Category: Hardware
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Four freezes, no logs: retiring a Proxmox node without knowing why it died
A ThinkCentre in my homelab kept hard-freezing and left nothing behind. This is how I narrowed it down, and why I swapped it out before I had the answer.
My Proxmox cluster,
thefellowship, runs on three small machines. Thorin, a Lenovo ThinkCentre M90q Gen 3 with an i5-12500T, carried the media side of the house: Jellyfin, qBittorrent, the *arr stack, and Frigate, the camera NVR.Read more about Four freezes, no logs: retiring a Proxmox node without knowing why it died
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Three Years Without Buying a Drive
A year ago, running out of disk space was a shopping problem. You waited for a sale, bought a bigger drive, and moved on.
That’s over for now. AI data centres are buying up the world’s memory and flash, and it’s spread to hard drives too. RAM, SSDs and hard drives all cost two to five times what they did twelve months ago, depending on the part. I already skipped buying a second offsite drive in my backup post because a 16 TB disk had become absurd.
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8 Tokens a Second
Eight tokens a second. That is the number that ended my experiment with running AI locally, and it is the reason my personal AI stack now sits on someone else’s GPUs.
I did not want that outcome. I run a homelab specifically because I like owning the thing that does the work. But after a few months of trying, the honest answer is that local inference did not earn its place, and the reasons are more interesting than “it was slow”.
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The Pi That Can’t Run a Browser
A 2012 Raspberry Pi, a 320×240 touchscreen, and four things that failed silently while reporting success.
I have a dashboard. It runs in a container, it pulls from five services, and it lives at a URL. Which means I see it when I go and look at it, which is less often than I intended when I built the thing.
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The ¥45,800 Offsite Backup
I did not go to Japan to buy a laptop. I wasn’t even intending to buy the parts for a desktop that was supposed to be a server, which is its own story. But a second-hand ThinkPad X13 sitting on a shelf at ¥45,800 is the kind of thing that follows you home, and at 125.3 yen to the Singapore dollar that worked out to S$366.
For S$366 I got six cores, 32GB of RAM and a machine that now holds the only copy of my homelab that does not live in my house. That last part is what this post is actually about. The laptop is the cheap bit. The job it does is an interesting outcome of my homelab journey.