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Hermes for Homelab: Agents That Know Your Infrastructure
Put Hermes Agent to work on real homelab hardware -- deploy it on a Proxmox VM or TrueNAS, give it SSH access across your machines, query VM and storage health, monitor your network, and schedule a daily digest to your phone. Nine lessons from first deployment to a working infrastructure agent.
01
What Is a Homelab Agent?
Before writing a single line of config, understand why persistent agents are a natural fit for homelab management -- and how the mental model shifts from shell scripts and cron jobs to an agent that genuinely knows your infrastructure.
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02
Deploying Hermes in Your Homelab
Choose the right deployment target for your Hermes homelab agent -- a dedicated Proxmox VM, an LXC container, or the TrueNAS community app -- and get it running as a persistent background daemon.
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03
The SSH Terminal Backend: Shell Access Across Your Lab
Configure Hermes to execute shell commands on remote machines over SSH -- the core capability that turns a local agent into a lab-wide infrastructure tool. Learn the config, the persistent shell model, and how to manage multiple hosts using profiles.
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04
Querying Proxmox: VMs, LXCs, and Cluster Status
Use your Hermes agent to inspect a Proxmox cluster in natural language -- list running VMs and LXCs, check node resource usage, query storage pools, and get plain-English summaries of what is happening in your infrastructure.
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05
Storage Health: ZFS Pools and Disk Checks
Query ZFS pool status, dataset usage, and drive SMART health from inside a Hermes session -- and understand what the output means well enough to catch problems before they become failures.
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06
Network Awareness: Uptime, Interfaces, and Connectivity
Give your homelab agent visibility into the network -- checking uptime and reachability of key hosts, reading interface stats, and querying pfSense or OPNsense for firewall and DHCP state.
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07
Building Your Morning Infrastructure Briefing
Wire together a scheduled cron job that checks VMs, storage, and network health every morning and delivers a plain-English summary to your phone via Telegram -- no manual intervention required.
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08
Safety Boundaries: Permissions and What Not to Touch
Set the right permission boundaries for your homelab agent -- least-privilege SSH access, read-only Proxmox roles, the safe toolset for monitoring-only sessions, and the lesson from a real 2026 security incident involving exposed Hermes dashboards.
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09
Your Homelab Agent in Action
Put the full track together: a Proxmox-hosted Hermes agent with SSH profiles for your key machines, a SOUL.md for an infrastructure ops persona, a morning briefing delivered to Telegram, and a clear picture of what the first week actually looks like.
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