Systems

Most of what I write about happens here. Roles and stacks, no addresses — this is a description, not a map.

Hosts

Name	Role
Pinky	The container host. Most services run here — workflow automation, secret management, local model inference, a vector store, self-hosted file sync, metasearch.
Josie	Monitoring, and nothing else. Deliberately separate hardware from everything it watches.
A Mac mini	The bridge to things that only exist on macOS: mail, calendar, messages.

Containers managed through a web UI, with stacks defined in files rather than clicked into existence.
Workflow automation for scheduled jobs — the largest single source of silent failure in the estate, by a wide margin.
Open-weight models running locally on a discrete GPU in the container host, for anything that shouldn't leave the house.
Centralised secrets. Nothing in a script, nothing in a note.
A NAS plus direct-attached storage for bulk data.
Uptime monitoring with alerting to a chat client, covering both services and the automations themselves.

Each of these was written after something broke in a way that took too long to notice.

Silence is not health. The absence of a signal has to be actively detected. It is never noticed passively.
Fail loudly. A caught error is an invisible error. Most schedulers report success unless something throws.
Watch the watcher. Monitoring has to be monitored by something it doesn't control.
Survive a reboot. Verify autostart from the persisted process list. Don't assume the process manager kept it.
Break the alert once. An untested alert path is an assumption, not a control.