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OLLAMA_HOST Resolution Strategy — ALAI Fleet (MC #8476)

OLLAMA_HOST Resolution Strategy — ALAI Fleet

Owner: Skillforge | Verified: 2026-07-28 | Re-verified: 2026-08-16 | MC: #8476 Source of truth: ~/system/tools/ollama-host.sh (implemented 2026-04-20, CodeCraft) + ~/system/architecture/distributed-ai-factory-plan.md §4

1. Why This Exists

ALAI agent scripts call Ollama for local inference (classifiers, embeddings, session summarization). Different machines reach Ollama differently:

  • ANVIL (Mac Studio, makinja-sin-mac-studio / hostname makinja.local) — Ollama runs locally on localhost:11434.
  • Remote/client hosts (e.g. ab-mac) — must reach ANVIL over Tailscale at 100.103.49.98:11434, or fall back to FORGE (10.0.0.2:11434, LAN-only) if ANVIL is unreachable.
  • Neither reachable — script must degrade gracefully (warn, do not hang, do not crash agents that have a Claude API fallback).

ollama-host.sh centralizes this so scripts don't hardcode an endpoint. Instead they read $OLLAMA_HOST (or, in JS, process.env.OLLAMA_HOST), which the wrapper resolves and exports once per shell session.

2. Resolution Order (as implemented in ollama-host.sh)

The live script's actual order is cache-first, then hostname, then a network probe ladder — this is slightly more defensive than the original architecture-plan pseudocode (§4 of distributed-ai-factory-plan.md), which omits the cache and the local-probe step. Documenting the real script here:

1. Explicit override   — if $OLLAMA_HOST is already set in the environment, use it
                          as-is. No probing. (Lets a human or CI job pin an endpoint.)
2. Cache check          — if /tmp/ollama-host.cache exists and is < 5 min old:
                            - cached value present and != "NONE"  → export it, done
                            - cached value == "NONE"              → warn, leave unset, done
3. Hostname match       — if `hostname` contains "makinja-sin-mac-studio" or
                          "makinja.local" (i.e. we ARE ANVIL) → localhost:11434
4. Local probe          — curl localhost:11434/api/version, 1s timeout
                          (catches "Ollama running locally for some other reason")
5. Tailscale ANVIL      — curl http://100.103.49.98:11434/api/version, 2s timeout
6. FORGE (LAN only)     — curl http://10.0.0.2:11434/api/version, 1s timeout
                          (fast-fails on non-LAN hosts, e.g. remote/cloud machines)
7. Graceful degrade     — write "NONE" to the cache, print one WARNING to stderr,
                          leave $OLLAMA_HOST unset. Agents with a Claude API fallback
                          continue; Ollama-only agents fail explicitly downstream
                          rather than hanging on an unreachable host.

Every successful resolution (steps 3–6) writes its result to the cache file before exporting, so the next shell in the same 5-minute window skips the probe ladder entirely (step 2 short-circuits).

3. Cache: /tmp/ollama-host.cache

  • Path: /tmp/ollama-host.cache (flat text file, single line: either a resolved URL like http://100.103.49.98:11434, or the literal string NONE).
  • TTL: 300 seconds (5 minutes), enforced by comparing stat mtime against date +%s. The script tries macOS stat -f %m first, falls back to GNU stat -c %Y — safe on both ANVIL (macOS) and any Linux host that sources the same file.
  • Purpose: avoids re-running the curl probe ladder (up to ~4s of sequential timeouts in the worst case: local 1s + Tailscale 2s + FORGE 1s) on every new shell/subprocess.
  • Failure caching: a NONE result is cached too — so a host with no reachable Ollama doesn't re-probe every session, it just re-warns from cache until the TTL expires or the cache is flushed.

ollama_flush_cache()

ollama_flush_cache() {
  rm -f "$_OLLAMA_CACHE_FILE"
  echo "[ollama-host] Cache cleared. Run 'source ~/system/tools/ollama-host.sh' to re-resolve."
}

Deletes /tmp/ollama-host.cache and prints a reminder to re-source. Call this manually after:

  • Tailscale reconnects (e.g. after sleep/wake or VPN flap) and ANVIL becomes reachable again
  • Ollama is (re)started on ANVIL or FORGE
  • You changed $OLLAMA_HOST by hand and want the wrapper to re-probe instead of trusting a stale cached failure

It is exported as a shell function (export -f ollama_flush_cache) so it's callable from any subshell in the sourcing session, not just interactively.

There is also ollama_available(), a one-line guard scripts can call before an Ollama-only code path:

ollama_available() {
  [[ -n "${OLLAMA_HOST:-}" ]] && [[ "${OLLAMA_HOST}" != "NONE" ]]
}

4. Consumption in Node/JS Agent Scripts

Scripts that were refactored off hardcoded endpoints read the resolved value via process.env.OLLAMA_HOST (the shell wrapper exports it, so any JS process spawned from a shell that sourced ollama-host.sh inherits it).

Verified counts (grep -rlE over ~/system, .js/.sh/.ts/.mjs):

Date Files reading process.env.OLLAMA_HOST
2026-04-20 (task description estimate, unverified) 52
2026-07-28 (first live grep) 149
2026-08-16 (re-verified live grep) 848

⚠️ Correction to MC #8476 task description: the task text (written 2026-04-20, the day ollama-host.sh was implemented) states "52 refactored files now read process.env.OLLAMA_HOST". No historical record (evidence/reports) of a "52 files" sign-off was found via discover.js search, so that original number cannot be reconstructed or verified — treat it as a same-day estimate, not a target to reconcile against.

The count itself is not stable — it grew 149 → 848 (5.7x) between 2026-07-28 and 2026-08-16, three weeks apart, tracking the system's overall growth rate rather than a single discrete refactor. Practical implication: do not cite an absolute count from this runbook as current without re-running the grep below; cite the trend (rapid, ongoing adoption of the wrapper pattern) instead.

grep -rlE "process\.env\.OLLAMA_HOST" ~/system --include="*.js" --include="*.sh" --include="*.ts" --include="*.mjs" | wc -l

Not every hardcoded reference is necessarily a bug: some are inside ollama-host.sh itself (the probe URLs), health-probe/monitoring scripts that intentionally target a specific host, or docs/comments. A hardcode count is a signal for follow-up, not an automatic defect list — each hit needs eyeballing before "refactor" is filed as a task.

5. Shell Integration

Expected integration (per ollama-host.sh header comment):

[ -f ~/system/tools/ollama-host.sh ] && source ~/system/tools/ollama-host.sh

added to ~/.zshrc.

⚠️ Verified gap (re-checked 2026-08-16, unchanged since 2026-07-28): ~/.zshrc on this machine (ANVIL) still has no reference to ollama-host.sh or "ollama" at all (grep -in ollama ~/.zshrc returns nothing, 158-line file). The wrapper is NOT currently auto-sourced on interactive shell start. It must be invoked explicitly (source ~/system/tools/ollama-host.sh) or sourced by whatever launches an agent process today.

This is a real gap, not a documentation omission — filed as a follow-up rather than silently assumed fixed. See §6. Note: a different overlay mechanism exists (~/system/config/role-overrides/workstation/env.sh, added by the workstation role's bootstrap.sh for non-ANVIL machines like a Mac Air test host — MC #8562) which sets its own OLLAMA_HOST and is appended to ~/.zshrc/~/.bashrc by that bootstrap path, but only when the workstation role is provisioned. It targets a stale fallback IP (100.104.164.86 for FORGE, offline since ~2026-06-14 per ~/system/CLAUDE.md) and is a separate code path from ollama-host.sh — do not conflate the two when auditing shell integration.

6. Follow-ups Identified While Writing This Runbook

  • zshrc source line missing — add the one-line source guard from §5 to ~/.zshrc so every interactive shell resolves $OLLAMA_HOST automatically instead of relying on each agent-launch path to source it independently.
  • "52 files" figure stale — treat as historical/unverifiable; 149 is the current verified count of process.env.OLLAMA_HOST consumers. Re-baseline if this runbook is used as a compliance reference.
  • Hardcode audit — a full-tree count of remaining localhost:11434/127.0.0.1:11434 references (excluding ollama-host.sh's own probe code) would tell CodeCraft how much refactor work is actually left; not completed here due to ~/system's size (23G) making a full recursive grep slow — a scoped follow-up task should target it.
  • Tailscale ACL — per architecture plan §4, ANVIL's Ollama port was not reachable from other Tailscale peers as of the plan's writing. This runbook does not re-verify that ACL state; treat §4's Tailscale ACL recommendation as still open unless confirmed otherwise.

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