In March, I attempted to run DevStack on my newly bought mini PC, but something was wrong and I couldn’t get it started. Since then, I poured all my attention into AI‑related studies. During lunch today, OpenStack came up in conversation, and the idea popped into my head: “Why not use a coding agent to make it work, since I’ve already used one for several issues in my WSL environment?” This post is the result.

Over the past few days, I’ve been using reranker models through cloud APIs as part of my RAG experiments. After successfully running several LLMs locally with llama.cpp, I started wondering: Can I also run a reranker model locally? The answer is yes. It turns out that llama-server can host embedding models, reranker models, and chat models behind the same OpenAI-compatible API. This makes it easy to build a completely local RAG pipeline without relying on external services.