homelab

Currently? 4-5 months "playing" with local models and in the last week or two it has REALLY started to come together, and I have NEVER in like 25+ years of having a home lab/server(s) under the desk, but as happy or impressed. Fully offline and private, scratch-coded agent with a boatload of models behind it, spread across five GPUs in four VMs, and now with fully private/local (also scratch coded) voice interface. Absolute most incredible thing I have put together in my life, and that's not a short list of 'cool shit' I've built over the years.

Historically? Having such high-end networking gear to 'play' with in the early 2000s that I actually sold and shipped some to a small ISP overseas to use for production 🤣

the fact it holds together and is "reliable".

Shits reliable. I have automated 3-2-1 backups. PSU supports power to router and lab, and due to NUC tech, it stays on for 5+ hours on battery. Anything that could be automated is automated.

The fact that it is a 3-node proxmox cluster with high availability. When one node fails, the other two pick up all the services the failed node took with it.

And it is all in a 10inch rack.

I can't even say I have a homelab yet, lol, but two steps toward starting it made me really proud. Not much but honest work.

First was merely rooting an old redmi 9i, then degoogling it. Like I always wanted to root a phone but I'm too poor to take the risk. Xiaomi was kind enough to enforce planned obsolescense so hard on the software that for the first time in our lives my mom was forced to buy a new phone before the hardware broke, so it was the first time I had access to a truly expendable device since it was already unusable. I'm planning on flashing an abandoned custom rom I found when I have the time, then I'll just use it for chroot experiments, since the software is no longer supported and it's probably gonna be an open door at the kernel level. But maybe I can find some service that I could run on an untrusted device, or figure out a way to harden it, idk, I'm honestly very new to this.

Second was figuring out how to make emacs and org mode usable on my regular phone through a combination of syncthing, tailscale, unexpected keyboard, termux, tmux, and the new android port of emacs (like I can't get the sharedUserID versions to work on this device, so I just switch between native emacs + termux emacs to make up for each other's weaknesses). It's a work in progress but it already made it much easier to do simple habit tracking and note taking on the go without mobile internet. Like I don't have to worry about things getting out of sync. Again, not much at all, but a huge QoL improvement for me nonetheless.

The next step is fixing a little thin client I bought for ~30 USD in the current conversion rate. I'm pretty sure I just need to replace the motherboard's coin battery, that's what chatgpt told me based on the symptoms. It's really weak, like 1 GB ram 1 GB flash storage, but it's a real machine so I plan on trying alpine, seeing what I can run with so little resources, and then maybe trying my own LFS some day, or my own kernel experiments, idk.

I’m proud it’s run in three countries and been accessed from four, depending on your definition of country

My main server is a puny Raspberry Pi 5 with no disks that still packs a lot of services for my home.

My other server is an ancient 4 core box with an equally old graphics card and a bunch of disks (some spinning, some solid state) arranged in a ZFS array. It handles backups and running a local nasty tempered LLM modelled after GlaDOS.

I have 3 machines running proxmox, and if one of them dies, the other 2 can pick up the slack and spin up the LXCs with the docker services to prevent important services from going down.

Automatically, within a couple of minutes, with little to no data loss.

It was a pain, it maybe is not super reliable, and it’s all running on older hardware. But it is running, with good uptime.

64 days of continuous uptime today!! I know this isn't much compared to serious hosting, but I started self-hosting not so long ago and it's my record so far.

Apart from that, hosting my own messenger (Matrix) instance and actually having my friends switch to it from proprietary platforms. The sense of truely owning my data is deeply satisfying.

My old laptop (also EOL) still running as my server I guess ? I'm still looking for some time to switch to my old desktop with 5TB.

Not much but it's kinda needed for my curreent Arr stack and my self-hosted services i want to share with family members (SFTPgo, vaultwarden, invidious, baikal, navidrome, jellyfin, seerr...)

Still need some time to make our network more reliable :) I still have 2 managed swiches to put into our network !

Mann so many things to do, but not enough time in a everyday life :( !

The 5 HDDs that are playing so nicely together with ZFS, rock stable now for 8 years or so.