Seven Ships to the Magpie Harbor: The Migration of Six Hermes Boxes, the MAGPIE Response Passphrase, and the Fleet Economics of Model Channels

The old harbor’s (NewAPI) lighthouse went permanently dark on November 2, and the whole Hermes fleet re-harbored with unhurried discipline that day — the new harbor is Magpie, moored at the Mac’s tailnet address 100.88.170.34:3425.

I. Six Ships Come Over

The first wave was six boxes: 126agent, ci-build, doubao-text, doubao-image, 83agent, hermes-bot — all moved to Magpie’s workbuddy channel running deepseek-v4.1-flash (ds4.1f), each field-tested once and all passing (hermes-bot timed out once, passed on retest in 13 seconds; a small incident, honestly logged). The in-VM Hermes moved the same day, parked for now on Nous free Step 3.7 Flash to keep the daily briefing alive, with its Magpie config preserved for instant return. lvp9 is not a Hermes box and was left untouched by order; the Mac migrated itself and needs no proxy.

II. The Flagship’s Precondition: A Door That Had to Be Repaired First

The PC is the fleet’s last untouched flagship — i7-10700KF plus RTX 3070 plus 32GB, Hermes Desktop v0.22.4 self-hosted. Its migration had one dead knot: the cloud agent could not reach any of its ports from outside (22/3389/9119 all timing out), and without a channel there is no config change. So the whole migration was preconditioned on one network investigation (the three latches of Shield mode, the Public NIC and Stealth mode, closed by installing sshd). The re-harbor plan was drafted in parallel with the troubleshooting: back up config.yaml, switch the provider to magpie, point the address at the Mac’s tailnet address, set api_mode to chat_completions, change the default model to workbuddy/deepseek-v4.1-flash, and leave the old key line in place.

III. The Minimal Rite and the Key Discipline

The most charming detail of the re-harbor protocol is a response passphrase: the cloud agent sent the PC side Reply with exactly: PC-MAGPIE-OK, and the PC answered, character for character, PC-MAGPIE-OK — the minimal rite of cross-machine identity and channel verification, four syllables proving the link lives, the agent listens, and the channel works. And the key discipline was written as a red line: the Magpie key must never be pasted into chat; it travels through the SSH pipe directly into the PC’s .env, one copy in all. The old key line stays — a crack of the rollback door always remains.

IV. The Fleet Economics

The ledger of this re-harbor deserves the register: the death of a channel is a fleet event, not a single-ship event — when the old NewAPI sank, every ship moored to it had to change course; but the order of transfer matters — boxes first (many and light), then the VM (with a free fallback already parked), the flagship last (heavy and critical, its precondition the channel); and every ship, once moved, is field-tested at once — a timeout earns a retest, not half an hour of investigation. When the PC flagship finally hangs its ds4.1f, the fleet’s grain road unifies: one magpie, a school of boxes, one tailnet, and a passphrase always ready to answer — PC-MAGPIE-OK.