The Lab

# rig

• + Intel i9-14900KS — 24 cores of questionable thermal decisions
• + NVIDIA RTX 4090 — shared between production inference and "let's see if this runs"
• + WSL2 on Windows — yes, really; it works better than you'd think

# services (~22 containers)

• + self-hosted AI — local LLMs, image models, a routing gateway, RAG over my own notes
• + photos & files — a private photo library and file sync, all on my own disks
• + automation — agents, schedulers, and glue that keeps the rest honest
• + observability — dashboards, health checks, and a dead-man’s switch that pages my phone

# reliability

• + UPS + battery backup — short outages don't even register
• + unattended auto-recovery — the box restarts itself from freezes, crashes, and reboots, then pages me about it
• + daily health checks with an actual alerting path (learned that one the hard way)