rdmpw3275m-changelog-20260922-1850-ollama-cpu-canary

Loaded one small official local Ollama model on the previously empty 768 GB Intel Mac Pro store and verified CPU-only loopback inference without changing services or clients.

Scope, files, and commands

• Host: rdmpw3275m; exact SSH host fingerprint was verified against fleet record before write. The pre-change .ollama directory was about 12 KiB and ollama list had zero model tags.
• Command: ollama pull qwen3.5:4b-q4_K_M through SSH exited successfully. Only /Users/richh/.ollama received the additive model manifest/blob; no project file, app, service, listener, credential, client, or account state changed on this host. Canonical documentation is under /Users/richh/dev/localAI/ollama on rdmsm4x.
• Full /api/tags digest: 2a654d98e6fba55d452b7043684e9b57a947e393bbffa62485a7aac05ee4eefd; registry size 3,389,983,735 bytes.
• Bounded synthetic API canaries: a short request returned 42; the warm 2K-context no-thinking 46-prime JSON list was correct, took 9.82 seconds and generated 157 tokens in 9.42 seconds (16.7 tokens/s). ollama ps reported 3.1 GB 100% CPU; swap used was 0; lsof showed only 127.0.0.1:11434 for Ollama 0.34.2. Disk retained about 5.9 TiB free.

Backup and rollback

• tmutil isexcluded /Users/richh/.ollama reported Included, and a local Time Machine destination is configured, but tmutil latestbackup returned no usable snapshot. There were no existing model blobs before this single additive canary; the official tag can be re-downloaded if needed. The Ollama private key was not read or copied. No validated store restore is claimed.
• Rollback: leave the new tag unused and preserve it for review. Do not delete its blob/manifest or change clients without a separately accepted recovery and target-specific plan. No model or data was deleted.
• Open: no large Ollama model rollout on this CPU-only Intel host until measured throughput and backup evidence justify it. The changelog is archived here and on the host; its Notes entry is filed from the canonical Studio's Aqua/iCloud session into the rdmpw3275m host folder, without relying on AppleEvents over SSH.