, :8030; gateway alias lfm25-vl-3b (LiteLLM restarted, 36 s).
Positive control exact; null control shows it describes a missing image.
- stacks/vibevoice-asr-seat: audio.cpp v0.8.2-audio8-perf-hotfix (the GGUF's
own runtime, not vibevoice.cpp) on cuda 12.8 runtime + libgomp + libsoxr,
sha256-pinned; :8031 direct. LibriSpeech WER 3/69, RTF 0.07-0.14; ~31 s
cold first request.
Same model revision (df3ce67, blob sha matches fv-ml1), vLLM v0.24.0 and flags;
0.33 of the Ada (~5.4 GB, fv-ml1's absolute budget). Healthy, KV 79,808 tokens.
Parity (teacher-forced true code, 40 FIM prompts, 2,215 tokens, cache-salted):
each host is bit-exact with itself; cross-host |dlogprob| median 0.049, top-1
agreement 0.966 (Blackwell vs Ada + fp8 KV); against ground truth no quality
difference (mean logprob diff +0.008 +/- 0.019 SE). Speed on-box: ~5x slower
(64-tok FIM p50 ~1.0 s vs ~0.2 s; 63 vs 338 tok/s). Gateway coder-fast left on
fv-ml1 pending Prime's call.
- AMT re-IP'd over WS-Man to static 10.100.250.61/24 (gw/DNS .1): AMT keeps
its old DHCP lease across a VLAN move, so it was unreachable until changed
(reached via a temporary on-link /32 on vmbr0 + ssh tunnel, since removed).
- KVM redirection enabled, redirection listener on, IPS_OptInService
OptInRequired=0; all read back. Password vaulted as nh3-pve/amt-admin.
- scripts/amt-wsman.py: stdlib WS-Man get/put/invoke client (digest auth,
AMT 16 legacy-renegotiation TLS), password from $AMT_PW.
- PFI-UDMSE port 6 override: native nh3-mgmt, tagged VLANs blocked (was
forward all / native default). Reservation nh3-pve-amt -> 10.100.250.61.
- nh3-pve: arp_ignore=8 / arp_announce=2 on enp88s0 (now on vmbr0's untagged
L2) so the host never answers ARP for 10.100.250.60 with the AMT port's MAC.
- DNS nh3-pve-amt.nh3.internal -> 10.100.250.61.
- Homepage: NH3-PVE-AMT card under Infra - NH3 (no siteMonitor/ping: AMT drops
ICMP and its legacy-renegotiation TLS fails Homepage's fetch).
- AMT keeps its old 10.100.0.151 lease until rebind/expiry (~1920-2224 PT
2026-09-26); it does not re-DHCP on a VLAN change or link drop (measured).
AMT had no IP because Linux had enp88s0 admin-down (it left vmbr0 on 09-25 and
had no auto stanza); igc powers off the I226-LM PHY when down, so AMT had no
link. With the port up (no IP, unbridged) AMT took a lease within minutes.
- nh3-pve: `auto enp88s0` (manual, unbridged) and sysctl.d disable_ipv6 on it;
backup /root/interfaces.bak-20260925-amt; runtime already matched, no reload.
- UDM: reservation nh3-pve-amt -> 10.100.0.151 (untagged nh3-default; the
cable is on an nh3-sw1 trunk, not the UDM).
- DNS nh3-pve-amt.nh3.internal. AMT 16.1.25 answers TLS :16993 and :664.
nh3-ml1's first Temperature alert (2026-09-25 2105, 88.8 C) was nh3-pve's CPU
package during the nightly vzdump; the GPU sat at 47 C. hwmon is not namespaced,
so an LXC's agent reports its host's coretemp sensors under the LXC's name.
- hosts/{nh3,esh}-ml1.yaml: SENSORS=-coretemp_*,acpitz (blacklist); GPU and
NVMe temperatures verified still reported.
- Hub: Temperature >95 C / 5 m on nh3-pve and esh-pve for the CPUs (i9-13900H
TjMax 100 C; nh3-pve 2-hour averages reach 88 C on busy days).
- nh3-pve README: runs warmer than esh-pve; workload confounds it, check
airflow on the next visit.
NH3 site visit done: Secure Boot off, iGPU restored as boot VGA, AMT port cabled.
- nh3-pve: NVIDIA 580.178.04 (DKMS, open modules) via pve-nvidia-host.yaml.
- nh3-ml1 = CT 109 @ 10.100.50.80 via gpu-lxc.yaml; embed-rerank (TEI 1.9.4)
deployed with HOST_NAME/HOST_IP labels.
- Parity vs esh-ml1 (1,126 texts, 2 runs/host, controls): embed cosine min
0.999993 = own noise floor; overlap@10 1.000 vs MRL-256 positive control
0.684; rerank top-1 1.00, max diff 0.0014 vs floor 0.0020. On-box speed
identical within rep spread.
- gpu-lxc.yaml: first step upgrades lxc-pve to >= 6.0.0-2 (Proxmox fix#7006).
With 6.0.0-1 every docker run in a nesting CT failed on runc 1.5's sysctl
reopen; applied on nh3-pve (one package).
- pve-nvidia-host.yaml: document that the headers meta drags in the newest
kernel (nh3-pve went 6.8.12-11 -> -43 at the next reboot).
- Monitoring: Beszel NVIDIA agent + 5 alerts, Kuma #29/#30, Homepage
nh3-ml1-docker, Dozzle agent (hub 8 clients). DNS nh3-ml1.nh3.internal.
- nh3-pve README: SB/IGFX/driver/kernel state, btmtk oops on -4x kernels,
AMT cabled but unreachable on the network.
Gateway routing to nh3-ml1 is not changed.
- esh-pve-nvidia-host -> pve-nvidia-host: headers/dkms/build-essential step,
nouveau blacklist + guarded unload (refuses if nouveau bound a device)
- esh-ml1-lxc -> gpu-lxc: host vars have no defaults (elway aborts on undefined),
rootfs storage/startup order parameterized, CT kept out of all-guests vzdump jobs
- embed-rerank: Homepage labels take HOST_NAME/HOST_IP, defaults = esh-ml1
nh3-pve and esh-pve are the same Minisforum MS-01 (BIOS AHWSA.1.17). With a
card in the x16 slot its root port takes bus 01 and every NIC moves down a
bus (measured on esh-pve), so predictable names change (enp2s0f0np0 ->
enp3s0f0np0 etc.) and vmbr0 would boot with no uplink. systemd .link files
now pin all NICs by MAC, baked into every initramfs and synced to the ESP;
udev confirms the files apply. The AMT-capable I226-LM (enp88s0) leaves
vmbr0's bridge-ports in the file (next boot), so cabling it for AMT cannot
loop the STP-less bridge.
Also: documented the NanoKVM (https://10.100.250.171) as nh3-pve's console
OOB and that AMT is not wired; nh3-dev's Beszel agent no longer binds NAS
shares (it died on the last NH3 cold start); post-boot checklist in
persistent-memory.
- Beszel: NVIDIA agent (stacks/beszel hosts/esh-ml1.yaml), hub system
registered with Status/Disk/CPU/Memory/Temperature alerts; GPU samples
verified (RTX 2000E Ada util, VRAM, power, temp).
- Uptime Kuma: health monitors for the TEI embed (:8001) and rerank (:8013)
services — the sole backends behind the gateway, so the one exception to
"seats are out of Kuma's lane". Reward seat excluded (no consumer).
- Homepage: dockerd on tcp/2375 bound to 10.0.50.80 (playbook step);
esh-ml1-docker added to docker.yaml.
- Dozzle: agent v10.4.1 on esh-ml1. The hub's DOZZLE_REMOTE_AGENT still
named ana-ml2's 10.250.50.54 and irv-ml1's retired 10.100.79.3; repointed
to 10.251.50.54 / 10.6.110.50 (fv-ml1 and irv-ml1 logs were missing).
- Documented nh3-dev's Beszel agent failing on NH3 cold start (bind of an
automounted NAS share); revived by hand, fix still open.
- Audit: Skywork-Reward-V2-Llama-3.1-8B is still #1 of 188 on AllenAI's
RewardBench 2 per-sample results; no Skywork V3; the -40M sibling is
vendor-marked experimental. Our AWQ W4A16 quant: 0.847 vs published bf16
0.860 on a 150-prompt sample (within +/-2.9 pt SE), 96.2% pairwise
agreement. Double BOS from vLLM on pre-templated text costs a further
~2.7 pts; callers must send add_special_tokens=false.
- No working consumer: 0 requests since 2026-09-13; Worldtree Domari points
at a dead IP with a non-vLLM schema (reported to worldtree-dev).
- Move: sha256-identical model copy; vLLM v0.24.0 on esh-ml1 :8003 at 0.55
util (KV 1.30x of a 16k request). Parity vs fv-ml1: 149/150 verdicts,
99.8% pairwise signs, raw |delta| median 0.049.
- Gateway /scalar-judge passthrough -> 10.0.50.80:8003; fv-ml1 vllm-reward
removed (~10.2 GB freed on GPU 1). stacks/vllm now holds only vllm-coder.
Prime, 2026-09-25: TEI serves embedding + reranking for esh-ml1 and the fleet
from now on; fv-ml1 retires both once esh-ml1 is up.
- stacks/embed-rerank: vLLM -> TEI 1.9.4 (89- Ada build), same ports
8001/8013, fail-closed truncation (--auto-truncate false; embed
--max-batch-tokens 32768).
- litellm: qwen3-embedding -> esh-ml1 only (hosted_vllm/, unchanged address);
reranker -> huggingface/ provider at :8013 (hosted_vllm/ 422s on TEI's
`texts` body). DB alias reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3 patched to the same target.
- Verified via the gateway against the retiring fv-ml1 seats: embed cosine
median 0.999927 (n=203); rerank top-1/top-3 29/30.
- stacks/vllm: vllm-embed and vllm-rerank-a3 removed (containers retired on
fv-ml1, GPU 1 freed ~6.1 GB); reward + coder unchanged.
- Bake-off record moved to docs/pfi/embed-rerank-tei-vs-vllm-bakeoff.md;
CLAUDE.md gains the TEI convention.
esh-pve: NVIDIA 580.178.04 (open modules, DKMS) installed on the host from
NVIDIA's .run and loaded live, no reboot. nvidia-persistenced unit creates the
device nodes before pve-guests; the T400's vfio-pci ids and `blacklist nvidia`
retired. playbooks/esh-pve-nvidia-host.yaml.
esh-ml1: CT 110, unprivileged Debian 12, 10.0.50.80, GPU nodes via devN,
NVIDIA userspace from the same .run (--no-kernel-modules), docker-ce +
nvidia-container-toolkit (no-cgroups). playbooks/esh-ml1-lxc.yaml. Not in the
vzdump job on purpose. DNS esh-ml1.esh.internal.
stacks/embed-rerank: Qwen3-Embedding-0.6B :8001 + bge-reranker-v2-m3 :8013 on
the same vLLM v0.24.0 digest and flags as fv-ml1. Measured parity: embed
cosine FV-vs-ESH median 0.999908 (min 0.999772), inside both self-noise
floors; rerank max |delta| 0.000145 vs floor 0.000181, identical ranking.
litellm: qwen3-embedding and reranker gain an esh-ml1 deployment at order 2
behind fv-ml1 (order 1). Order fallback proven with throwaway groups:
refused primary +0.15 s, host-down primary ~18.7 s per call, dead-only 500.
Also: repaired the DB-only alias reranker-a3-bge-v2-m3, dead since the
fv-ml1 relocation (still named 10.250.50.54); documented the third
unkillable homepage wedge on esh-docker-vm.
After the 2026-09-24 NH3 outage pfi-gx10 stayed off. It has no BMC, and the
ASUS firmware defaults to staying off after AC loss. With Prime's approval,
bytes 3-4 of the UEFI Setup variable were changed from 0x1d,0x00 to
0x1c,0x01, a community recipe that matches factory power-on units. The
readback shows exactly those two bytes changed. The original 85-byte raw
variable (attr header included) is committed here and also kept on the box.
The README records that an OS shutdown is not a test of this setting. It
stays off by design, and two such "tests" were invalid. The only valid test
is pulling and restoring AC, which Prime will do on 2026-09-25. It also
records the revert procedure.
After the 2026-09-24 NH3 power outage every NFS line from nh3-nas failed at
boot: nh3-docker's /mnt/compose and /mnt/backup, and nh3-dev's /mnt/backup.
The NAS is the slowest box to serve NFS, and the plain fstab mounts stayed
down until remounted by hand. nh3-dev's /mnt/smithy already used
x-systemd.automount, and the same boot shows it self-healing on its next
access. playbooks/nh3-nfs-automount.yaml brings the other lines to that
shape (_netdev,nofail,x-systemd.automount,x-systemd.mount-timeout=30).
Hard-mount semantics are unchanged; only WHEN the mount happens moves.
Applied and read back on nh3-docker and nh3-dev: every nh3-nas line carries
automount, each automount unit is active, and each share is NFS-mounted after
access. A second run on nh3-docker is a no-op. The fstab check judges only
errors the rewrite ADDS, because nh3-dev's installer cdrom line has a
pre-existing verify error. The first run caught that and aborted without
writing.
servers/nh3-pve/README.md now lists each guest's expected state after a
power loss: nh3-laser is on-demand and stays off (Prime), pbs-nh3 now has
onboot=1 (it had none and stayed down), and pfi-gx10 is bare metal that
does not auto-power-on.
A deliberate `systemctl --user restart hermes-gateway` paged infra-ops as a
FAILED unit (msg 3716) while the unit was already back up. Cause is a Hermes
v0.21.1 race: the planned-stop marker watcher runs the shutdown handler before
systemd's SIGTERM, consumes the marker, and the SIGTERM re-runs the handler,
which then classifies the stop as unexpected and exits 1.
Corrects the README claim that OnFailure never fires on a deliberate restart:
that holds only when the main process exits with a success status. Measured on a
throwaway unit (3/3 paged without SuccessExitStatus, 0/3 with it, and crash
restarts are unaffected), and a survey of every stop on nh3-dev since 09-15
found hermes-gateway to be the only unit that does this.
The host-side fix is drop-in hermes-gateway.service.d/
20-planned-stop-exit1-is-clean.conf (SuccessExitStatus=1). No alarm coverage
is lost: Restart=always ignores the classification, and StartLimitIntervalSec=0
means the unit can never reach `failed` from a start failure.
TAILSCALE IPv6. `tailscale status` had been reporting, continuously:
2 add route failures; first was: permission denied
adding address fd7a:115c:a1e0::6/128 from tunnel interface: permission denied
with tailscale0 carrying only 100.64.0.6/32 while headscale had assigned it
an IPv6 address it could not use.
Not a capability problem -- tailscaled runs as root with the full bounding
set. /etc/sysctl.conf:59 sets net.ipv6.conf.default.disable_ipv6=1, and
`default` is inherited by NEWLY CREATED interfaces; tailscale0 is created at
daemon start, inherits it, and the kernel returns EPERM for every attempt.
Fixed with a scoped systemd drop-in rather than flipping the global default.
That line carries no comment, but IPv6-off-by-default on a host with ~26
docker bridges reads as deliberate, and changing it would hand IPv6 to every
future bridge as a side effect of fixing Tailscale.
⚠ It must be ExecStartPost, not /etc/sysctl.d. A sysctl.d entry for a
per-interface key is applied at boot, BEFORE tailscale0 exists, and is
silently ignored -- the setting would look present and do nothing.
Also learned: setting the sysctl on the LIVE interface is not enough.
tailscaled only attempts the address at startup or on a netmap change, so
the verify failed for 60s until the daemon was restarted. Restart is part
of the operation, not an afterthought.
Verified: fd7a:115c:a1e0::6/128 present on tailscale0, health clean, mesh
and services (arbo, ytvc) up.
README. It documented the pre-headscale topology as current -- "Reachable
IP: 10.100.79.3 (WireGuard tunnel endpoint)", "No direct LAN access", and a
refresh caveat telling you to bring WG up. That sends anyone triaging this
host to the wrong layer, which is the exact tax the file exists to prevent.
Now: mesh primary at 100.64.0.6, LAN 10.6.110.50, and wg0 documented as
STILL UP with a live peer -- tailscale uses that address as its direct
endpoint, so it is load-bearing, not vestigial.
Recorded with it, because these cost hours tonight and will cost them again:
- Irvine is a TENANCY behind a Fortinet PFI does not control. Its TLS
inspection breaks Tailscale's relay and control channels (41 cert
warnings/week, 4 control-plane episodes in 14 days). Usually invisible
because direct peer paths carry the data. No fix on our side.
- Diagnose reachability with `tailscale ping`, NOT the status output:
headscale said "online" and status said "active, 19.7 GB" while nothing
on the host answered. Both are last-known state; only a round trip is
liveness.
- The ~26 docker bridges make tailscaled report captive portals.
Two stale claims corrected: the hostname rename it called "pending" is done,
and `ollama` is listed as running on :11434 when it is gone -- verified, no
unit file, nothing listening, no process. It is banned fleet-wide.
The Booth is now one of the most-used fleet tools -- 17 agent handles post to
it daily -- and it is taking an information-architecture rework plus a
cross-agent SVOS design retrofit from design-dev. That work wants its own
ROADMAP, contracts and blast radius, not the fleet-infrastructure repo's.
All 29 commits moved with it via `git subtree split`; the history carries real
lessons (two shipped-dead controls, the verbatim-injection traps) that a
squashed import would have thrown away.
Live service repointed and verified: the user unit and the ~/.local/bin/booth
symlink now resolve into ~/development/booth, healthz answers, all 24 booths
intact. services/booth/ keeps a pointer README, same shape as the
chatterbox-fast and tts-stack extractions.
Operator confirmed 2026-09-19 that fv-ml1 and the R420 running OPNsense are the
only loads on a dedicated 20 A circuit.
The governing number is 1920 W, not 2400: a GPU inference host running for hours
is a continuous load, so NEC's 80% rule applies. Worst case lands at ~1625 W
with the current caps -- about 85% of budget.
Measured via the BMC rather than assumed: 390 W instantaneous, 461 W max over a
2423 s sample, with GPUs at idle, giving a ~313 W non-GPU baseline.
Compare the GPU caps against the 300 W stock TGP, NOT the 325 W firmware
ceiling. The operator corrected this: 275 W across four cards saves 100 W, not
the 200 W you get by measuring against a number nobody would ever run at. Stock
300 W would put the circuit near 90%, which is not illegal but leaves nothing
for a heavier R420, PSU efficiency, or a warm day. Keep the caps.
The coupling matters more than the trip. OPNsense IS the Fountain Valley edge
and shares the breaker with the thing most likely to trip it, so an overload
takes the router with it and removes the remote path needed to diagnose or
power-cycle anything. fv-ml1's four PSUs do not help -- PSU redundancy protects
against a PSU dying, not against the circuit going away.
Three things are explicitly NOT measured and the file says so: fv-ml1 under real
4-GPU load, whether the BMC reports AC input or DC output, and the R420's actual
draw. Treat 1625 W as a floor.
Also corrects the hardware section, which claimed 2x GPUs. nvidia-smi reports
four.
Live on vllm-voices (fv-ml1 GPU0 :8027) beside voices-base, lv-yarros and lv-bronte.
Healthy 190 s after recreate, four models served, GPU0 96,092 -> 96,090 MiB. The adapter
was verified byte-identical to checkpoint-850 by sha256 across both transfer hops, and the
seat was verified by generating, not by reading its config: base emits 170 words of <think>
planning and never writes the passage, lv-hemingway writes the scene.
Gate design was pre-registered before any generation existed (0bb4938). Three arms, 60
held-out beats, 4 seeds, 240 generations per arm.
A. VOICE PASS 6.4x +0.413 delta_cb, pairwise floor 0.064 -- and it clears the OLD
all-arms floor (0.113) too, so this verdict does not lean on the
rule change. Closes 73.8% of the span between the unadapted
carrier and held-out Hemingway itself; lv-bronte closed 48%.
B. NOT COPIED see below
C. NO DAMAGE PASS ran-on +0.08, on-beat -0.14, both inside a 0.217 floor
AXIS B: THE NEGATIVE CONTROL WAS THE WRONG ONE, AND FIXING IT MADE THE RESULT WORSE, NOT
BETTER. memorization_check.py uses the base-unadapted arm as its control. Base writes
18,035 words of summary against the adapted arms' 27,413 of pastiche, and text that does
not imitate a register cannot collide with its n-grams -- so base's 0.00 measures "different
register", not "did not memorise". The comfortable reading was that Hemingway's plain
high-frequency prose makes collisions inevitable for any arm that learns it. That is
refutable, so it was tested: held-out Hemingway, the author himself, scored against the
train split at the generations' own median length.
HELD-OUT HEMINGWAY (never trained) 370 chunks 0.01 hit-rate mean-longest 0.1 max 10
base-unadapted 240 gens 0.00 0.0 0
ckpt850 (shipped) 240 gens 0.07 0.6 9
positive control (train vs train) 160
The hypothesis is false: the adapter reproduces train n-grams ~7x more often than the
author reproduces himself. That is real and is on the record. All 19 matched runs were then
READ rather than counted -- every one is stock dialogue ("came over and sat down at the
table", "how do you feel i feel very well"), capped at 9 words, with no plot, no imagery and
no proper noun; the one name-shaped hit is the RENAMED invented name. Nine is shorter than
the 10-word run unseen Hemingway shares with the train split by coincidence. Elevated rate,
zero protectable content. Hemingway is in copyright; lv-yarros is the in-line precedent,
also in copyright, shipped at 0.10 against a 0.07 control. Unload is 0.003 s.
The durable lesson is about the instrument: a negative control that differs from the
candidate in a way correlated with the metric is not a control. memorization_selfsim.py and
memorization_dump_matches.py are committed so the claim can be re-derived rather than taken
on faith.
SHIPPED ckpt850, NOT the loss minimum at step 1750. The two are indistinguishable on voice
-- 0.072 apart against a 0.113 pairwise floor -- so the pre-registered tiebreak fell to the
axes that resolve, and 850 wins all of them: 2.3x tighter seed spread (0.050 vs 0.113),
lower memorisation, less ran-on, half an epoch less overfit. ckpt1750's spread is one seed
(0.491, 0.449, 0.468, then 0.562), the same lone-outlier shape that lost ckpt925 the
lv-bronte tiebreak. The two-epoch recipe is now 0 for 2 and should stop being carried
forward; only the epoch-3 collapse is robust at 17.4x jitter.
servers/fv-ml1/ssh-target was a bare IP, so deploy-stack.sh connected as lkraven, could not
write the infra-ops-owned /opt/docker/compose, and could not escalate either because
lkraven's sudo on fv-ml1 wants a password. Now infra-ops@10.251.50.54; --validate-only stays
clean and the deploy works through the repo's own tool rather than around it. Other hosts
may carry the same gap -- a read-only refresh works as either user, so it only surfaces on a
deploy.
Placed on GPU 3 first because it was the empty card. That was the wrong read:
the seat is ~800 MiB, under 1% of a 96 GB card, so the question was never "where
does it fit" but "whose headroom is cheapest to spend".
vLLM sizes its KV cache as a fraction of TOTAL VRAM, not free VRAM. A resident
tenant on an otherwise-clean card therefore does not cost its own megabytes — it
costs the profiling margin of whatever full-size seat lands there later, and
flash-next needs 93 GiB of 96. A 96 GB card at 2 MiB can still take that; the
same card at 922 MiB is one where the next big seat needs its utilization
hand-trimmed, which this repo's flash-next history shows is both thin and silent
when it goes wrong.
Committed utilization per card is the number that governs, not free bytes:
GPU 0 0.40 + 0.48 = 0.88 ~13 GB spare <- moved here
GPU 1 0.52+0.24+0.10+0.055+0.03+0.03 = 0.975 ~4.3 GB
GPU 2 0.96 ~1.8 GB
GPU 3 - kept empty as reserve
GPU 3 is back to 2 MiB / 97,247 MiB free and is now documented as a deliberate
reserve rather than a spare.
Post-move n=5 on the same clip: 0.68 / 0.54 / 0.54 / 0.52 / 0.53 s, median 0.54 s
against 0.50 s on GPU 3. The spreads overlap at this sample size and no difference
is claimed; the GPU 3 figure was taken on an idle card and is now noted as a best
case, since the seat shares GPU 0 with the hot serving path. Silence control and
the gateway round-trip both re-verified after the move.
Also records both Parakeet endpoints (FV v3 on Blackwell, IRV v2 on a 3090) and
the four confounds that make them not an A/B pair, sent to tts-dev for the bench.
Retargets the existing sherpa-onnx stack from irv-ml1 to fv-ml1's utility card
and puts it behind the gateway. GPU 3 was the only card with room: 0/1/2 carry
the vLLM seats at 84-95.5 GB of 96.
Changes:
- compose: pin GPU via `device_ids: ["3"]` (the dead on-host stub used
`count: all`, which would have handed a 0.6B ASR seat all four cards);
join traefik-net; port 8300; homepage href to the live FV address.
- .env.example: default to the v3 int8 model (25 European languages, 464 MiB)
rather than English-only v2; models to /tank/parakeet/models.
- app.py: warm the recognizer at startup before uvicorn accepts traffic.
The warmup is not an optimisation. ONNX Runtime's CUDA EP compiles and autotunes
lazily on the FIRST DECODE, and on sm_120 that measured 45.7s cold (reproduced at
45.1s on a second container) against ~0.50s warm. A 45s first request is
indistinguishable from a hang and LiteLLM's default timeout abandons it long
before it returns. Decoding 1s of silence at load moves the cost inside the
healthcheck's 300s start_period; first real request after restart is now 0.65s.
Verification, because "provider=cuda" in the log is only an echo of the env var:
ORT falls back to CPU silently and still returns correct text, so the service
being up and the transcript being right establishes nothing. The discriminator is
a process on GPU 3 (922 MiB), confirmed. Controls both directions — a known TTS
sentence transcribes near-exactly (positive), 3s of digital silence returns
empty (null). Warm throughput 0.50s median on an 8.52s clip, n=5, spread
0.47-0.65s, single-stream, one clip: a smoke measurement with its harness
stated, not a benchmark.
Gateway aliases `ext-stt` (engine-neutral, mirrors ext-tts) and `whisper-1`
(OpenAI-compatible drop-in) registered via POST /model/new, i.e. LiteLLM's
Postgres store where the ext-tts family already lives — no gateway restart, and
config.yaml is consequently not a complete picture of what the gateway serves.
Both verified end to end.
The aliases use a raw IP deliberately: ana-docker resolves no .internal names at
all (resolv.conf points at 1.1.1.1), and LiteLLM only reaches irv-ml1 through a
hand-pinned extra_hosts entry. A second hosts entry would mean recreating the
container and bouncing the gateway for every consumer.
Also records the svos_miranda plugin validation pass and its structural findings,
and notes that the irv-ml1 parakeet is still running — there are two now, and
retiring the old one is the operator's call.
nh3-dev sits on the NH3 LAN and reaches every site through its own default
gateway; RouteAll was already false, so it never used the tunnel for routing.
Membership bought a 100.64.0.4 address nothing referenced -- grep across the
repo and ~/development found only docs and memory hits.
It also cost something concrete. A host running Tailscale installs
-A ts-input -s 100.64.0.0/10 ! -i tailscale0 -j DROP, and because the fleet's
subnet routers preserve source rather than masquerading RFC1918, a mesh client's
packet reached nh3-dev's ens18 still sourced 100.64.x and was dropped silently.
That is why nh3-dev.nh3.internal failed from the mesh while every NH3 host that
does not run Tailscale worked, and it needed a -d 10.100.10.50/32 -j MASQUERADE
exception on nh3-scale to paper over. Retiring the membership removed the
anti-spoof rule, so the exception went with it -- mesh-exit-masq.sh is back to
the two rules it had before yesterday.
Verified after: nh3-dev reachable at 10.100.10.50 from ESH, Anaheim, FV, Irvine
and NH3, and reaching all four sites plus the internet itself. fv-ml1
unaffected.
The mesh is now six nodes and every one has a job: three site routers,
vb-gateway, irv-ml1 (Irvine's own router, no separate scale node), and the
operator's MacBook Air. Nothing is enrolled just in case.
Operator's design, and a better one. Once the FV SNAT rules landed, fv-ml1's
mesh membership was redundant for routing and its only remaining value was as a
second way in. Keeping it enrolled bought a standing second door; joining on
demand buys the same recovery path without one.
normal tailscaled stopped + disabled; fleet reached via the gateway SNAT
fault nh3-dev / nh3-docker unreachable while the WAN is up
action start tailscaled + tailscale up -> reachable at its 100.64.x address
fv-ml1 is now off the mesh and its node record deleted. Verified it still
reaches NH3, ESH, Anaheim, Irvine and the internet on the SNAT path alone, then
the break-glass fired on cue (counted 1..4, joined at 5 as 100.64.0.10),
answered ping and ssh from nh3-dev, and was closed again cleanly.
No auto-leave, deliberately: once open the door stays open until a human runs
systemctl disable --now tailscaled. A watchdog that re-closes on recovery flaps,
and a flapping recovery path is down exactly when someone finally looks. It also
skips entirely when already on the mesh, which is what makes it idempotent after
firing.
The question exposed a hole worth more than the redesign. The stored rejoin key
was one of the 2026-09-12 FV cutover keys, expiring 2026-09-19 -- a break-glass
credential that dies in four days and fails silently at the only moment it
matters. Replaced with a dedicated 1-year reusable key (headscale ID 8, expires
2027-09-15), vaulted as fv-ml1/headscale-breakglass-key, root:600 on the host.
That also closes the standing self-join risk rather than trading it: the two
stale reusable keys (IDs 5, 6) are expired, so the mesh now has exactly one live
reusable key -- purpose-built, on a host we control -- instead of two orphans
nobody owned.
Rejoin uses --accept-routes=false and the reason is in the script: on 2026-09-14
tailscale up --accept-routes on this box accepted its OWN subnet from the
gateway and black-holed it. That happened with a human watching; here it runs
unattended, during an incident, on a box already in trouble.
FV could not reach any site but Anaheim. The cause was a single outbound-NAT
rule on the FV gateway, added 2026-09-13 and scoped to Anaheim only --
docs/runbooks/fv-to-ana-nat.md says so in as many words: "Other remote sites
remain outside this fix's scope." Three mirrors added, same interface and
source, only the destination differing: 10.100.0.0/16, 10.0.0.0/16 and
10.6.110.0/24.
After: fv-ml1 reaches NH3, ESH, Anaheim, Irvine, the mesh and the internet.
Regression sweep clean across nh3-dev, nh3-docker and esh-docker-vm.
The runbook now records what the failure looks like, because it presents as a
routing or Tailscale fault and is neither. fv-ml1 reached mesh addresses
perfectly and LAN addresses not at all; the FV firewall log showed the outbound
passing with src=10.251.50.54 and no reply returning; temporary counting rules
proved nh3-scale received 5 packets and sent 4 replies; both peers' AllowedIPs
were correct. The discriminator that settles it is that every other site pair
works -- nh3-docker to esh/ana/FV and esh-docker-vm to FV all succeed -- so a
general subnet-to-subnet limitation is ruled out and only outbound SNAT is
left.
Also reverts the remote-site MASQUERADE rules added to nh3-scale earlier on the
asymmetric-return theory. They fired but were not the fix, so they are removed
rather than left to accumulate as NAT that achieves nothing.
Applied via source_nat/add_rule + apply with a pre-change config backup taken
first. Source scope is still fv-ml1's /32, so a second FV host will hit this
again -- flagged in the runbook.
WATCHDOG (done, proven). fv-mesh-watchdog probes two independent anchors every
minute and, after 5 consecutive failures, puts Tailscale back to known-good:
accept-routes off, re-up against headscale with a stored key. It touches
nothing else — a watchdog with a wide remit is a second way to lose the box.
Two anchors that cannot share a failure mode: a plain-internet one and a
mesh-only one. If BOTH fail the site uplink is down, Tailscale cannot fix that,
and it deliberately does nothing — thrashing tailscaled during an ISP outage
turns a wait into an incident. Disable file at /etc/fv-watchdog.disable for
planned work.
Proven by positive control, not assumed: counter incremented 1..4 without
acting, fired the restore at 5 (tailscale up ran, tailscaled restarted), and
reset to 0 once the real anchor returned. fv-ml1 stayed reachable throughout.
This exists because a on fv-ml1 black-holed it
from its own LAN earlier the same day: it accepted 10.251.0.0/16 from the
gateway — its OWN subnet — and routed the local network through the tunnel.
FV CROSS-SITE ROUTING (partial). Two changes landed, the path is still broken:
1. acceptSubnetRoutes 0 -> 1 on the FV gateway's tailscale plugin, via
settings/set + service/reconfigure (the documented apply, not a reboot).
The GATEWAY now has 10.0/16, 10.100/16 and 10.250/16 in its routing table
and reaches NH3 and ESH itself. It could not before.
2. Remote-site MASQUERADE rules on nh3-scale. The existing jump matched only
-s 100.64.0.0/10, so traffic from another site's LAN never entered
MESH-EXIT and kept its original source; an NH3 host then replied via its
own LAN router instead of back through nh3-scale, making the path
asymmetric. The rule is confirmed firing (counter increments on FV
traffic) but does not complete the path.
Still failing: fv-ml1 -> NH3/ESH LAN addresses. Mesh addresses work perfectly
from fv-ml1 (100.64.0.1, 100.64.0.4), Anaheim works over the metro link, and
the FV firewall log shows the outbound passing on tailscale0 with
src=10.251.50.54 and no reply ever returning. The remaining gap is forwarded
FV-LAN traffic specifically, not the gateway's own.
Full regression sweep clean: nh3-dev, ana-docker and esh-docker-vm all reach
all four sites plus the internet.
One rule on nh3-scale (CT 107): -d 10.100.10.50/32 -j MASQUERADE, above the
RFC1918 RETURNs in /usr/local/sbin/mesh-exit-masq.sh, so it survives a reboot
rather than living only in the running ruleset.
Cause. A host that runs Tailscale installs -A ts-input -s 100.64.0.0/10
! -i tailscale0 -j DROP. The fleet's subnet routers run NoSNAT: true with
RFC1918 explicitly exempted from masquerade — deliberate source preservation,
and a departure from Tailscale's own --snat-subnet-routes=true default — so a
mesh client's packet reached nh3-dev's ens18 still sourced 100.64.x and died
at the anti-spoof rule. Every NH3 host that does not run Tailscale was
unaffected, which is why this read as a DNS or routing fault rather than a
policy one. Masquerading just this destination makes it behave like every
other host and leaves source preservation absolute elsewhere.
Verified before and after against 13 targets from nh3-dev and 9 from the
MacBook Air, and again after restarting the service so the chain was rebuilt
from the script rather than from the manual insert. nh3-dev.nh3.internal now
resolves and connects from the mesh, ssh and the Booth port included, with no
script changes anywhere.
Records the failed approach prominently, because it is the attractive one:
advertising 10.100.10.50/32 from nh3-dev itself black-holed it from ESH,
Anaheim, FV and Irvine. ip rule there puts lookup 52 at priority 5270 ahead of
main at 32766, and becoming a subnet router let table 52 capture cross-site
traffic the node has no accepted route for. Its own LAN and the internet kept
working throughout, so a single-host check confirms a break it cannot see.
svos-dev split their Bifrost wall's HS256 signing key off the Hermes Bearer
(svos main 7165272), so nh3-dev/hermes/api-server-key is free to rotate again.
The previous note said do-not-rotate and would have made a future session
refuse a legitimate rotation on stale grounds.
Not rotating now: the key was minted today, is vaulted, and has never been
exposed — rotation is a hygiene action with a trigger, and none applies. What
changed is the capability, which is what the record needs to reflect.
Also records two things for when the svos_miranda plugin arrives: it will
reference the dispatch key rather than the Bearer (expected, not a defect), and
its tools array is legitimately seven or eight entries because repo_read is
conditional on a config block SVOS owns. A third number is a real fault.
Operator ruling: root:docker, not a personal username and not a new admin
account. lkraven is one of three names he uses, so baking it into shared
infrastructure guarantees a stale owner later; a dedicated deploy account
buys nothing the existing docker group doesn't, since that group already
exists on every host holding exactly lkraven + infra-ops.
Applied to nh3-dev, nh3-docker, esh-docker-vm, irv-ml1, ana-docker. All
five now 2775 root:docker on /opt/docker and /opt/docker/compose. Clears
the 0777 on nh3-docker and ana-docker. 55 stack .env files normalized to
root:docker 0640, tightening 43 world-readable ones and opening 31 that
were readable by only one of the two deploy identities. No containers
bounced — inode metadata only, and .env is read at compose up.
Deliberately not a recursive chmod. Three acme.json files and an ssh
private key are mode 0600 and traefik/ssh refuse to start if that widens,
which would have been a delayed failure surfacing at the next restart
rather than now. Protection is both mode-based (0600/0400 untouched) and
name-based (acme.json, *.key, *.pem, *.pfx, id_*); modes are symbolic so
the 53 executable files in these trees keep their exec bit.
Two defects found and fixed mid-rollout. The name list was initially
reported but not enforced, so a .key already at 0644 on esh-docker-vm was
widened to 0664 — reverted, and the list is now enforced in the chgrp and
widening steps. And the exec-bit verify asserted every .sh is executable,
which was never true and false-FAILED irv-ml1; it now compares the
executable-file count against a recorded baseline.
The restart loop runs as the deploy identity, not root, and a stack .env is
allowed to be root-owned 0600. compose bails on the unreadable file before
doing anything, so the stack was reported FAILED while restart=unless-stopped
had already brought it back healthy — a false failure, which is worse than a
quiet one because it trains readers to skim the failure lines.
Retry under sudo -n before calling it a failure, and print compose's own
output either way. Verified on nh3-dev against beszel: plain attempt rc=1
'open /opt/docker/compose/beszel/.env: permission denied', sudo retry rc=0
'Container beszel-agent Started', container back to healthy. The happy path
is unchanged — the sudo attempt only fires after a failure.
Also record that tts-dev migrated talk from ~/talk into
/opt/docker/compose/talk, which removes the one stack on this host that was
invisible to anything walking that path.
Operator cleared the swap and ruled out a docker-compose v1 shim. Ran
playbooks/upgrade-docker-ce.yaml: docker.io 20.10.24 -> docker-ce 29.8.0,
docker-compose 1.29.2 -> compose plugin v5.5.1, containerd 1.6.20 ->
containerd.io 2.3.5, buildx v0.37.1 added. 12 changed, 0 failed, verify
4/4. talk and beszel-agent back healthy on their restart policies.
The pre-state was worse than 'old': there was no cli-plugins directory, so
'docker compose' was not a command and exited 0 on a help blurb — a silent
no-op that reads as a successful deploy.
Records two things the run surfaced. vastblue-u5-pg and its anonymous
volume were removed when the old daemon stopped; the playbook has no rm,
prune or purge and five other containers survived, so the cause is almost
certainly --rm, unprovable now that the record is gone. It was measured
beforehand as zero user tables in every database, so nothing was lost. And
the playbook's restart loop runs as infra-ops and cannot read a root-owned
0600 stack .env, so it false-FAILs that stack.
Also notes that nh3-dev is the only host where /opt/docker/compose is
root-owned; the other four are lkraven. Created /opt/docker/compose/talk
as lkraven so tts-dev can move talk out of ~/talk. Normalising the parent
is left to the operator.
Operator ruled the repoint; Miranda moves off the paid z.ai Coding Plan
onto free local compute. model.default gen-large, provider custom,
base_url http://10.250.50.70:4000/v1. Verified by a real turn rather than
by config: hermes status reports gen-large / Custom endpoint and a
completion through /v1/chat/completions returns 660 tokens. The
openrouter/nous credit warnings cleared with it.
Records the landmine found on the way: CUSTOM_API_KEY and
HERMES_CUSTOM_API_KEY are inert for bare provider: custom — they bind only
a named custom_providers entry through its key_env. Without model.api_key
the request ships the placeholder no-key-required and LiteLLM 401s inside
the response body while hermes status still reports a healthy gen-large /
Custom endpoint, so status alone cannot verify this change.
Also notes that nh3-dev/hermes/api-server-key must not be rotated until
SVOS splits its HS256 signing key off the shared value.
Set platform_toolsets[api_server] = [] in ~/.hermes/config.yaml. Measured
back on /v1/toolsets: 28 rows before and after, enabled 14 -> 0, registered
tools 40 -> 0. The row count surviving matters — SVOS's _hermes_roster
derives its required-config line from the full report, so narrowing the
surface does not blind the diagnostic. terminal, code_execution, file,
browser and computer_use are now unregistered rather than merely
unreachable.
Separately, record an unresolved finding raised by svos-dev: model.default
names anthropic/claude-opus-4.6 and model.base_url names openrouter, but
provider: auto with only a zai credential resolves Miranda to GLM-5.3 on
the paid z.ai Coding Plan. Nothing under ~/.hermes references the LiteLLM
gateway. The operator believes Miranda runs on gen-large, which does exist
on LiteLLM. Not repointed — the premise is his to confirm.
vh