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).
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