My daughter is 13 and autistic. She needs homework help at 9pm sometimes. Every AI tool I looked at was either totally unmonitored, pointed at the open internet, or locked behind a school district policy I had zero visibility into.

I'm an IT admin. I run a homelab. I have an RTX 3060 sitting there. So I built something myself.

This isn't a tutorial. It's a postmortem of everything that failed and what I did to fix it — because the gap between "I have a working Ollama instance" and "this is actually safe for a vulnerable kid" is a lot wider than I expected.

The Stack

Nothing exotic here:

Ubuntu Server 24.04 on local hardware

Ollama for model serving

LiteLLM 1.68.2 as the LLM proxy

Open WebUI 0.8.12 as the front end

TEI reranker container for RAG reranking

PostgreSQL for persistent storage

RTX 3060 12GB doing the inference

Getting this running took an afternoon.…