About r0k's Blog

Hi, I'm Oliver.

I'm an IT infrastructure guy who apparently doesn't get enough infrastructure at work — so I build more of it at home.

This blog started as a place to document things I was working on and, more importantly, things I didn't want to figure out twice. Over time, it turned into a collection of real-world experiments with OpenStack, Kubernetes, storage, virtualization, automation and, more recently, local AI.

My homelab has changed quite a bit over the years. What started relatively small has somehow evolved into OpenStack, Ceph, Kubernetes, Proxmox, TrueNAS, various GPUs and an increasing number of experiments with local LLMs and AI agents.

Most of the things you find here are not theoretical tutorials.

They're things I've actually built, tested, broken and fixed.

Sometimes an experiment works exactly as expected. Sometimes I spend hours debugging something that should have taken ten minutes. And occasionally I manage to break something spectacularly enough that it deserves its own blog post.

Either way, I try to document what happened, what worked, what didn't, and the commands and configurations that got me there.

What you'll find here

Most of my posts revolve around:

• Local AI & GPUs — llama.cpp, Qwen, local inference, GPU experiments and AI agents
• OpenStack — Kolla-Ansible, upgrades, networking, Magnum and GPU workloads
• Kubernetes — clusters, storage, backups and running things that probably didn't need Kubernetes
• Homelab & Virtualization — Proxmox, hardware experiments and self-hosting
• Storage — Ceph, TrueNAS, NVMe and backups

This isn't a news site and I'm not trying to publish something every day.

I write when I've built something interesting, solved a problem that might help someone else, or discovered something worth documenting.

I build things. I break things. I write about both.

Thanks for stopping by.