After the dashboard post, the next question was: what happens when the Win Mini sleeps? So I gave the fleet a second home: a Raspberry Pi 3B+ with one gigabyte of RAM, named jacinto.
Why it works
The brain is thin: the model lives on the API, not the hardware. Same Hermes, same
llm_client.py, and nobody on Discord can tell which machine answers. A
local-only brain could never fit in 1 GB.
First boot is a haunted house
A host on the LAN accepted the user pi without being the Pi: verify
the MAC (b8:27:eb:…) before trusting anything. And the modern Pi OS
ignores the country= line in wpa_supplicant.conf: Wi-Fi
stays rfkill-blocked until raspi-config nonint do_wifi_country.
A second Hermes
The install kept dying with the SSH tunnel, so it runs under
systemd-run, immune to my connection dropping:
ssh jacinto 'systemd-run --user --unit=hermes-install --collect \ bash -c "curl -fsSL https://hermes-agent.nousresearch.com/install.sh | bash"'
Cloud provider only (a quantized 8B does not boot in 1 GB), and its own Discord bot token: one token is one connection. The bot is my ops console. I typed "deploy alienhabits" and it did: wrote the unit, documented it in its own skill, scrubbed the password from the chat. Vaultwarden, the sync, the exporter binds — all managed from its chat.
The mirror
Twelve repos cloned over SSH (by rule, bidirectional). Syncthing keeps the vault
(8,617 files) and backups on both machines. node_exporter feeds a
jacinto-health dashboard (fourteen panels), and Prometheus plus the
Pushgateway answer from the Pi when the Win Mini sleeps. One-gigabyte budget:
zram swap, Bluetooth off, journald capped.
What it taught me
- The brain is thin. If your agent weighs more than the model, you are carrying something heavy for nothing.
- Real redundancy is another machine, not another process. A second Hermes with its own bot is a colleague.
- Hardware keeps you honest: kernel panics, impostor hosts, Wi-Fi that refuses to unblock. Design (idempotent provision, data off the boot device) beats fixing.
- Measure the second home too: two machines, two dashboards, one Prometheus.
The reliable choice, again
The brain runs wherever it is installed, the data lives in two places, and the second home cost the price of a microSD card. The API won, again: this time it bought me a second house.