Using both a 16B MacBook Air and a 32B Mac mini for LLM Experiments: My Setup

I have a setup that other people might find useful. I leave my M2Pro MacMini tucked away always running headless. I use the Tailscale service to assign a “sort of” IP address to the MacMini - in fact, other devices must have TailScale installed and all devices need to be using the same configuration. I have never used TailScale before so it took almost 20 minutes to setup both my Macs, iPad Pro, and my iPhone.

On my MacMini, I always keep running:

OLLAMA_HOST=0.0.0.0 OLLAMA_CONTEXT_LENGTH=32768 ollama serve

Setting a larger than default context length is crucial. For example running Claude Code using a Ollama hosted model fails with a smaller context.

On my MacBook Air I need to set the OLLAMA_HOST address assigned by Tailscale (set the IP address Tailscale gives you, not the ‘dummy’ one I show here):

$ OLLAMA_HOST=100.122.241.16 ollama list

NAME ID SIZE MODIFIED nemotron-3-nano:latest b725f1117407 24 GB 4 weeks ago

devstral-small-2:latest 24277f07f62d 15 GB 4 weeks ago

....

In Python code:

import os, ollama

_remote = os.getenv(”REMOTE_OLLAMA”)

client = ollama.Client(host=_remote) if _remote else ollama

def completion(prompt):

print(f”\n\n$$ completion: prompt: {prompt}\n\n”)

response = client.chat(

model=”rnj-1”,

messages=[{”role”: “user”, “content”: prompt}]

)

ret = response[”message”][”content”]

print(f”\n\n$$ completion: ret: {ret}\n\n”)

return ret

print(completion(”1 + 3”))

I also find it useful to set a shell script for using ollama on the remote MacMini that I call ‘mollama’:

$ cat ~/bin/mollama

#!/usr/bin/env zsh

OLLAMA_HOST= 100.122.241.16:11434 exec ollama “$@”%

$ chmod +x ~/bin/mollama

uv tool install open-webui --python 3.11

Run using:

OLLAMA_HOST=100.122.241.16 open-webui serve

To NOT show OpenAI models, just models on the MacMini with Ollama:

OLLAMA_HOST=100.122.241.16 OPENAI_API_KEY=’’ OPENAI_KEY=’’ open-webui serve

Note, to uninstall use:

uv tool uninstall open-webui

Set these environment variables:

export ANTHROPIC_AUTH_TOKEN=ollama

export ANTHROPIC_BASE_URL=http://100.122.241.16:11434

export CLAUDE_CODE_DISABLE_NONESSENTIAL_TRAFFIC=1

And then create an alias:

alias CLAUDE=’~/.local/bin/claude --model glm-4.7-flash’

The only hassle with my setup is that even though I keep a few SSH sessions open on the remote MacMini, at least twice a week I find that I need to plug the MacMini into a monitor and keyboard/mouse for admin actions that I can’t easily do on the command line.