My Home Lab
A home lab is a personal technology environment where I can experiment, learn, and run real-world use cases outside of production systems. It integrates closely with my home network, allowing me to stay connected to both home and lab resources no matter where I am.
The home lab enables me to:
- Maintain seamless connectivity between home and lab environments wherever I go.
- Experiment with new technologies and solutions.
- Establish secure connectivity between multiple home locations, so resources can be shared over private IP tunnels (e.g., centralized storage or remote desktop access).
Core Home Network
The foundation of my lab relies on a secure and redundant home network, designed to balance performance, reliability, and flexibility.
- Dual internet connectivity for redundancy and load sharing
- UniFi Cloud Gateway for security and Layer 3 VLAN management
- Proxmox hypervisor for virtualization
- Unifi access points and controller for wireless connectivity
- Pi-hole DNS for malware and ad filtering
- Squid proxy for secure VPN routing (e.g., DNS traffic)
- Synology storage for centralized data
- Proxmox VMs hosting core public-facing services
- Gigabit switches for Layer 2 connectivity
- VyOS for advanced routing
- WireGuard VPN for secure remote access
- ZeroTier SD-WAN for seamless multi-site connectivity
Recent Upgrades
My home infrastructure has been enhanced with the following upgrades:
- Upgraded to Gigabit PoE switches for higher throughput and integrated power delivery.
- Replaced the Sophos firewall with a Unifi Cloud Gateway featuring:
- Application-aware Layer 7 firewall
- Intrusion Prevention & Detection (IPS/IDS)
- Ad blocking
- Centralized management via the Unifi Controller
Home Lab Environment
The home lab is a subset of the network, consuming shared core resources but fully isolated from the core network with dedicated Layer 3 VLANs and strict firewalling.
This ensures experiments remain secure and separate from production services.
Infrastructure deployments are automated using Terraform for Infrastructure as Code (IaC), while Ansible manages configuration and orchestration across virtual machines and containers.
Applications in the Home Lab
I run and experiment with a wide range of applications in the lab, including:
- Nagios – network monitoring
- Uptime Kuma – real-time outage alerts
- Lubelogger – vehicle service history maintenance
- Multiple proxies (Squid & SOCKS) – for testing and experiments
- Flame – dashboard interface
- Portainer – Docker management
- Plex Media Server – media streaming
- Home Assistant – smart home automation
- Grafana – monitoring and visualization
- InfluxDB – time-series database for metrics
- MongoDB – database experiments
- Terraform – infrastructure automation (IaC)
- Ansible – configuration management and orchestration
- WireGuard – secure tunneling
- OpenVPN – remote access
- Pi-hole – DNS filtering and ad blocking
- Kemp Load Balancer – traffic distribution and high availability