Overview

Let us get something out of the way immediately. This machine does not host this site. It does not serve it. It does not sit in a rack pretending to be production while quietly judging you.

This is a desk box. Its job is to hold terminals, browser tabs, VS Code, a WireGuard client, and sometimes Spotify, for those moments when the headphones are already on and I realize I forgot to actually turn the music on.

Back in 2020, this machine was built as a Proxmox server. A real one. Not a hobby experiment. It ran nonstop for four years doing exactly what it was told and absolutely nothing more. Elasticsearch installs, reinstalls, migrations, rollbacks, and long staring contests with index settings. Then OpenSearch. Then Timescale and Postgres. Then a half finished “ISP in one server” project that never fully died and still quietly bleeds ideas into my day job.

It lived in the corner, ran hot, pulled real power, and never once asked why.

At the center of it all is an AMD Ryzen Threadripper 3970X. Thirty two cores. Sixty four threads. A CPU socket that looks less like consumer hardware and more like something that should require a waiver before opening. Surrounded by more RAM than any reasonable browser session deserves and enough PCIe lanes to let bad ideas scale without friction.

This was never a polite build.

Eventually the large experiments slowed down. The workloads faded. What remained was the worlds most overqualified file server, guarding about one terabyte of data while quietly costing roughly thirty dollars a month in electricity. Public government datasets that no longer exist. A decade of notes, diagrams, half finished code, and ideas that were not wrong, just unfinished.

One day it was powered down.

Shortly after that, I found myself fighting a Ryzen 5, a SATA SSD, and 16 GB of RAM, watching progress bars inch forward while a perfectly capable monster sat asleep in the corner. That situation did not last.

The server is gone. The workstation remains. It now runs Windows 11. Yes, Windows. Before the Linux torches come out, Linux desktop served me well for years because it matched the work I was doing at the time. If it works for you, keep trucking. Maybe one day it will be the default.

Today was not that day.

This box boots from a 4 TB WD Black Gen4 NVMe, backed by 12 TB of Seagate EXOS storage and a frankly unreasonable 256 GB of DDR4 RAM. Windows throws updates, background nonsense, ads, and whatever else it feels like that week at it. The hardware waits politely and continues without comment.

This machine does exactly one thing now. It holds my working brain. Terminals everywhere. Browser tabs stacked deep. VS Code multiplying quietly. A WireGuard tunnel humming in the background. Spotify occasionally remembered.

This is not production. This is not hosting. This is the cockpit.