GridLink

gaia is a three-node Proxmox cluster. Two nodes must agree for the cluster to accept changes, so any single node can fail or reboot without taking the others with it.

Storage deliberately sits outside the cluster. A compute-host failure can interrupt its services. Quorum is not automatic failover, and recovery depends on the affected workload and available backups.

The house's nervous system. It talks to the lights, locks, thermostats, cameras, sensors, and speakers, then runs the rules that tie them together, all on local hardware.

Because it is self-hosted, an internet outage does not stop a light switch from working, and no device vendor can end-of-life the house.

A voice assistant that answers to “cortex” and never phones home. Wake word, speech recognition, the language model, and the voice itself all run on a graphics card in this house.

When more than one microphone hears you, they compare how loud you were and the nearest one answers, so you are never replied to twice.

A photo library that does what Google Photos does: phone backup, albums, and search by face or by object. The originals are stored on your own infrastructure, with off-site backup handled separately.

Face and object search is indexed on local hardware, so nothing is uploaded to be catalogued by someone else.

A media server for films and television. It catalogues a library, fetches artwork and metadata, and streams to a TV, phone, or laptop, converting the format on the fly when a device cannot play the original.

The library lives on storage dedicated to media, so a busy movie night never competes with backups for disk.

A full mail server, not a forwarding trick. It receives, stores, and sends mail for its own domains, and speaks JMAP as well as the older IMAP and SMTP, so modern clients get modern sync.

A second mail exchanger elsewhere holds inbound mail during an outage and hands it over once the server is reachable again.

File sync and sharing across desktop, phone, and web, in the shape of Dropbox or OneDrive. Folders can stay online-only until opened, so a laptop does not need room for everything.

Files are stored as ordinary files rather than an opaque blob store, which means they remain readable even without the software that put them there.

Notes and long-form writing, kept as plain Markdown files in a folder rather than locked inside an application's database.

The vault syncs through Nextcloud, so every device sees the same notes without a subscription in the middle.

A recipe box. Paste a URL and it pulls out the ingredients and the method, then strips away the life story and the adverts wrapped around them.

Recipes turn into meal plans and a shopping list, and they stay readable years after the original blog goes offline.

Task and project tracking: lists, boards, due dates, and reminders. It is the single place work gets written down, whether that work is a product release or replacing a smoke alarm battery.

The house's DNS server. Every device asks it to turn a name into an address, which means it can refuse the ones belonging to ad networks and trackers before a single request leaves the network. Nothing needs installing on the phones and TVs.

It also answers for names that exist only on the local network, so the same address works whether you are at home or away.

A feed reader. Sites are followed directly by their own feeds, so what shows up is what was published, in the order it was published, with nothing ranked or injected in between.

Save an article now, read it later. It keeps a clean copy of the text, which means the piece survives a paywall going up or the page quietly disappearing.

Spreadsheets that behave like a real database: typed columns, relationships between tables, and forms and views on top. Useful whenever a spreadsheet has outgrown being a spreadsheet.

A search front end that asks several engines on your behalf and merges the answers. The engines see the server asking, not you, and no profile is built from what you look for.

A legacy service launcher that is being retired. The family uses the GridLink portal; monitoring and alerts now live in Vantage.

Combines uptime checks, fleet health, updates, backup monitoring and repair history. Its Android companion receives alerts, and an independent watchdog checks Vantage itself. Uptime Kuma and ntfy were retired in September 2026.

The control panel for everything running in a container: what is deployed, from which definition, and whether the last deploy worked. New services are added here rather than by hand on a terminal.

Talks directly to Zigbee sensors, buttons, and bulbs through a local radio, so they answer to this house instead of to the manufacturer's cloud. It also frees them from needing a separate hub per brand.

A private place for medical records, test results, and readings from wearables, pulled together from the various portals that each hold one piece of the picture.

A browser front end for driving coding sessions on the machine that holds the graphics card, so the work can be picked up from any screen in the house.

Turns a spare screen into a digital photo frame that pulls from the same photo library, so the pictures on the wall are the pictures everyone is already taking.

A visual editor for the automation rules that run the house, so a rule can be read and changed as a diagram instead of as a wall of configuration.

Watches every running container for a newer published version and reports what is behind. It only ever reports: nothing installs itself, so an update stays a decision rather than a surprise.