Earlier this year I began contributing to [Open Source Ecology]. In February I spent a week at OSE’s campus building out the hangar. In March I spent two weeks at my father’s house in Florida building out Iconic CAD. The kicker is: I live in New Jersey. So how does a desktop guy manage on a small-screen laptop thousands of miles from home? The answer: stalwart server.

Stalwart is the name of my custom made home server running in my garage. I pieced it together with hardware from old gaming computers. I started building out stalwart server and my network because I needed to be in all those different places at once. Stalwart is the key because it meshes four devices together.

My laptop, my desktop, and the raspberry pi that hosts this site all orbit around Stalwart. If I can reach Stalwart from my laptop then I have access to the whole network. When I arrive at OSE’s campus my desktop’s files are sitting right there for use on my laptop. When I’m sitting in the OSE workshop on my laptop I can write to the pi or modify any service on Stalwart. When I return to New Jersey all of my Iconic CAD work is sitting right there on my desktop. This whole system lives off of two tools: WireGuard & Syncthing.

You can think of [Syncthing] as a folder that exists on multiple devices at once. It’s so simple even a grandma could get it. The two devices meet each other and shake each other’s hands. They pass a folder from one to another, back and forth, forever. In my case it sits on the desktop and laptop sharing all of my working files using the server as a middleman. I even routed my phone’s camera folder straight to the network. No more emailing myself pictures.

[Wireguard] does the dirty work that syncthing cannot. It is NOT simple enough for a grandma to understand but she may understand it as ‘a magical wire across the sky’. This particular wire connects my laptop to Stalwart. I can type ssh server into my terminal and voila full access to Stalwart and the Pi. I can maintain, upgrade, and edit Stalwart + deploy new articles to this site from across the world with this magical wire.

Naturally with home servers the sky is the limit. I already run a [monero node] & [i2p router] on Stalwart. Though, again, the laptop can access this from anywhere in the world, this is considered a dormant home server. You can think of this as the foundation, the wheels, the first steps to much more. V2 is coming with self-hosted AI, a git instance, systemd-less, and the rest of the fixings. Stalwart has to walk before it can run.