Matrix

Introduction Hermes is the agent I use when a conversation has to reach the infrastructure. I address @hermes:white.fm in an end-to-end encrypted Matrix room. Hermes reasons through the local model route in my cluster, then invokes a finite set of tools against services with their own operational boundaries. Three previous pieces describe the components in isolation: the local Ollama router, the encrypted Matrix notification hub, and the MCP server fleet. Hermes is where those systems meet. Matrix provides the private conversation, Ollama provides the default inference path, and Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers supply the functions through which an answer may become an action. ...

Introduction Three years ago I wrote about running a Matrix server with Docker Compose, where the interesting part was the federation-over-Cloudflare-tunnel arrangement and the observation that a Matrix homeserver makes a serviceable notification hub. That deployment has since moved into my RKE2 cluster, and the notification role has grown from a convenience into the primary reason the homeserver exists. Nearly every machine-generated message in my infrastructure now arrives in an end-to-end encrypted Matrix room. Feed digests from FreshRSS, Prometheus alerts, GitOps deployment results, Falco runtime detections, Authentik authentication events, media-library activity, uptime state changes, weather alerts, and notifications from the UniFi and Synology appliances all terminate in rooms whose contents the homeserver itself cannot read. Two AI agents also use encrypted Matrix rooms, each reserved for direct conversation with the agent. ...