The book
Hand-Me-Down Homelab
How I built a home lab from old hardware — and an AI runs it
At 6:32 every morning, an AI reads the alert emails my house sent overnight and decides whether any of them need me. Most mornings, none do. The book shows you how to build your own version from whatever is in your drawer. Each chapter says what you'll build, what you need and how hard it is.
- Hardware and network
- An AI sysadmin
- Keeping it alive
- Home Assistant
- Names, certificates and remote access
- Local AI on one graphics card
- Agents and apps
- Files, movies and a radio
- Eyes on the street
- Watching the wire
Every chapter has war stories from the lab: symptom, wrong guess, cause, fix and lesson. PDF and EPUB, with a free sample (the Introduction and Chapter 1), and updates are free.
Companion files
Where the book installs something, a playbook does the work. Each one is written for your AI assistant to carry out on your network: it finds your addresses, asks before anything risky, and checks each step by its effect. They read fine as checklists if you'd rather type the commands yourself.
The playbooks and scripts are free under the MIT license, so you can read them before you buy. The book gives each one a short address, like handmedownhomelab.com/p/6.1-pihole.