Goodbye HP, Hello Spark — My Homelab Got a Glow-Up

My old server was a brave little soldier. An HP 260 G4 running HyperV, with Ubuntu VMs, with Docker on top — layers stacked like a sad lasagna. It worked. It also wheezed every time I asked it to do anything cooler than serve a webpage. So I replaced it with an NVIDIA DGX Spark. Tiny box. 128 GB of unified memory. Sips ~35 watts at idle. The entire homelab now fits on a shelf and barely shows up on my electric bill. What's running on it now Bambu and I rebuilt the whole Docker stack from scratch. Traefik holding it all together, AdGuard Home (RIP PiHole, you weren't pretty enough), Home Assistant, Portainer, Uptime Kuma, YanWeb powering yansimon.com (no more WordPress — we've got our own thing now), YanHome dashboard, and a bunch more. Every service has its own IP on the LAN like it's a real machine. Looks clean. Feels professional. Probably is professional. The smart home glow-up While I was at it, I redid Home Assistant properly. Every device assigned to a room. Every room a dashboard tab. Now when I say "turn off the lights" it actually means the lights in the room I'm in — not all of them, not none of them. The right ones. It's the difference between a smart home and a home with a lot of toys. Then I shoved AI into it This is the cool part. Home Assistant lets you plug in a local LLM as the brain. So we're running Qwen 3.6 as the primary, with a couple of backup models swapping in depending on the task — all directly on the Spark. Speaks Czech, handles tool calls, fast enough to feel real. "Turn off all the lights downstairs except the hallway and set the bedroom to 20." Done. No cloud. No subscription. No "sorry, I didn't catch that." The Mac Mini M4 stays in the corner as the AI sandbox — Ollama, experimental models, things I don't want crashing my actual house. Production and playground stay separate. Lesson learned the hard way once. Won't be learned again. Worth it? There's something deeply satisfying about pressing a switch and knowing the whole chain — bulb, Zigbee, container, proxy, DNS, the LLM that figured out which lights you meant — is sitting in your own house. No subscriptions evaporating. No company changing pricing. Just a quiet little box, glowing in the corner, running my whole life. 🐼