Homelab / Journal
Homelab journal since 1 August 2026 — services, hardware, platform, and design, curated and scrubbed. Older milestones stay visible.
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 11 Total 18 AI 3 Portfolio 6 Service 1 Storage 1
Public architecture page for Wiki Chat — hybrid search over wiki and handbooks, local Qwen3 models, plus read-only tools for RAM, CPU, disk, and uptime when those values are never in the wiki.
Why it matters: The chat is more than a tile — its build (RAG, routing, tools, evaluation) belongs in the portfolio story next to observability and ops AI.
Company website for SME software in the Bern region — theme-less Hugo, data-driven pricing and services, Forgejo → GitHub mirror → Cloudflare Pages; contact form as a Pages Function with Turnstile and SES, preview lock until launch.
Why it matters: The website pipeline is reusable — a new site needs a repo, a mirror and a Pages project, no new infrastructure.
root-files.net shows live aggregates (probes, hosts, apps, CPU/RAM/network) plus posture (backup coverage, alerts, edge latency) and sparklines — without hostnames, IPs, or admin UIs.
Why it matters: Observability belongs in the platform story — publicly only scrubbed scalars, no Grafana embed.
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.
Ops pipeline runs locally via Ollama — facts Qwen3.5 9B, writer Qwen3.6 35B-A3B (MoE, Qwen3.8 27B fallback), critic Qwen3.8 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.
Always-on privacy gateway with remote browser behind SSO; phase-2 ops entrances — 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.
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.
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.
Footer shows curated version plus build stamp; milestones link to the matching page.
Why it matters: Visible release state and direct navigation — without an internal changelog.
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.
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.
Context
Milestones before the official journal start on 1 August 2026.
root-files.net gains curated milestones, an architecture diagram, and aggregate status figures — without internal hostnames.
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.
Scrubbed sensor/device inventory from Home Assistant on the portfolio site.
Compute nodes, CI runners, and UniFi/MikroTik networking as product pages in the portfolio.
Tickets and changes as an ops layer — incidents and planned work kept separate from the engineering board.
Remote state and runs via a collaboration platform instead of permanent local state.
Keycloak OIDC and HashiCorp Vault as the shared base for apps and remote access.
