Infrastructure
Hosts and roles, no addresses. Back to systems.
Pinky
The container host, and where most things live — workflow automation, secret management, the vector database, file sync, metasearch. It has a discrete GPU, so open-weight models run locally for anything that shouldn't leave the house.
Containers are defined in files and deployed through Portainer rather than started by hand, after an audit found rather too many that had been.
The Raspberry Pis
Three of them, each doing one job. Small, cheap, and individually disposable — which is the point. Anything that has to keep working while I'm rebuilding Pinky lives here instead.
| Josie | Monitoring, and nothing else. Runs Uptime Kuma, deliberately on separate hardware from everything it watches — because the one thing a monitoring host cannot do is report its own death. Something on Pinky checks Josie in return. |
| Home Assistant | The house. On its own Pi so that lights, sensors and the garage door don't depend on whether I'm halfway through rebuilding a container host. |
| Pi-hole | DNS and ad filtering for the network. Also the single most disruptive box to take offline, which is an argument for it being nothing else. |
A fourth role — a jump box for segmented management access — is on the roadmap rather than in the rack.
Mac mini
The bridge to the things that only exist on macOS — mail and messages — and the host for the attached storage.
Retired
An Unraid server ran all of the above as a single box until 2026. Breaking it into separate failure domains was the best infrastructure decision I've made, and confirming it was actually switched off took embarrassingly longer than moving the services off it.
Network
UniFi throughout — gateway, switching and access points — with services reached over Cloudflare Tunnel rather than forwarded ports. Monitors check over the LAN rather than out and back — thirteen of them once shared a tunnel and turned a single flap into twenty-six alerts.