Chicago, Illinois. Est. whenever the first laptop got a static IP.
A homelab with the confidence of a Fortune 500 company and the budget of a guy who buys used enterprise SSDs on the internet.
River Otter Labs is what happens when one person in a Chicago apartment decides that "the cloud" is just somebody else's computer and that somebody else should be him. It is a rack of laptops, two small supercomputers, a network that has been fixed more times than it has been broken, and a number of internet domains that seemed like a good idea at 11pm.
Officially, we are a research institution. Unofficially, we are the reason the WiFi went out that one Sunday in July. We have since bought Ethernet cables. Lesson learned. Lesson written down. Lesson forgotten and relearned.
"Why is it called River Otter Labs?" Because river otters are clever, they spend most of the day playing with rocks, and when they need to get somewhere fast they lie down and slide. This is also our engineering philosophy.The Founder and Chief Otter
Two small AI boxes run large language models locally so we never have to say "let me ask the cloud." They mostly get asked whether the kettle is on. They are very good at this.
128 GB of memory, 1 kettleAn autonomous fantasy football manager that sets lineups, works the waiver wire, reads the injury reports, checks the weather at kickoff, and has opinions about Denver's altitude. It has been given full control. We will report back.
Weapons hot since draft nightA survival world for the kids, with a live map, nightly backups, an in-game assistant that hands out snacks but never diamonds, and an irradiated wasteland the Lab built for reasons nobody can fully explain.
Whitelist only, sorryA punch list app that runs the house: to-dos, groceries by store, thermostats, the laundry, the robot vacuum, and text-message reminders. It has a tab called Bangers. Ask us about the Bangers.
ottjott.comTwo edge servers, one in Ohio and one in a data center we have never visited, front every site here with automatic failover. Overkill for a blog. Exactly right for a lab that likes green checkmarks.
90/10 weighted, health checkedEverything is backed up nightly to a repurposed DVD-ripping machine, then mirrored offsite. We have tested the restore. Once. It worked. We are choosing to believe it still does.
3-2-1, roughlyOur main servers are laptops with the lids taped shut, all named after a toy kitchen and numbered. Nobody remembers why. Nobody is allowed to rename them.
Twenty-one terabytes of movies and music on a shelf of external drives. It sat unplugged for a year. It came back. Its hostname is a grudge.
A tiny computer that blocks ads for the whole house. Small, warm, and the first thing everyone blames when a website will not load.
An enterprise network switch with far too many ports, installed next to the washing machine. It took three attempts to factory reset. The manual lied. The reset button did not.
Standings, week-by-week scores, rosters, the weekly ten-dollar top score, points leaders across all eighty teams, and the Super Bowl race, for every one of the eight CSG leagues. Read only. No login. Bring your excuses.
A live top-down map of the kids' world. If you see a giant crater, that was on purpose.
A personal essay and an interactive cookie decorator. The cookies are supposed to look bad. That is the point of the essay.
Every public service, checked every minute, so the Lab can find out something is down before the group chat does.
Matt Bishop. Founder, and the person who has to explain all of this to the Otter Wrangler.
Matt on LinkedInJessy Allen. Keeps the founder, the kettle, and the robot vacuum in line, and finds every bug by using the software the way an actual person would. Correctly noted that river otters do not hold hands.
Jessy on LinkedIn