Personal

The Lab

Most people in post don't run their own infrastructure. I do, at work and at home. Here's what's actually running, and what it's for.

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Why bother

Post teams lose days to problems that aren't creative: lost files, mismatched setups, handoffs that break, drives failing when it mattered. I set things up so that happens less often.

Proxmox UNRAID Tailscale

How I Apply It

I work in film and design, not enterprise IT. The habits came from watching teams lose time to things that weren't creative: assets in five places, machines set up differently, handoffs that broke, drives failing when it mattered. I'd rather fix the setup once than have everyone work around it every week.

At Momo that meant designing the studio's whole digital setup: storage, network, review pipeline, and the machines the team worked on. Anywhere else it looks similar — fewer moving parts, fewer surprises when a deadline lands.

It also means I can work from anywhere. I can get into the machines, diagnose an issue and keep production moving without being in the building.

What's Running

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The machines

A handful of boxes at home across macOS, Linux and Windows. One is the workstation I remote into when something needs real horsepower.

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The server

A storage server that also runs the Docker services and the local AI models. Ollama for anything that shouldn't leave the house, plus the automation and the archive work.

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The direction

Almost everything has moved to Unix. Linux where I can, macOS where the software demands it, and Windows is on its way out of the house.

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Getting in

Tailscale on everything, so the lab is reachable from anywhere without opening a port to the internet.

Things I've Built

Saga

macOS · 2026

A native macOS app that merges years of Android WhatsApp backups into a single searchable archive on your own disk — and keeps the messages the phone has since dropped. SwiftUI, SQLite and a local index; on-device summaries through Apple Intelligence or Ollama, with an MCP server for Claude Code. Free, MIT, no account, nothing uploaded.

Site ↗ github.com/surajsunnysumanth/saga ↗ Download ↗

Tools I Use