r0k5t4r

Can Two Old Tesla V100s Beat an RTX 4090 for a Fully Local Hermes Agent?

Testing Qwen3.6-27B, llama.cpp, MTP speculative decoding, 131K context, and whether cheap server GPUs are actually worth it for local AI agents. I’ve been experimenting with local AI agents for a while now. I previously wrote a few articles around OpenClaw and running AI locally, but the

oracle

🦎 Keeping My Pangolin Instance Alive on Oracle Cloud (With a Simple Watchdog)

TL;DR Oracle Cloud can detect when your VM has problems — but it won’t automatically fix them. I built a small watchdog script that: * checks if my service is reachable * queries OCI health metrics * automatically resets the VM if needed It runs from my homelab and just works. You

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Pangolin

Running Pangolin for Free in Oracle Cloud

OpenStack

OpenStack 2024.1 → 2025.1 (SLURP) Upgrade with Kolla-Ansible — Lessons from the Trenches

Yes it's kind of late but to be honest a lot of people run even older OpenStack release as of today. For me it was finally time to upgrade. 2024.1 is unmaintained for quite some time now. And as you can imagine the upgrade didn't

OpenClaw

OpenClaw + Local LLMs: Running Your Own AI Agent in a Homelab

I finally found some time again to work on my OpenClaw + local LLM project. Last time I tried connecting OpenClaw to LM Studio on both my Mac and Windows PC. At first everything worked surprisingly well — but only for a few minutes. After that things started to fall apart. It

Pangolin

Why My Oracle Free Tier Instance Kept Becoming “Unresponsive” — And How I Fixed It

TL;DR: My free-tier VM on Oracle Cloud Infrastructure kept becoming “unresponsive”. * It wasn’t an Oracle outage. * It was sustained high CPU usage from Pangolin running on a shared AMD micro instance. * Because I didn’t limit container CPU, the VM hit heavy steal time (st in top)

OpenClaw

OpenClaw - I'm (not) scared...

TL;DR: * OpenClaw tested in an isolated Ubuntu VM on Proxmox * Local LLM (LMStudio on MacBook Air and Windows PC) connected via API * WhatsApp bot successfully running * Don't use Signal it doesn't support bots and you need a free phone number * I didn't manage

TrueNas

TrueNAS VM – resize disk without downtime

The disk of my Ubuntu VM kept filling up, so it was time to resize it. Luckily, the steps are very simple and — yes — no downtime is required. Still, it’s always a good idea to have a backup! ⚠️ Overview ┌───────────────────────┐ │ TrueNAS (ZFS) │ │ Dataset / Zvol │ └───────────┬───────────┘ │ resize Zvol ▼ ┌───────────────────────┐ │ Virtual Disk │ │ (VM Block

AirPrint

AirPrint for an Old Brother Printer with Warp AI – Done in 20 Minutes

I have a Brother MFC-490CW printer that doesn't support AirPrint. Yes my printer is old (15+ years) but we only print 5-10 pages at most per week and it still works very well. Instead of buying a new printer, I thought: "This should be doable

ipv6

How I Had to Learn IPv6 – And Why It’s Actually Really Cool

We just recently moved into a new place, which meant switching ISPs. After weeks of getting the flat ready, I finally found some time to dive into my next project: migrating my Ghost Blog running in Kubernetes from my paid VPS to K3s in my Homelab. What sounded like a

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Warp

WARP is awesome. But you want local LLMs? Try ShellGPT.

Valetudo

When Your Roborock "running Valetudo" Goes Rogue

My trusty old Roborock V1 decided to ghost my Wi-Fi after we moved into our new flat. No problem, I thought. Same AVM Fritz!Box 7590, same settings—should be smooth sailing, right? Wrong. I couldn’t even access the Valetudo web UI. “No worries,” I told myself, “we’

TrueNas

TrueNas - Upgrade to Electric Eel (24.10)- Migrating TrueCharts to Docker

With the release of TrueNAS SCALE 24.10 “Electric Eel”, iXsystems introduced a major architectural change: Kubernetes support for apps has been dropped in favor of a native Docker-based system. If you're like me and have been running plenty of TrueCharts apps—which are built entirely on

OpenStack Magnum

Fixing the Vexxhost MCAPI Driver in Kolla-Ansible OpenStack 2023.2

After updating the containers in my Kolla-Ansible deployment, I ran into a frustrating issue when trying to spin up new Kubernetes clusters with Magnum and the Vexxhost Cluster API (CAPI) driver. Everything had been working flawlessly—until the image refresh. The Error Here’s what I was met with

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Proxmox

Automating VM Deployment in Proxmox Using OpenTofu (Terraform) and Cloud-Init Pt. 2

Proxmox

Automating VM Deployment in Proxmox Using OpenTofu (Terraform) and Cloud-Init Pt. 1

Note: This is Part 1 of a two-part series. In this post, we'll focus on the manual approach of downloading and preparing a cloud-init-enabled Ubuntu image in Proxmox that can be used as a base template for cloning. In Part 2, we’ll dive into

TrueNas

TrueNas - Upgrading my Hardkernel Odroid H2: Finding the Right Balance Between NVMe and SATA Storage

In my previous blog post, I discussed upgrading my Hardkernel Odroid H2 with four NVMe drives, pushing the limits of what was considered possible. This time, I want to share my final storage configuration and why I decided to mix NVMe and traditional spinning disks instead of going all-in

OpenStack

I've Created a Monster

This monster is called OpenStack. Yes, my beloved OpenStack cluster has now been running for over two years, and throughout the years, I have faced many obstacles. Some of these challenges are still not 100% resolved even today. But I keep learning more and more. Octavia Certificate Expiration Just recently,

TrueNas

TrueNas - Upgrading my Hardkernel Odroid H2 with 4 NVMe Drives - Making the actually impossible possible

How I Discovered This Upgrade While I was looking for new NAS options, I ended up browsing Hardkernel’s product website. I saw that the new H4 Plus now offers more SATA ports, and since its compact size is perfect for me, it seemed like the best option. As I

MacBook

Reviving My Beloved MacBook Pro 2010 with OpenCore Legacy Patcher and Linux Mint 21

I've always had a special connection with my MacBook Pro 2010. It’s not just any laptop—it’s a device I built myself years ago by combining two broken MacBook Pros I bought on eBay. Something you can no longer easily do so nowadays since the MacBooks

News

I screwed up big time!!!

How I Accidentally Nuked My Blog (And What I Learned About Backups) A tale of overconfidence, tiredness, Kubernetes PVs, and a backup strategy that wasn't quite what I thought it was. Spoiler: my blog didn't survive. The Setup: My blog is hosted on a self-managed

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OpenStack

Unlocking GPU powered Kubernetes in Openstack Magnum with Kolla-Ansible

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AI/ML

Enabling GPU Passthrough in OpenStack with Kolla Ansible for High-Performance Workloads/

Proxmox

Proxmox - Tired of deploying from ISO? Upload VM image

Recently, I had to replace my homelab VMware ESXi server… we all know why. After considering the many open-source options available, I decided on Proxmox due to its similarities with ESXi. Don’t get me wrong—I love OpenStack, but for a single server setup, it felt like too

Docker

OpenStack / Cloud-init - Deploy Docker Ubuntu VM in under 2 minutes

In this guide, I’ll show you how to deploy a fully configured Ubuntu VM with Docker using cloud-init in OpenStack. With this setup, you’ll have Docker up and running in just under two minutes! Prerequisites Before we begin, make sure you have the following ready: * Access to