Homelab / Journal

News

Homelab journal since 1 August 2026 — services, hardware, platform, and design, curated and scrubbed. Older milestones stay visible.

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What moves in the lab — new live services, hardware, platform design, and public portfolio pages — as a curated journal.

Official start: 1 August 2026. Earlier stations remain below as context.

Journal since

Since epoch 8 Total 15 AI 2 Portfolio 4 Service 1 Storage 1

2026-09

Portfolio

Forgejo as lab SoT and CI matrix

Self-hosted Git is the source of truth for IaC and docs; Actions run on Linux amd64, macOS Apple Silicon, Windows 64-bit, and Windows ARM64.

Why it matters: The platform story names Forgejo and the runner fleet explicitly — not only the website pipeline.

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2026-08

AI

Multi-pass with Qwen3.6 (writer + critic)

Ops pipeline runs locally via Ollama — facts Qwen3 8B, writer Qwen3.6 35B-A3B (MoE, 27B fallback), critic Qwen3.6 27B. No cloud LLM.

Why it matters: Stronger writer and stricter critic for alert/upgrade notes — human approval stays mandatory; apply stays behind a snapshot gate.

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Service

Tor gateway with onion doors

Always-on Tor client with SSO remote browser and SOCKS; phase-2 onion ops doors — curated, without hostnames or reachability hints.

Why it matters: Dual remote gains a third, deliberately slow ops path — parallel to Pangolin and overlay, not a replacement.

Portfolio

This website explains itself

root-files.net — Forgejo as SoT, private GitHub mirror, Cloudflare Pages with Hugo; curated catalogs instead of leaks.

Why it matters: How the portfolio site is delivered belongs in the platform story — not only the services behind it.

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Storage

TrueNAS and OMV deliberately virtual

Storage roles as hypervisor guests — one platform, hot ZFS kept apart from USB bulk (passthrough).

Why it matters: One compute/IaC/backup platform instead of second bare-metal NAS silos; bulk must not poison the hot pool.

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AI

Controlled AI and ops showcases

Multi-pass LLM for alert analysis and patch notes — curated, scrubbed examples; no autopilot.

Why it matters: AI delivers facts and summaries — apply stays human plus a snapshot gate.

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Portfolio

Public homelab journal begins

From 1 August, this journal tracks what moves in the lab — services, hardware, platform, and design — curated and scrubbed.

Why it matters: An epoch start makes progress readable without exposing operational secrets.

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Context

Earlier stations

Milestones before the official journal start on 1 August 2026.

Portfolio

Lab telemetry and CGNAT story

Fleet CPU/RAM/network in the live pulse; connectivity explains dual 5G behind carrier NAT — without IPs or reachability hints.

Why it matters: Aggregate telemetry and design story instead of hostnames and reachability hints.

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Platform

Terrakube for OpenTofu state

Remote state and runs via a collaboration platform instead of permanent local state.

Platform

Identity-first cutover

Keycloak OIDC and HashiCorp Vault as the shared base for apps and remote access.