rms-mcp

A resident MCP server for an RMS / Global Meteor Network station. It lets Claude Code (or any MCP client) inspect the station over an SSH/WireGuard tunnel — "how did last night go?", "is capture healthy?", "show me the detections" — without SSHing in and re-deriving the answer each time.

It runs beside RMS, not inside it: a small pure-Python daemon in its own virtualenv that reads RMS's own outputs (FTPdetectinfo, the recalibrated platepars, the logs) and resolves every path from the live .config, so a station on an NVMe (data_dir: /mnt/nvme/RMS_data) or with renamed subdirs Just Works. No import RMS, so it can't be broken by — and can't break — the capture environment.

Tools

Read (safe inspection):

Tool	Returns
rms_status	capture/service states, disk, current capture night, ml_filter, last upload
rms_list_nights	recent archived nights, newest first (sorted by date, not name)
rms_night_summary	meteor count, FOV, recalibration status, upload bundle — for a night, or the latest
rms_detections	per-detection kinematics (frame span, peak magnitude, meteor-vs-streak hint)
rms_logs	tail the current RMS log, optionally filtered

Write (gated — see Scoped access):

Tool	Does	Scope
rms_config_get	read one .config value	config.<key>
rms_config_set	change one .config value — backs up first, preserves comments, never appends, does not restart capture	config.<key>
rms_reprocess	launch RMS reprocessing of a captured night under ~/vRMS — refuses the live night, won't stack jobs (dry_run to preview)	reprocess

Security & scoped access

Loopback-bound (127.0.0.1:8740), every request carries a bearer token that maps to a paired client, every call is authorised against that client's standing policy (deny by default) and audited to ~/.config/rms-mcp/audit.log. Reach it from another machine over an SSH -L tunnel or WireGuard — never expose the port directly.

Grant management is CLI-only (no MCP tool can alter policy, so nothing can self-escalate):

rms-mcp pair phone                                            # prints a token once
rms-mcp allow phone rms_status,rms_night_summary,rms_detections '' 90d   # read-only
rms-mcp allow ops   rms_config_set,rms_reprocess 'config.ml_filter reprocess' 30d
rms-mcp policies                                              # show grants
rms-mcp unpair phone

A refusal names the exact allow line that would grant it. The single bearer minted on first run is adopted as a full-access local client, so an already-connected client keeps working while you add narrower ones.

Run

python3 -m venv .venv && .venv/bin/pip install -r requirements.txt
.venv/bin/python -m rms_mcp            # serve
.venv/bin/python -m rms_mcp token      # print the bearer token

As a persistent user service:

systemctl --user enable --now rms-mcp
loginctl enable-linger "$USER"         # survive logout/reboot

Connect a client

# from the client machine, tunnel to the station's loopback port:
ssh -N -f -L 8740:127.0.0.1:8740 ian@meteor
claude mcp add --transport http rms http://127.0.0.1:8740/mcp \
  --header "Authorization: Bearer $(ssh ian@meteor '~/source/rms-mcp/.venv/bin/python -m rms_mcp token')"