The Homelab

Scored a Mac Mini M2 on Carousell after a week of negotiating; the seller had it listed at a price that didn't reflect the market, and patience closed the gap. It has been my homelab server ever since, managed through OrbStack for container orchestration.

The stack

The Docker side covers media (Jellyfin plus the *arr suite via YAMS for automated library management), network-level ad blocking with Pi-hole, and workflow automation through n8n. Tailscale ties it together for remote access without opening a single port to the internet. Ollama runs local LLM experiments: nothing production-grade, but useful for offline inference testing.

Self-hosting OpenClaw

The same machine runs OpenClaw, an open-source multi-agent system that works over Telegram. I deployed it here and configured it around how I actually use it: the DeepSeek API backend, the agents I keep running (Arbiter for general tasks, Carscout for Singapore used-car research), and the headless browser environment it drives for sites that have no API.

Running it on the homelab rather than a hosted box was the point. It costs nothing per month, browser sessions keep their state on local disk, and Tailscale means I can reach it from anywhere without exposing anything to the open internet.

Getting it stable took the usual operational work: keeping credentials out of the image, giving the browser automation an environment it wouldn't fall out of, and working out what happens when a long-running session dies at 2am.

What it's actually for

It serves media to the household, blocks ads at the DNS level, and gives me a sandbox for containerised deployments outside of work hours.

Modest hardware, but it has taught me more about networking, Docker Compose, service isolation and self-hosting than any tutorial could.