📖 About

The story behind the lab and the person who built it.

How It Started

From a single board computer to enterprise-grade iron.

  • The Raspberry Pi Era Started self-hosting on a Raspberry Pi 4 — enough to catch the bug, but quickly hit the ceiling on what it could run.
  • The R630 Discovery Found that Dell PowerEdge R630 servers go for surprisingly cheap on the used market. Bought two. The specs per dollar blew anything consumer-grade out of the water.
  • Proxmox VE Chose Proxmox as the hypervisor for its flexibility — running both full VMs for heavier workloads and lightweight LXC containers side by side.
  • GPU Workloads Added two Nvidia Tesla P4 GPUs to a dedicated VM for AI/LLM inference — powering local models without any cloud dependency.
  • Learning Linux The biggest unexpected outcome: a deep, hands-on education in Linux, networking, virtualization, and systems administration that no course could fully replicate.
  • Today 96 CPU threads, 156.97 GiB RAM, 7+ running services, and it keeps growing.
“

I saw that R630 servers are cheap, bought two, and have learned a crazy amount about Linux since. It started as an upgrade from a Raspberry Pi 4 and turned into something I'm genuinely proud of.

— Austin Holdheide

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Skills Built Along the Way
Linux Administration Proxmox VE Networking Docker Reverse Proxying VPN Setup GPU Passthrough AI / LLMs Self-Hosting Systems Debugging
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