Looking for a recommendation on an LLM that can guide a user on how to manually set up a home server that runs Jellyfin, Arr Stack, etc. Have a couple of friends interested and I have some spare old NUCs I was going to give them, so I was going to download the software for them and then walk them through it.
But it’ll be difficult to align our schedules for the next month or so (school starting and different time zones) so then I thought maybe I could just run an LLM they could use on my main PC for when they have time.
Why not just use one of the existing services? Those cost extra money and none of us want to financially support those companies.
Interesting question. If you are asking for an LLM (that is self-hosted and can do that?), you’re going to need to provide some significant tooling, like rag / documentation, troubleshooting, sort out concurrency, front end etc. Honestly…it just easier to point them at a YouTube (network chuck has good stuff).
It absolutely can be done and it absolutely can be valuable - for you personally. But if they’re having trouble doing basic things like installing jelly fin, they have zero chance of doing something like that themselves.
Honestly, I think your easiest option for your non-technical friends is just to point them at one of the cloud providers, like chatGPT or Claude.
OTOH, how much work are you willing to put into this and what’s your GPU / LLM set up like? There
Your basic foot in door starting point is going to be installing and provisioning OpenWebui, getting a good local model up and running (Qwen3.6-35B or Qwen3.6-27B) and creating a “Knowledge Base” in OWUI with requisite documentation. You’ll need to set up tailscale / headscale so they can access your OWUI instance from their homes, too.
If you’re serious about this, write back and I’ll thumbnail sketch it out for you. It’s a good project and I’ve done similar. There are real complexities to something like this beyond just “install ollama, lol done”.
I am interested in this in general too. I have a 3090 which I know isn’t much but have been thinking of trying to get a second 3090 and using an NVLink to increase to 48Gb. Mostly for learning and testing purposes, and then to eventually offer to donate to my wife’s local school district a local model they own (since teachers aren’t supposed to put student info online, that includes private LLM models like ChatGPT, but they keep accidentally doing so anyway).
But one project at a time, and setting up this LLM would help my two friends if they have issues (it’s easy to forget for people like us that to nearly everyone else, setting up Jellyfin properly with remote access as well as things like Docker are not easy, even when they have base level knowledge), but it might help others in the future too that might then get interested in self hosting. A 24/7 guide can make a difference I think in someone actually trying self hosting or not.