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Private AI: Self-hosting an AI Chatbot on Linux

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sun, 16 Aug 2026 20:00:00 +0200

After I wrote my previous post about running a local AI chatbot on a Mac mini, a few people asked me about doing so on Linux instead. It seems like it feels really wrong for some people to run servers on macOS, and understandably so. I would not have done it myself if not for the current chip shortage. I already had this Mac mini, which I had bought even before all of this chip madness began, and I wanted to deploy my local LLM chatbot. So, it was more of a necessity than a wish.

Private AI: Self-hosting an AI Chatbot on a Mac mini

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Tue, 31 Mar 2026 10:25:00 +0200

I’m a firm believer that the future of AI is private deployments. By concentrating so much power in the hands of a few corporations we will inevitably find ourselves in a dystopian future.

Some time ago I started to wonder: what would it take to self-host my own “Claude” or “ChatGPT”?

Most of the time I use LLM chatbots as a very advanced search engine. But what I actually need it for is to help me navigate numerous documents written in legal German (as if regular German weren’t difficult enough, people invented the legal version of it). Obviously, the problem here is privacy. Under no circumstances can I trust my personal documents to a third-party.

Code Maintainability Is Not Always a Technical Problem

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sat, 05 Jul 2025 18:19:58 +0200

Context #

First, who am I to even talk about it? What is my background?

I’ve been building software for the last 15 years. I’ve worked at 8 companies ranging from small startups to one of the biggest tech companies in the world.

At the moment I primarily work on Beats. A few facts about this repository (July 2025):

~15 teams work on it
918 unique contributors (including external ones)
4,183 Go files
653,168 lines of code
45,205 pull requests

So, it’s a relatively big project with quite a few people working on it. Let’s take my path from onboarding to the present day as an example for this article.

The Battle

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Mon, 16 Jun 2025 00:00:00 +0100

This track was very long in the making.

I wrote the first version in March 2020 for my custom baritone guitar. The guitar tuning is actually Dropped A (A E A D F# B).

At that time I was still unsatisfied with some parts and took a break for some time. Later I was returning to writing now and then, and at some point it seemed finished. When it came to recording guitar, I really struggled. You see, I’m not practicing guitar that much. I use it as my music-writing instrument, but I’m not a good guitar player. It was very tough for me to play these parts, and this track turned out to be harder to record than I anticipated. I tried a few times but was never satisfied with the results. So, I abandoned this idea completely.

My road to IRONMAN 70.3

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sun, 01 Oct 2023 00:00:00 +0000

It was a typical weekend of 2018 when I went to see a new movie. As usual, the movie theatre played a few commercials and trailers before the actual movie started. This was one of the played commercials:

First, you see a woman who is training for a triathlon race and apparently her family, particularly her daughter, does not really understand why she is wasting so much time on it instead of being with her family. But then the story unfolds: we start seeing that this woman was in a tragic accident where she barely survived and lost her leg. Eventually, her daughter understands the “why” and realises how important it is for her mum and how important it is to support her.

Why run?

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Fri, 11 Nov 2022 00:00:00 +0000

Short Answer #

The short answer is:

“

It makes me happy, it makes me better

„

Not satisfied? Welcome to the long version…

Long Answer #

I always hesitated to give a long answer in person. Mainly, because it required me to communicate so many things in a short amount of time and, most likely, I would not be able to find the best words to do so. Fortunately, smart people invented writing which allows us to be better at choosing the best words.

Paranoid Habits. Privacy Tips

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Wed, 10 Mar 2021 12:01:16 +0100

Recently I gave a talk to my colleagues where I shared some information about the modern state of data collection and privacy violation. It’s impossible to avoid all of the tracking but one can take some steps to minimize the amount of collected data.

Why Care about Privacy? #

Surprisingly, when I raise privacy questions I often get something like:

“

Why should I care?
I have nothing to hide, I obey the law.

Riding in Granada, Spain

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sun, 29 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0100

I like traveling. Bragging facts:

I’ve visited 15 countries
I’ve been to 32 places
I’ve spent a total of 102 days in traveling.

Since I got my motorbike license, I’ve had 2 big trips that went particularly well: Lanzarote and this one – Granada in Spain. It went so well with Lanzarote that in Granada we even took a guided tour from a local company (details later), and I filmed our trip on camera (only pictures before). What beautiful footage has come out! It was totally worth doing.

My automated backups to AWS S3 with client-side AES256

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sun, 08 Dec 2019 00:00:00 +0000

What I was looking for. Requirements #

The reason I didn’t just start using some backup software with built-in encryption is a pure lack of trust. So, if you’re fine with someone managing your backups, you might think the approach described here is a total overkill. And it’s okay. But there are some people out there who have the same trust issues that I do and they might find this article useful, so I write it for them. And also for myself, as a write-up what I did.

Paranoid Habits. Security Tips

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sat, 23 Mar 2019 12:01:16 +0100

Recently I gave a talk to my colleagues where I shared some tools I use to secure my online presence and communication. Some of the listed things can be very technical but some of them I believe are crucial to know as a part of the daily life in the modern world.

Disclaimer #

I’m not a security expert, please check every word I write.

Although, I have some experience in basic pen-testing and I have exposed some vulnerabilities in the past, I don’t consider myself an expert in this area. There are people out there whose full-time job is information security and I’m not going to pretend I’m one of them. I just do some CTFs as a hobby and build software as my daily job, so it gives me enough knowledge to write such articles and give such talks but does not make me an expert.

How to secure your web apps (at least a little bit)

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sun, 10 Mar 2019 10:05:39 +0100

Disclaimer #

I’m not a security expert, please check every word I write.

Talks

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Wed, 06 Mar 2019 00:00:00 +0100

All dates are in yyyy-mm-dd format.

📝 – write up post
🎬 – video
📇 – slides
📎 – related code/demo/attachment

In English 🇬🇧 #

2026-03-26 Private AI: Running an LLM Chatbot on Your Local Network 📝 📇
2026-01-20 Elastic Agent: Ingesting log files, how hard can it be? 📇
2025-08-15 Maintainable Software Podcast: When Consistency Becomes a Culture
2020-03-10 Thursday Talk @ Contiamo: Paranoid Habits. Privacy Tips 📝 📇
2019-03-21 Thursday Talk @ Contiamo: Paranoid Habits. Security Tips 📝 📇
2018-10-11 Thursday Talk @ Contiamo: How to secure your web-app 📝 📇 📎
2016-08-26 JSConf Iceland 2016: Progressive rendering – how to make your apps to render sooner 🎬 📇
2016-03-17 BerlinJS: Progressive rendering with Catberry.js 📇 📎

По-русски 🇷🇺 #

2015-05-22 В гостях у компании Enterra: Зачем изоморфный JavaScript? Почему Catberry.js? 🎬 📇
2015-03-28 CodeFest 2015: Изоморфный JavaScript – Будущее уже здесь 🎬 📇
JSib — сообщество JavaScript-разработчиков в Новосибирске
- 2015-01-17 Знакомство и амбициозные планы 🎬 📇
- 2015-01-17 Распространённые ошибки в JavaScript 🎬 📇
- 2015-03-21 Изоморфный фреймворк Catberry 🎬 📇
- 2015-04-25 Многообещающий JavaScript – Promises 🎬 📇
- 2015-09-19 Отзывчивый UI без блокировки Event Loop 🎬 📇 📎

Riding on Lanzarote, Spain

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Tue, 25 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100

This is the first time we went somewhere after I got my motorbike license, so “why not rent a bike and explore the whole island by riding together” we thought. Now, looking back, I’d say it was a bit sketchy because I had not have enough experience riding in mountains before but, in the end, it went well, I was very careful and didn’t try to ride above my abilities.

Cyber City

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sun, 16 Apr 2017 00:00:00 +0100

I’ve been a big fan of the Ghost in the Shell anime for a long time. I also really liked the Stand Alone Complex show. So, when I learned that there would be a movie, I was very excited. I had so many ideas of what it could be, so many high expectations.

I went to see the movie and got very disappointed in the story the filmmakers chose to tell in Ghost in the Shell movie. Instead of taking a risk and telling a new story in that universe, they just took the best things from the original anime and the show I mentioned above and created a monster. Oh, well. At least visually, it was great.

.strandberg* Boden OS7 — my perfect guitar

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sun, 15 Jan 2017 00:00:00 +0100

In my previous post I promised to write about the .strandberg* guitar I had ordered. It definitely deserved a separate post. I’m going to share all my thoughts on the .strandberg* Boden OS7: all the upsides and downsides I found, how I fixed what I didn’t like in it, and how I eventually made a perfect guitar for myself.

A short disclaimer: this post is my personal opinion, and nobody paid me to write this.

Chasing a perfect guitar

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Thu, 15 Dec 2016 00:00:00 +0100

Disclaimer #

A guitar or its sound is a very subjective topic. I don’t claim that I know the best about guitars and any related gear. Everything written here is my personal opinion according to my preferences and experiences (which I don’t have much of).

How It All Started #

I can’t remember exactly when my parents bought me my first guitar, but I have this picture from May 20th, 2005, where I play my very first guitar ever.

Space

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Mon, 24 Oct 2016 00:00:00 +0100

This single is my first ever finished work with live guitars.

What I used:

Guitar: Gibson SG Standard
Bass: Ibanez SR300EB-CA
Guitar FX: Zoom G3

Inside The Machine

denis@rdner.de (Denis Rechkunov) — Sun, 01 Feb 2015 00:00:00 +0100

This album is my first ever experiment with producing music. The idea was to express in music how one would feel inside a busy computer processing signals and working hard. The focus was definitely on the percussion.

Just to manage your expectations: I had never produced any electronic music before I worked on this. I didn’t try to match a certain genre or mimic someone, also most of the samples are taken from existing libraries.