Welcome to the first entry on villeeianrijaaskelainen.org.

If you’re reading this, you’ve caught me at the beginning of a long-term mission. This site is the new home for my professional CV and this blog, all running on a piece of hardware I’ve dubbed the V1Server. This is the story of how my data survived a “thermal crisis” and finally found stability.
The 400GB Weight Class

Most people start a homelab with a few documents. I started by trying to ingest a half a terabyte of personal photo library into Immich. When you’re dealing with nearly half a terabyte of high-resolution memories, every technical choice matters. If the database is slow, the app is unusable. If the CPU is weak, indexing a library of this size can take weeks of constant churning.

The Steam Deck “Oven”

My first attempt was ambitious: running the whole stack on a Steam Deck with CachyOS. The Deck is a marvel of engineering, but I quickly discovered it wasn’t built for a 24/7 indexing job of this scale.

Generating thumbnails and CLIP encoding for half a terabyte of media is a massive sustained CPU load. I watched my idle temps sit at 48°C in a closed cabinet before spiraling toward a thermal shutdown. I quickly learned about “The Oven Effect”—and my first lesson in homelabbing: Hardware intent matters. The Deck is back to its intended use (gaming), and the server has found its true home.

The “Desktop Assist”: Outsourcing the Brain

When the Deck started to sweat under the pressure, I had to pivot. I needed to run the heavy machine learning (Face Detection) without melting my gear.

The Fix: I offloaded the heavy lifting to my Main PC. By using my desktop’s raw horsepower to crunch through the thousands of faces in my library, I saved my server from a meltdown. Once the “brain work” was done, I moved the results back to the stable core. This hybrid approach kept the project alive during the transition.

The Server: HP EliteBook 840 G3 on Debian 13

The V1Server is now a dedicated HP EliteBook running Debian 13 (Trixie). Moving away from “bleeding edge” distros to the rock-solid stability of Debian was the best move I made. Managed via CasaOS, the setup is now built for reliability:

Internal 1TB Drive: Housing the 400GB Immich library and my WordPress sites. Keeping this data on the internal bus ensures the UI stays snappy.

External 1TB Drive: Dedicated to Nextcloud for bulk storage and stability.

Connectivity: Everything is tunneled through Cloudflare, keeping my home network hidden while making my CV and blog accessible to the world.

The Mission Ahead

The 400GB library is indexed and the V1Server is running cool. My next priority is the 3-2-1 backup rule. Before I even think about expanding this infrastructure or taking on more data, I’m focused on ensuring that these 400GB of memories are indestructible.

The journey has officially begun.