The Local LLM Lab — Part 12

One controlled experiment. One number. One verdict.

A home server is a stack of things that can fail. 59 containers. 94 active systemd units. A GPU with models on it. A network of ports, a registry, a CI runner, a media server, a photo library, an LLM observability stack. Any one of them can die, and the question is never "will it fail" — it's "will you know, and will it come back."

I instrumented the whole stack: every container has a health check, every critical service has an uptime probe, and the monitor watches both. Over the last 7 days the probes ran 10,000 checks. This is what they found — and it is not a clean 100%. One probe target has been refusing connections for the entire window, and the monitor flagged it on day one.…