Homelab

I keep a collection of Linux machines at home for storage, batch processing, and machine learning work. Everything is x86_64, mostly small-form-factor hardware. It’s quiet, low power draw, and cheap enough to leave running around the clock.

What I Use It For

Most of what ends up on this blog gets built here first. Renting a GPU by the hour is fine for a one-off, but it’s a bad fit for the way I actually work, which includes long, interrupted sessions where an idea sits half-finished for a week. Owning the hardware makes that free.

• Local LLM inference. Running models on hardware I own means no per-token cost and no data leaving the house, which matters when the input is my own notes or photos. That was the whole premise behind wiring Ollama into Airflow DAGs, I wanted full end-to-end testing of a pipeline without reaching out to a third-party provider.

• Fine-tuning. The GPU box is what makes experiments like fine-tuning Gemma 3 with Unsloth practical to iterate on instead of spinning up cloud instances.

• Vector search and embeddings. Somewhere to build and re-build indexes at a realistic size while working through things like Ray Data integrations for vector databases.

• Distributed compute prototyping. Enough cores and memory across the three machines to run a real multi-node Ray cluster, which catches the class of bug that never shows up on a laptop.

• Storage. The bulk disks hold photography work and the datasets that would be tedious to re-download, including the raw material behind plotting GPS coordinates out of photo metadata.

Network

Everything resides on a flat 192.168.1.0/24 subnet. Working outward from the machines:

• The three hosts are wired into a 2.5 GbE switch, which keeps transfers between them off the wireless entirely.

• The switch uplinks to a Netgear Nighthawk WiFi 7 mesh extender, which is what gets the upstairs machines back to the rest of the house.

• The extender routes down to the Nighthawk router downstairs.

• The router is plugged into a Spectrum cable modem for the WAN connection.

My Homelab, Merch and Books

Machines

Power

The whole shelf runs off an Anker S2000 rather than straight off the wall, which does two jobs at once:

• UPS. Everything is always-on, so a brief outage or a flicker would otherwise mean an unclean shutdown on machines that are often mid-write. The battery sits inline and rides through it.

• Time-shifting. The unit charges when electricity is cheap and runs the lab off battery when it isn’t, so a rack of always-on hardware stops tracking peak time-of-use rates.

The second one is the reason it’s worth the hardware. A homelab’s cost is mostly the electricity to leave it running, and shifting that draw off-peak takes a meaningful bite out of the bill without turning anything off.