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.
Easy setup would be to use koboldcpp + SillyTavern + Gemma 4 26B A4B GGUF of the largest quant your graphics card can fit together with your context.
Remember to setup SillyTavern to allow network connections and create a user and password, default installation is localhost only.
Set the temperature to 0.3 if using IQ3_M, higher quants allow higher temperature, and make sure all the formatting templates inside Advanced Formatting are set to Gemma 4.
Then use either Gemma 4 itself or the free google.com AI to create some “W++ Denze with Horizontal Lines summaries for Gemma 4” of the relevant documentation of the latest version of the home server apps your friends are gonna install.
You should ensure the resulting lorebook entries are no more than 1k tokens each to leave some context for your friends chats, add it to a character card in SillyTavern and set some keywords to allow them to load dynamically and not stay in context memory all the time.
Regarding the character card you can ask Gemma 4 to write that for you too, I find “Write a character card in W++ Denze with Horizontal Lines style for Gemma 4 with this name, personality, attitude and skillset” works well for that.
Then ask it to write a “First message prompt that starts with X, continues with Y and ends with Z for that character card” and you get a first draft to rewrite and paste into the “First Message” of the character card. The first message works as a template that Gemma 4 will imitate when you chat with it. Then simply try the chatbot out before letting others use it.
I find my own Gemma 4 26B A4B IQ3_M works well for practicing hiragana and katakana, discussing programming or troubleshoot existing code or writing a small function but it can’t be expected to write a correct DatabaseService.cs from scratch and stuff like that.
Oh and forget about finding good cards and lorebooks for SillyTavern use online, most users use it for NSFW Roleplaying chats. It is a very easy UI to use to create harnesses for your local LLM though.