2 year project to make a Homelab Powered by Coax, Tailscale, and Local LLM

Spent the past two years setting up the home network in our townhome and flesh our useful homelab projects:

Hardware Stack:

Backbone- Wi-Fi 7 Mesh Gateway pushing through a MoCA 2.5 coax backbone across 3 floors, I upgraded legacy MOCA throughout the entire home for this since original splitters and couplers were from 2006.

Tier 1 Core- 10-Bay Intel 12500 NAS (72TB HDDs, 32GB DDR4) running 24/7. Handles Jellyfin for the Apple TVs, Wake on LAN requests, Home Assistant, and local DNS.

Tier 2 Edge AI- M4 Pro MacBook Pro with 24GB RAM serving as a low-power, high-VRAM endpoint for 14B models. I use this mostly for reading medical literature and helping me process large amounts of research data. When at home it is connected via thunderbolt Ethernet adapter, and can easily undock it to use it on the go.

Tier 3 Gaming & Burst Compute- High-TDP 9800X3D/9070 XT/32GB DDR5 Gaming Rig asleep most of the time, triggered via WoL for Sunshine AV1 game streaming to my living room HTPC (5800x in Eco mode/32GB DDR4/RTX 5060 LP) and Steam Deck.

Overlay: Tailscale ties it all together for remote access.

This was a huge labor of love but honestly as a non-tech person, this was a really fun experience to go through and I was able to build out some really cool home computing capabilities in the process that have exceeded my expectations.

Cheers!