Self-hosted infrastructure
The homelab. Hypervisor decisions, container layout, network storage, off-host backup, integration with daily-driver desktop, and surviving upgrades.
Recipes in this chapter
Backup & Recovery
How to protect your OpenClaw workspace, configuration, and memory from data loss. Encrypted backups, restore testing, and disaster recovery planning.
Updated 2026-05-31Desktop Integration: The Daily Driver as a Peer
Most homelab writeups treat the desktop as a dumb client that connects to the server. I run it the other way too. My always-on Linux agent host SSHes into the Windows 11 daily driver, mounts its…
Updated 2026-06-04Homelab Topology: The Map
This is the floor plan of my homelab. One hypervisor, a pile of LXC containers, a couple of VMs, and a backup server that lives on the same box it protects. It covers what runs where, how I split LXC…
Updated 2026-06-04NAS and Network Storage Mounts
How to wire network storage into a Linux host so a powered-off peer never hangs your boot, an agent never deletes irreplaceable data, and a consumer NAS never silently corrupts a backup chunkstore.…
Updated 2026-06-04OpenClaw Host Topology
A production agent host is not just one daemon. It is config, channels, cron, memory, browser automation, plugins, health checks, and the boring glue that keeps all of it observable.
Service Isolation: One Service Per Container
I run my homelab as a pile of small, boring, unprivileged LXC containers. One service each. Not one fat VM with a docker-compose monolith, not a single Debian box hand-fed twelve daemons. This guide…
Updated 2026-06-04Upgrade Hygiene: Surviving openclaw update
Every OpenClaw minor release has, at least once, silently regenerated my systemd unit and dropped custom directives. If you don't plan for this, the gateway crash-loops at 4am and you find out over…
Updated 2026-05-06