Compute: Mac Studio
- Apple M2 Max, 64 GB unified memory
- Daily driver for engineering, scripting and documentation
- Host for local AI workloads thanks to the large unified memory
IT Lab
Where I try things first
My lab is where new technologies get tested before they reach production: today that means local AI on Apple silicon, virtualization and a properly segmented network.
Local AI
- Large language models running fully offline on the Mac Studio
- Coding assistants, retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) over my own documents, agents
- Comparing local models with cloud models for quality, speed and privacy
Virtualization
- Proxmox VE for Linux and Windows lab VMs and containers
- Snapshots and templates for quick test environments
Network & Security
- Segmented home network with a dedicated firewall
- VPN access to the lab
- Testing security tooling in an isolated network
Storage & Backup
- NAS for central storage
- Versioned backups with an offsite copy
Home Automation
- Automations and sensors, kept local where possible
Archive
The lab in 2016
For comparison: my lab about ten years ago was a classic Microsoft data center in miniature. It taught me most of what I later used at work.
- Microsoft Windows
- Windows 7/8, Windows Server 2008 R2 and 2012
- Virtualization
- Hyper-V and a VMware cluster (ESXi, vCenter, vMotion, DRS, HA) on shared iSCSI storage
- Directory services
- Active Directory, DNS, DHCP, group policies
- Messaging
- Exchange 2010 → 2013 migration, Edge server, DAG
- Network
- pfSense firewall, PPTP/OpenVPN, site-to-site VPN, DirectAccess with IPv6 and PKI
- Files & databases
- DFS namespaces and replication, SQL Server 2008 failover cluster
- Monitoring
- Nagios with about 30 hosts and 250+ services, SNMP
- Linux
- Debian and CentOS, web server cluster, MySQL replication, Squid proxy
- Applications
- Redaxo, Joomla, WordPress, DokuWiki, Redmine, ownCloud