Business phone service — RingCentral and the like — runs $20–35 per seat per month, locks your desk phones to their firmware, and puts your dial tone at the mercy of someone else’s cloud. I replaced all of it with a self-hosted PBX that costs a few dollars a month in actual usage, keeps every phone on hardware I own, and adds something the commercial offerings either charge extra for or simply don’t do: push-to-talk intercom between rooms. Dial the kitchen, it answers itself on speaker, you talk.

The whole thing is four Docker containers on one host, one DNS record on another, and a single SIP trunk in the cloud. Everything else is a text file.

A note on the examples: this runs on my real network with real family phone numbers on it. Every phone number, personal name, and account identifier below is synthetic — invented for illustration and drawn from the 555-01xx range reserved for fiction. The configuration is real and copied verbatim from the running system; only the personal data is swapped. If you build one of these, keep your own credentials and family numbers out of your blog. I’m practicing what I preach.

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.

Learn how to set up a complete CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions that automatically deploys a Flask application to Docker containers. This guide covers integrating Tailscale for secure remote access, configuring SSH authentication, and implementing continuous deployment without exposing your server to the public internet.