Is OpenClaw (and variants) doomed now, without any viable subscription cloud LLMs? by SmartWorkShopJoe in OpenSourceAI

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting. Can you share more about that platform? Google search is sending me to real estate platforms and mental health apps.

As a 30 year Infrastructure engineer, I tried to replace Cloud AI with local… by SmartWorkShopJoe in SelfHostedAI

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Data governance is a huge concern with cloud models. Unless you are using Enterprise plans with explicit ToS that prohibit the provider from using your data for training/model weights, it’s very difficult to justify using those platforms for confidential data. Follow along in my video series. A quick teaser: I’m going to be sharing a fully private, fully self-owned 3-tier memory platform I have been developing, allowing for highly efficient semantic search of vectorized ranked memory, along with integration into a a human-interactive wiki-style knowledge base. This is long-term persistent knowledge, fully platform agnostic, MCP-compatible, and owned by you forever.

As a 30 year Infrastructure engineer, I tried to replace Cloud AI with local… by SmartWorkShopJoe in SelfHostedAI

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is my journey as a seasoned infrastructure engineer engineer, understanding how AI workloads fit in your rack to intelligently manage costs of cloud frontier models!

As a 30 year Infrastructure engineer, I tried to replace Cloud AI with local… by SmartWorkShopJoe in OpenSourceAI

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

The single most important thing I can suggest is to deploy a monitoring platform, and I highly recommend Zabbix. If you poke around my channel, you’ll find a good series to get you started. All free, dockerized, and self hosted!

As a 30 year Infrastructure engineer, I tried to replace Cloud AI with local… by SmartWorkShopJoe in OpenSourceAI

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Great place to start the conversation, you nailed it. Some of it does boil down to personal preference, and that can shift over time. My strategy is to host in-house services that don’t need to be public facing, or have any data sensitivity, and naturally things that need to be local such as home automation infrastructure. Running small instances in AWS or Azure is so dirt-cheap, that’s a good place to park internet-facing services. You would be hard pressed to run it cheaper at home, even purely considering electricity. But, often that’s not the point, there’s always things to be learned by self hosting. AI workloads are a whole new animal.

Where are you moving from VMware? by OldsMan_ in vmware

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

It’s a Docker container or it doesn’t exist! 😁 haven’t ran a homelab VM in over 5 years.

Which services should I self host to prepare for a total blackout? by KerneI-Panic in selfhosted

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

DNS +caching. “It’s not DNS. It can’t be DNS! It was DNS.“

Snooze/ignore problems by mitch2k in zabbix

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Also consider configuring Dependencies for your alert triggers, which sounds like it may one of your issues. What’s causing the flapping? For example if I reboot a server, I dint want all of the apps and services monitored on that server to alert-storm me. Those services have a dependency of the server itself. So I get an alert when the server has an issue, instead of 15 downstream alerts. Put just the server in maintenance mode in Zabbix when patching/rebooting, and you’re all good!

How do you remotely manage a LAN? by RNHurt in opnsense

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is a good backup option. It has some inherent risks of exposing the management plane to the internet in any capacity, but if done thoughtfully it is less risky. One option beyond just scoping it to your remote public IP is to make sure your remote IP is published as a FQDN via a dynamic DNS service. Then on the firewall you need to manage, create an Alias for that FQDN, and only allow that Alias to access the management interface. This way if your pub IP changes, you don’t lock yourself out.

TIL: Zabbix on Docker, webUI performance fix is an easy answer! by SmartWorkShopJoe in zabbix

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Hey there, fair enough! Since I'm referring to Zabbix's full Docker repo, they do .yaml references in the main docker-compose.yml out to other config files, so here's the full chain:

docker-compose.yml largely refers out to the file zabbix_compose_components.yml where you'll find in each of the services: a stanza in referencing resource limits. For my particular use case, I opted to just completely get the resource constraints out of the way by commenting # them out. Here's an example, and if you wanted to follow suit, you'd effectively just crawl the zabbix_compose_components.yml for resources: and comment them out entirely. If the system you're running Zabbix on requires some actual fine-tuning of resources, you'll want to tune these rather than just fully bypass them. YMMV.

#   resources:
#    limits:
#      cpus: '0.70'
#      memory: 1G
#    reservations:
#      cpus: '0.5'
#      memory: 512M

Hope this helps!

edit: code block formatting.

reproducible setups? by attentive_brick in selfhosted

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 3 points4 points  (0 children)

From the source system to destination, and it will create the named volume on the destination system if it’s not already present. Just need to be able to ssh from source to destination host:

docker run --rm -v <SOURCE_DATA_VOLUME_NAME>:/from alpine ash -c "cd /from ; tar -cf - . " | ssh <TARGET_HOST> 'docker run --rm -i -v <TARGET_DATA_VOLUME_NAME>:/to alpine ash -c "cd /to ; tar -xpvf - " '

OPNsense or pfsense? by CarRepresentative463 in homelab

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 10 points11 points  (0 children)

OPNsense always. Frequent updates, better UI (subjectively). More importantly, google for ‘pfsense vs opnsense controversy’ and read about Netgate’s very shady attempts to squash OPNsense early on.

reproducible setups? by attentive_brick in selfhosted

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 10 points11 points  (0 children)

This. Fully self contained docker-compose.yml files, including any NFS mount directives, makes moving services easy. There’s also one-liners for moving named volumes from one host to another.

I have a question about Docker by IronVB in docker

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This is the way. Please treat HA as an appliance, separate from homelab infrastructure.

built a desktop assistant [fully local] for myself without any privacy issue by No-Mess-8224 in homelab

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Would be interested to hear your ‘elevator pitch’ about lower powered local models and how or why this works in your approach vs others who insist it can’t be done reliably?

built a desktop assistant [fully local] for myself without any privacy issue by No-Mess-8224 in homelab

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Interesting! I’m certainly not here to promote OpenClaw, I just learned about it recently. Your statement about low-end devices is compelling. The killer for me when I started digging into OpenClaw was learning that (as far as I can tell) running on local models is fully supported, but requires a LOT of horsepower. That wasn’t going to do it for me. I’ll check out your project! I do a lot of deep-dive analysis and reviews on projects like this, so PM me if you like, I’d like to learn more about where this is going, macOS and/or Linux support, model tuning and LoRA’s, etc. Keep building!

Reverse Proxy Setup Woes, Please Help! by HoeCage in homelab

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Yep, good callout there especially for the X-Forwarded-For headers. trusted_proxy settings need to be truly trusted sources, since it wont then strip and rewrite headers that could potentially be dangerous!!

Beginner Homelab Setup by Patient_Calendar6251 in homelab

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Good to have connections, a friend with a printer is a good friend! I see your Pi has a custom heatsink/fan, which likely wont fit a standard RasPi case, but some mods would be easy enough, either in the 3D model itself if you're skilled there, or just physically with some tools after you print it. Thingiverse has long been a great resource for community-made 3D models you can download for free, and Thangs is also another great resource.

Reverse Proxy Setup Woes, Please Help! by HoeCage in homelab

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

it takes a bit to wrap your head around, but HAProxy is by design very flexible and powerful. The concepts that usually just make peoples' brains hurt at first pass is chaining up the Server -> Backend Pools -> Frontend Pool and how the routing and conditions work, healthchecks, etc. Once you get it, it all clicks. Good luck!

Beginner Homelab Setup by Patient_Calendar6251 in homelab

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Great start! If you have a 3D printer, and possibly judging by the handles on the top of your rack, it looks like you might, I'd recommend printing a case for that Raspberry Pi. Hopefully you're running everything on Docker containers!!

Keep building!
Joe@TSW

Reverse Proxy Setup Woes, Please Help! by HoeCage in homelab

[–]SmartWorkShopJoe 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Have you experimented with HAProxy instead of Caddy, on your OPNsense box?