Building a Self-Hosted AI Development Platform

Forge is an old ASUS dual Xeon workstation — 32GB of RAM, two small SSDs, two 6TB drives — rebuilt into a documented, rebuildable home platform: Proxmox underneath, a ZFS mirror for the data that matters, a Docker host running twenty-odd services, self-hosted Git with CI, and publishing to the internet without a single open router port.

This series is the honest build log. It covers the decisions and their reasoning, but also the failures that shaped them: the local AI that was too slow to keep, the disk that filled to 97% while a metrics stack watched in silence, the DNS toggle that took every public service offline, and the services retired for having no job. Every post follows the same rule — goal, decisions, what broke, what it delivered.

Parts publish in build order. The roadmap below shows where the series has been and where it goes next.