Writing.
Notes from building things, with the commands left in. Addresses in them are examples; the real ones stay private.
THE HOME LAB, REBUILT
One machine under a desk, in nine parts and a prologue: a Raspberry Pi that could not keep up, a Docker host on macvlan, the move to Proxmox, a new CPU, a backup system that failed quietly, a new GPU, the local models it now runs, how an AI agent was used along the way, the AI container split into three, and a status screen on the living-room TV. The same machine reports its health live at lab.monk97.me.
One map of where the series ended up: the network, the host and its guests, where data lives, and how a request finds a service. Products and roles, never addresses.
THE SERIES · NEWEST FIRST
Putting the lab's status on the TV: a GPU that would not drive the screen, a status page that had been wrong for ten days, a browser kiosk that kept losing the signal, and the Rust TUI that replaced it.
Splitting one crowded AI container into three: an inference box that owns the GPU, a chat front end with none, and a notebook workbench. How the engines were evaluated, what was measured, and how it was built.
How an AI coding agent was used across the lab's rebuild: audits, runbooks and diagnosis it did well, the wrong assumptions it made, and the steps that stayed with a human.
Passing a GPU into an unprivileged LXC container and tuning Ollama in it: persistence mode, twelve cores, models on fast storage, and the tokens per second each change bought.
Why 8 GB of VRAM was the ceiling for local AI, the cards considered under a single-cable power budget, and why a slot-powered RTX PRO 2000 Blackwell won.
Proxmox Backup Server on a NAS share: the job, the retention, the quota that silently stopped every backup for sixteen days, and the alert added so it cannot happen quietly again.
Swapping a 4-core Xeon for a 16-core E5-2697A v4 in a Dell Precision 7810, once the lab's guests were waiting on CPU rather than memory or disk.
Replacing a Docker host with Proxmox VE: LXC containers instead of macvlan, a bridge instead of a shim, and keeping the old install intact until the new one proved itself.
How the home lab started: one Ubuntu desktop running every service in Docker, with macvlan giving each container its own LAN address, and the shim, routes and DNS that took.
Why the home lab exists at all: Homebridge on a Raspberry Pi to bring everything into Apple Home, a Pi that could not keep up, and how one bigger machine grew a service at a time.