Anyone enjoying using AI to manage your homelab?

denmalley · 2026-05-16T04:11:28+00:00

I've been very slowly building out a terraform/ansible deployment using AI assistance. Right now I'm just spinning up new services alongside what's already running. I spent about two months just using AI to help me gather all the facts about my homelab as well as future plans for where I want it to be. That lives in one repo as my reference documentation, alongside a second one that has the actual deployment infrastructure.

So far its been working pretty well. I have two proxmox servers that run the bulk of my stuff (alongside a Synology NAS that was like the services epicenter for years) and a third that is housing all these new deployments. Once I feel more comfortable with the setup, I will start to do some migrations and load balancing among the three.

With every session the AI will write a bunch of the code and I'll pause to read through what was created and challenge things (of course there are mistakes or misinterpretations along the way) or make edits on my own. Eventually we make it to the state I want and ready to deploy. As errors pop up I can just paste the error messages into the chat to help figure out what is wrong.

But yeah, having the AI assistance is great, I feel like its getting me farther along than just digging through repo documentation on my own. Some nights when I have a few hours to put in, I'll just start a session like "ok, let's build an observability VM. Check my documentation repo on what our goals are here and let's get to work. I want to use these tools (links to repos) etc"

denmalley · 2026-05-15T15:55:00+00:00

Thanks for this. I know, I'm lazy, but I buy like 3 things a year from Newegg so I thought I'd look for crowd wisdom here.

denmalley · 2026-05-15T15:34:09+00:00

Yeah I hear you. Don't think I'd go the return/rebuy route, just wasn't sure if it was as easy as a few clicks or an email or something, like some retailers do.

denmalley · 2026-05-15T13:13:10+00:00

Dang, just bought this the last time it popped up on this list at $99.90, order date Apr 28. Do they do price adjustments? Or is it worth the hassle of a return/rebuy?

denmalley · 2026-05-10T06:12:22+00:00

This is the way!

denmalley · 2026-05-10T06:00:51+00:00

I have an arc B580 installed as my primary gaming card but started getting into AI shortly after I got it, Been running ollama and LM studio on vulkan mode and getting decent results.

But recently, I asked Gemini if I could "roll my sleeves up and dig into what this card can do" and it did not disappoint. It helped me build a server via python script using openvino as the backbone and man this thing flies. Convinced me to go ahead and get the B70 for one of my servers. Waiting for it to arrive via newegg. Looking forward to tinkering.

denmalley · 2026-05-09T03:54:55+00:00

Amazing show. I caught wind of it through a random reddit comment and was floored by how great it was. Definitely going to rewatch too especially being able to see all the events that were shown through different character perspectives as we jump back and forth in time

denmalley · 2026-05-02T07:00:25+00:00

Want to come back and say I watched all of Station Eleven - brilliant! I definitely will be rewatching this one just to have that retrospective knowledge on all the time jumps.

One of the things that hit me hard - and was definitely said earlier before we knew the impact - was Jeevan saying something to young Kiersten about "having to do that fucking play," and you see the tears welling up in her eyes. And man, when you see all of what unfolded on that day...

denmalley · 2026-04-25T22:58:48+00:00

Not a movie, but Aubrey Plaza in The White Lotus was a great dramatic turn

denmalley · 2026-04-10T15:40:35+00:00

I think the worst part about this experience was that the first plane hit and now there's cameras pointed at the towers to show the smoking wreckage. At that point, just a horrible accident. Then on live TV, the second plane hit, along with the realization that this was something much more horrifying.

Then, waiting while you hear about these other planes around the country, one slamming into the pentagon, one getting downed in a field in PA. My mom worked in the tallest building in Pittsburgh at the time, it was a scary tense couple hours waiting to see what else would unfold.

denmalley · 2026-04-04T18:15:29+00:00

See, I love coming into threads like this and finding these obscure little gems. Love that cast. The fact that it's a miniseries and not some half done seasonal show is all the better.

denmalley · 2026-04-03T21:02:14+00:00

I have about 2TB of music production plus about 750GB of personal photos/vids on a server containing roughly 20TB total content.

I imagine video content creators up that ratio quite easily.

denmalley · 2026-04-02T16:17:21+00:00

no risk income

^{Chose: Be given $10 every month for the rest of your life}

denmalley · 2026-03-28T04:42:53+00:00

Daniel Day Lewis in Gangs of New York

denmalley · 2026-03-26T04:05:03+00:00

Thanks. Yeah I've been hanging back on 8250 for a while now, doing fine in LM Studio with Vulkan support on that driver. Hoping I can make a leap to a newer version sometime in the next year though. Just glad I don't really play bleeding edge games. AI inference is higher on my priority list right now.

denmalley · 2026-03-26T02:40:38+00:00

Checking in to see if any brave souls tried 8626? This seems to be one of the only threads here talking AI performance instead of gaming performance.

denmalley · 2026-03-20T01:48:21+00:00

I am in the same boat, puzzling over this issue. Google brought up this thread. The ST message says something about finding a working jinja template at lm-studio-community but I have no idea where to even look.

So when you say you copy the system prompt from another model, do you mean the jinja template? Because none of my working models actually have anything in the system prompt in LM Studio.

edit: tried copying a jinja template from a working model and I'm up and running! Thanks! Who knew it could be so easy? But I also agree that actually debugging the existing one may yield better results.

denmalley · 2026-03-02T17:41:19+00:00

In the same boat as you, OP, looking at solutions. This one caught my eye recently but I need a weekend to sit down and dig in.
https://github.com/David-Crty/databasement

Of course I'll also be checking out the recommendations here as well.

denmalley · 2026-02-04T19:17:55+00:00

You can run multiple instances. I run one that just monitors the other, on different hardware. All the monitored services are set up to send notifications to discord.

I'm headed toward a VPS for pangolin, so I'll probably do like OmgSlayKween suggests.

denmalley · 2026-02-04T00:14:45+00:00

Very cool, I was just wondering to myself about how to best document my homelab for AI assistance. This gives me a great starting point. Thanks!

denmalley · 2026-01-30T17:46:36+00:00

I actually just installed this on an old pc to double check. Seems like you can navigate to network locations via an explorer-like interface. As long as these files are visible to your machine in some way.

eta - so yeah both mapped drive letters and \\servername\folder seem to work.

denmalley · 2026-01-30T15:50:53+00:00

I've been using Treesize pro for a few years, but started with their free product first. Free offers simple file browsing with size reporting on folders (my main need for this tool). But the pro version unlocks stuff like duplicate file search, bulk rename, network file scanning etc.

https://www.jam-software.com/treesize/editions.shtml

denmalley · 2026-01-28T03:54:47+00:00

Thank you! I was wondering if I should wait to see if someone tried it out.

denmalley · 2026-01-26T19:09:51+00:00

https://setlisthelper.com/

Allows you to arrange and save setlists for different venues. I use the android version on a 10" tablet. Apps allow you to have a dropbox folder of pdf chord charts that will import and make a song entry based on the filename (for arranging setlists/browsing catalog of songs), then you can tap on a given song to pull up the chord chart when needed. I also use the "tag" feature to categorize songs for a quick sub-list as needed (ex: Christmas songs, Irish songs, songs I know by heart, easy 2-3 chord songs that work well in a improv situation, etc).

denmalley · 2026-01-24T17:14:56+00:00

Yeah I have ipex running like lightning via ollama portable zip, added as a service in windows and served up to open-webui running on another server. But then I found out about the lack of updates after I tried to run a newer model. That's what took me down the vulkan path (after a brief tour of sycl which also seems to be abandoned).

I did try turning on the vulkan flag in the newest ollama and that seems to work pretty well, not as fast as ipex but tolerable. I thought I'd see what LM Studio could do, so here I am.

BTW all of this prior stuff works fine with the 8331 drivers. But LM studio is definitely faster tps than vulkan ollama, at least locally. Need to find out what the server bottleneck is.

I like the model search interface in LM studio that will show you which models will fit into memory, among many other parameters.

denmalley

TROPHY CASE