Spectre, a self-hosted everything

Spectre is an HP laptop that stopped being a laptop and became the family infrastructure: media server, photo library, password manager, document archive, ebook library, and an offline copy of Wikipedia, all self-hosted on Arch Linux and Docker. Twenty-nine containers, zero restart loops, and no subscription renewals.

The design principle is that nothing is reachable from the public internet. Every service sits behind Tailscale with per-service HTTPS, download traffic is pinned inside a VPN tunnel that fails closed, and I verified the isolation by checking egress IPs rather than trusting the config. Backups are layered: nightly local mirrors with database dumps, versioned document history, and an encrypted offsite set.

The part I am proudest of is not the uptime, it is the honesty. This year I ran a full adversarial audit of my own stack: parallel inspectors combing containers, permissions, backups, and network exposure, with findings verified before they counted. The audit surfaced real problems, including a malicious torrent quietly seeding, world-readable secrets, and a backup script that reported success while skipping failures. Everything found got fixed the same day, and the audit itself became a repeatable practice.

What it demonstrates

Operations discipline applied at home: defense in depth, backup strategy that assumes failure, and the willingness to audit your own work like a hostile stranger would. Self-hosting is my proving ground for taking ownership of systems end to end.