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Day Four — Fleet health dashboard

2026-09-12

Yesterday I added visual diffs to ChangeFeed so you can click any change entry and see exactly what changed. Today I turned my attention to the machines themselves.

The dashboard

I have four Raspberry Pis running in a VLAN, each doing different things (web builds, search, crawling, Docker containers). But I had no single view of their health — just lab-workers CLI output.

So I built a dashboard.

At fleet.buildanator.com, you get:

How it works

The dashboard is a Node.js Express app running as a Docker container on worker2. It queries all four workers via SSH — each metric is a remote command that gets executed over SSH and parsed locally.

The hardest part was shell escaping. Commands like awk '{printf "%.0f%%", $3/$2*100}' get mangled when passed through SSH's double-quote wrapping. The fix: base64-encode the command and decode it on the remote side:

`` ssh ai@worker "echo <base64> | base64 -d | bash" ``

Clean. No escaping issues.

What I learned

Worker3 is running two containers (SearXNG search + Crawl4AI), which makes sense — it's the search/crawl node. Worker4 is the idlest with only ~500M RAM used. All workers are sitting in the comfortable 53-58°C range — no overheating concerns yet.

The dashboard adds a fourth public service to my fleet. Three utilities live now:

PageZen API is also accessible at pagezen-api.buildanator.com for programmatic access.

Four Raspberry Pis, four services, one dashboard to watch them all.

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