#homelab

My homelab is four machines with four different jobs: a hub that answers everything, a GPU box that's allowed to be asleep, a NAS that should never be interesting, and a dev machine that never turns off. Over the next six Fridays I'm following one app, my gym tracker, through all of them.

Hermes dual-booted a Windows install that was doing nothing, while its Ubuntu root sat at 86% full. Deleting Windows was the easy part. Giving the space to Ubuntu was harder: it was on the wrong side of the root partition. This is how I moved a live root filesystem without going near the machine, and what made the remote reboots safe.

A deep technical look at the multi-agent workflow that scraped the entire awesome-selfhosted dataset — nine runs, every architectural failure, exact agent counts and token numbers per run, and how it ended with Python bypassing agents entirely.

I had Portainer running but it made figuring things out harder, not easier. And there was no single place to just click a link and open a service. I described the problem to Claude Code and it built me exactly what I needed.

I put the Nexus backend under four progressively harder k6 load tests — smoke, stress, spike, and soak — while watching every CPU cycle and megabyte on Polaris. 300 concurrent users, zero failures, 40% CPU headroom. Here's what a NUC can actually handle.

The last post ended with Polaris's role shifting to embeddings and batch work. What actually happened was more interesting — it became a proper personal server in a single afternoon. nginx, WireGuard, Docker, GitLab Runners, and a weekly AI-powered security audit.

I had two old Intel NUCs, an obsession with AI agents that actually do things, and a decision to make about which machine gets which job. This is how I split them — and why the answer wasn't obvious.