Several of my homelab projects want a local GPU for inference — running a vision LLM for OCR, offloading work that would otherwise hit a cloud API, keeping a small model resident and fast. So I built a dedicated box for it: a Dell Precision 3640 (i3-10105F, 16 GB) with a Gigabyte RTX 3060 12 GB, running Ubuntu Server and serving a vision model through Ollama.

Two things made this worth writing up. First, the actual GPU-serving setup has a few non-obvious choices (which driver, no CUDA Toolkit, exposing the port safely). Second — the fun part — I made the whole install zero-touch: plug in a USB stick, walk away, and the box comes up on a static IP with SSH pubkey auth ready, no monitor or keyboard ever attached. This post covers both, and both live as reusable docs/scripts in my infra-config repo.

If my main Docker host died tomorrow, how fast could I rebuild it? For a long time the honest answer was “slowly, and from memory.” The fix is to treat the box’s configuration as code: every docker-compose.yml, Dockerfile, and config file committed to a private git repo, so reimaging is a git clone and a handful of docker compose up commands.

The trap is that a live Docker tree is a minefield of secrets — .env files, TLS private keys, API tokens hardcoded into compose files — and pushing any of them to GitHub, even a private repo, is a bell you can’t fully un-ring. This post is the repeatable procedure I landed on: what to commit, what to never commit, and the automated checks that keep the second category out.

Two things happened on the same day that looked like problems and weren’t — at least not the problems they appeared to be. My NAS was reporting almost all its RAM in use, which sounds like a leak or an imminent crash. And a TV show I’d grabbed through LunaSea on my phone had downloaded fine but then “wouldn’t import” into the library, which sounds like a broken automation pipeline.

Both are among the most common false alarms in a self-hosted media stack. Neither was what it looked like. Here’s what was actually going on, and the real fixes.