cliffaxle5

That’s a pretty clean setup for a 24/7 box. Front intake through the radiator makes sense in that style of case, especially if you’ve got good exhaust up top and rear to keep the warm air moving out instead of pooling around the board and drives. Those temps look real comfortable, especially with the pump and fans not even running hard. I’d probably keep an eye on dust buildup on that front radiator since it’s acting as the intake filter now, but otherwise that should be a nice quiet long-term setup. The wake-for-backups idea is a good one too — that would make the server a lot more useful without depending on whether someone used the workstation that week.

That’s a solid starter setup, especially keeping it LAN-only first. One thing I’d add for beginners: if the server PC is running a firewall, make sure UDP 28015 is allowed locally, otherwise the server can look fine in the console but the clients still won’t connect. Also worth setting the server machine to a static LAN IP or DHCP reservation in the router. That way the `client.connect 192.168.x.x:28015` address doesn’t randomly change after a reboot. Once the basic setup works, then it’s much easier to move on to service files, auto-updates, backups, or opening it up for friends outside the house.

That’s a solid “get it running first, fancy stuff later” setup. One thing I’d add for anyone doing this at home: give the server box a static LAN IP or a DHCP reservation in the router, otherwise that 192.168.x.x address can change later and everyone gets to enjoy the classic “why did my server vanish?” mini-game. Also, if Ubuntu’s firewall is enabled, make sure UDP 28015 is allowed on the server. For LAN only you usually won’t touch the router, but the local firewall can still bite you. Once it’s working, tossing the start script into a systemd service makes restarts a lot cleaner too.

That’s a pretty slick way to use hardware that would otherwise just sit there sipping power and judging you. I like the choice of keeping the two Ollama boxes independent instead of trying to make one “cluster brain” out of them, way less fragile and a lot easier to troubleshoot when something acts dumb at 11 PM. The dispatcher idea is the neat part here, especially with Wake-on-LAN baked in. For Obsidian, I’d probably lean toward Open WebUI Knowledge/RAG first, just because it keeps Raymond as the one front door instead of turning every app into its own special snowflake integration.