Setup 5: Hermes on the Synology you already own — and a hundred things to give it

In discussions about home agents, the Mac mini gets recommended over and over. It's a good machine, and we have a part about it. But plenty of people buy one for something that can be handled by the box that has been sitting in a cupboard next to their router for five years.

Why a NAS is enough

It rests on one distinction: an agent is not a model.

The model is the part that thinks. It needs a lot of memory and a fast chip, which is why expensive machines get bought for it. The agent is the part that drives the model: it remembers what you told it, keeps the schedule, reads messages from Telegram and calls tools. That takes very little.

Hermes Agent states one core and 1 GB of memory as the minimum, and recommends two cores and 2–4 GB. That's an ordinary Synology from the Plus series. The model, meanwhile, runs elsewhere — at OpenAI, Anthropic or via OpenRouter — and the NAS merely sends it queries.

Read the last row twice. It's an advantage and a risk at the same time, and we'll come back to it.

So you don't have to have a Mac mini, but you can. It makes sense when you want the text never to leave the house at all. The agent can then stay on the NAS and simply ask the Mac mini — that's the division of labour from setup 2.

What to check before you start

• Container Manager. Open Package Center in DSM and search for it. If it isn't there, your model can't run containers and this setup isn't for you.
• Processor. Models with Intel or AMD are trouble-free. For low-power models with an ARM processor, check that an official image exists for your architecture; sources disagree on this.
• Memory. With 2 GB it will be a struggle, with 4 GB comfortable. On the Plus series, memory can usually be added.

Installation in half an hour

A detailed walkthrough, including the terminal for beginners, is in setup 4. Here is just the skeleton for a single container:

services:
  hermes:
    image: nousresearch/hermes-agent:latest
    container_name: hermes
    restart: unless-stopped
    command: gateway run
    volumes:
      - /volume1/docker/hermes:/opt/data
    mem_limit: 4g

Paste it into a new project in Container Manager. Then run the setup wizard once over SSH:

sudo docker run -it --rm \
  -v /volume1/docker/hermes:/opt/data \
  nousresearch/hermes-agent setup

The wizard asks about the model and about the channel the agent should use to talk to you. For Telegram you need a bot token and your numeric ID; the procedure is in the part Telegram as a control panel. Notice what's missing from the skeleton: a ports line. The agent polls Telegram itself; nobody connects to it from outside.

Do two things before you give it its first task:

1. Give it its own folder, not the whole NAS. The container sees only what you mount into it. If you want it to sort scans, mount the folder with the scans. Not /volume1.
2. Set a spending cap with the model provider. An agent with a schedule spends money even while you sleep.

A hundred things to give it

Tasks are given as a sentence in Telegram: “Every morning at seven, send me…” and the agent turns it into a scheduled task by itself. The list is ordered by how much you have to entrust to the agent. Start at the top.

Without your data: the web is enough

1. A morning news overview from three sources of your choice.
2. The day's weather with one sentence on what to wear.
3. Watching the price of one item in an online shop and a message when it drops.
4. Checking whether tickets for a concert have gone on sale yet.
5. A weekly digest of news in your field, five links and why they're worth reading.
6. Watching for changes on a public office's or school's web page.
7. An alert for a new podcast episode or a new video on a channel.
8. The euro exchange rate every Monday when you're planning a bigger purchase.
9. Closures and delays on your route before you leave the house.
10. Research on a topic: ten sources, a summary, the contradictions between them.
11. A comparison of three products by the parameters you care about.
12. Watching for free appointment slots at a public office or a doctor's, if they're publicly on the web.
13. A word of the day in the language you're learning, with a sentence for practice.
14. An alert when a new version of a program you use comes out.
15. An overview of cultural events for the weekend in your town.
16. Watching for new classified ads matching given criteria.
17. Verifying a claim from an article: what the primary sources say.
18. A summary of a long video or article from a link you send it.
19. A list of open grant calls in your field once a week.
20. A heads-up on name days, anniversaries and public holidays for the coming week.

Its own memory: what you tell it, it remembers

21. An ideas notebook: you dictate, it sorts by project.
22. An evening journal of three questions, saved to a file.
23. A shopping list you add to during the day.
24. Reminders with context: “remind me of this when I'm dealing with taxes”.
25. A record of what you've lent to whom.
26. A mileage or fuel consumption log, entered by voice message.
27. A reading journal with quotations.
28. A record of what you ate, and a weekly view without moralising.
29. A training plan that adjusts to what you've actually done.
30. A list of gifts someone mentioned during the year.
31. Birthdays and anniversaries with a reminder a week ahead.
32. Family rules and agreements in one place.
33. Household maintenance: filters, inspections, tyre changes.
34. Warranties and receipts with the warranty end date.
35. A medication record and a reminder when supplies are running out.
36. What's in the freezer and what to cook from it.
37. A personal glossary of terms from the field you're learning.
38. A weekly retrospective: what went well, what didn't, what to do differently next time.
39. Half-formed thoughts you want to come back to.
40. A weekly meal plan based on what the family eats.

Files in a folder you mount for it

41. Renaming scans by content and date.
42. Sorting invoices into folders by supplier.
43. A one-page extract from a long PDF.
44. Transcribing voice notes into text.
45. Finding duplicate documents.
46. Checking a contract: deadlines, notice periods, penalties.
47. Converting handwritten notes from a photo into text.
48. A spreadsheet from a pile of receipts.
49. Comparing two versions of a document and listing the differences.
50. An index to the family document archive.
51. Captions for holiday photos for an album.
52. Checking from the log that the nightly backup ran.
53. A weekly overview of what was added to the folder.
54. A proposal of what to archive and what to delete. It must not delete anything itself.
55. Translating a document while preserving its structure.
56. A summary of a month's meeting minutes.
57. Gathering the paperwork for a tax return into one folder.
58. A spelling check of everything you put into the “to check” folder.
59. A fair copy from a dictated draft.
60. A presentation outline from the materials in the folder.

Work: with access to mail, calendar or tasks

61. A morning overview of the day from the calendar and tasks.
62. Draft replies to routine emails. You do the sending.
63. Meeting preparation: who'll be there and what you last wrote to each other.
64. Watching for what you haven't had a reply to.
65. Meeting minutes split into tasks and decisions.
66. A Friday summary of the week for your boss or a client.
67. Proposed meeting times based on free slots.
68. Sorting mail into three piles: today, this week, never.
69. An alert about calendar clashes for the coming week.
70. An overview of overdue invoices.
71. A draft quote based on past quotes.
72. Tracking mentions of the company on the web.
73. The week's numbers from a spreadsheet in two sentences.
74. Reminders of promises from chats — that's the whole of setup 4.
75. A list of questions you should clarify for yourself before a meeting.
76. Checking a text against the company style.
77. An overview of what colleagues added to a shared document.
78. A proposed agenda from open items.
79. Breaking a big task down into steps with a time estimate.
80. A monthly overview of where your time went according to the calendar.

Household and family

81. A family calendar: who picks up the children when.
82. Reminders of after-school clubs and what to pack for them.
83. A bedtime story with characters the child invented.
84. Practising vocabulary or spelling rules as a game.
85. A cleaning rota that rotates fairly.
86. A trip plan based on the weather and the children's ages.
87. Checking the school website and a summary for parents.
88. Reminders of payments that don't go by direct debit.
89. Monitoring energy consumption, if the NAS collects it somewhere.
90. A packing list for a holiday by destination and season.

The NAS itself and advanced tricks

91. A daily report on disk health and free space.
92. An alert when a DSM update is available.
93. Checking the validity of certificates and domains.
94. Watching that the other containers are running.
95. A morning report spoken aloud instead of text.
96. A custom skill: a procedure the agent once did well for you gets saved and repeated next time.
97. A second agent profile with a different personality and different rights, for the children, say.
98. A fallback model via OpenRouter for when the main one goes down.
99. A weekly audit: what the agent did over the week and what it cost.
100. Cleaning up after itself: a list of scheduled tasks that no longer make sense.

Take numbers 96 and 99 more seriously than the rest. The former is covered by a separate part on agent skills. There are also dedicated parts on the morning brief, which folds individual tasks into one message, on voice control (number 95) and on a profile for children (number 97). The first is the reason the agent gets better over time. The second is the reason you can go on trusting it.

Where the line is

The list is ordered deliberately. In the first twenty, the agent sees nothing of yours and the worst that can happen is a bad summary. From number 61 onwards it reads things written by strangers and at the same time sees your data — and that's the combination covered in the part on the lethal trifecta.

For a NAS, four rules follow from that:

• The agent proposes, you send and delete. An email draft yes, sending no. A list for archiving yes, deleting no.
• Back it up. What to save and where, so the agent can be restored, is dealt with in the part on backups.
• The mounted folder is the boundary. What the container can't see, it can neither read nor send out. That's why you never mount the whole volume.
• Leave command approval switched on. For scheduled tasks, Hermes has dangerous commands disabled by default. Leave it that way.

And one extra rule that applies only here: the NAS is where you keep your backups. An agent with write access to them is the one thing capable of ruining both the data and its backup at once. Don't mount the backup folder for it at all.

How to lock down a NAS with an agent against access from outside is shown in the part Synology from outside.

After the first quarter, an audit will come in handy to show which of those hundred tasks you actually read, along with the part on what a month with an agent costs.

When not to build it

• You have no recurring tasks. If you ask an agent something once a week, a phone app is enough.
• The NAS is at its limit. If it already struggles to keep up when playing video, another container won't help it.
• You want the model at home. Then it really is a job for a Mac mini or a computer with a graphics card.

The sensible approach is boring: install it, give it three tasks from the first twenty and watch for a week whether you read them. If you do, add more. If not, none of those hundred items will help you — and you found that out for free, on a machine you already had.