As we looked around the house and saw all the possibilities to upgrade the tech in every way, it was inspiring. Realistically, this place is kind of a blank slate for us to play with and make it over however we want, at least from that standpoint.
I know that this next step would be one of the biggest projects I’ve ever undertaken though, and if it’s going to be big, then let’s see what we can squeeze into the small(ish) budget I’m working with for this one.
Our requirements for a server were both fairly simple and still quite honestly beyond the realm of what I’ve worked on before. And as someone who’s been working with computer builds since the mid-90s, that’s actually saying something. Privacy became the driving theme though, as we talked about what we wanted more and more.
We needed to have at least enough storage to cover our combined cloud space on things like Dropbox and Google Drive, plus the ability to have the same functionality to write and edit shared docs in real time like in the Google office suite. We wanted to get away from sharing our search data with Google, so I looked into private/local search projects. Not a fan of ads popping up and clogging my web pages or whatever, and I’d heard of projects like Pi-hole, so some kind of network-wide ad blocker was added to the list. There’s also the obvious need for network monitoring as well, which is fairly standard.
We already owned a Samsung smart fridge and brought it with us from Los Angeles, so we knew we liked having the ability to monitor our appliances and things. As we’re building things out with additional smart appliances and other devices, we want to have Home Assistant running as well, as we’re looking to go open source as much as possible.
Eventually we want to have an in-house office-style phone setup with extensions in at least my office, the bedrooms, the kitchen, and the basement workshop. Bonus points if it has an Android app for us to use our mobile phones when we’re away from an office extension. I’m wondering if there’s way to do this via tablets in every room, for that matter. Could have our Home Assistant screen and our in-house comms, all in one maybe? I’m sure someone has done it, so I’ll need to check how it could work for us.
And then the big one. I wanted to have a locally hosted AI suite to take the place of ChatGPT and the rest, so after some reading on the subject, I chose Ollama to keep all of my AI use in-house. I’m not looking to create something to rival an AI datacenter or anything, but I think it’s reasonable to want a private setup that I can train on my own data and systems to help with my day to day here.
As we talked about it more and more, my SO turned to me and said, “So do we name the server JARVIS?”
Hell yeah, we’re naming it JARVIS. I’ve been a superhero guy since early childhood, and I am a long time fan of Iron Man, going back to the early 80s. Way back before there was a JARVIS AI running things for Tony, in fact. But I really loved the MCU version of things.
Now our JARVIS won’t be quite at the level of some of the others people have built out there, especially in the beginning, but I have a lot of ideas for bringing him to life for us, with all of the systems being locally hosted for privacy.
So yeah, we’re naming the server JARVIS. I’ll be showing all of this in a series of posts that will be categorized as “Building JARVIS” on the site.
For now, thanks for reading along here, everyone. Until next time, get out there and build the world you want to play in!
