All Systems Operational

My Home Lab

A resilient, 24/7 production-grade environment that has supported my research and self-hosting needs for over 7 years with minimal downtime. This lab allows me to experiment with enterprise technologies and real-world use cases while maintaining high availability for core home services.

Remote Integration

Maintain seamless connectivity between home and lab environments wherever I go.

Experimentation

Test new technologies and solutions safely.

Secure Tunneling

Secure connectivity over private IP tunnels for shared resources.

Core Home Network

The foundation of my lab relies on a secure and redundant home network, designed to balance performance, reliability, and flexibility.

Network Infrastructure

  • Dual internet connectivity for redundancy and load sharing
  • Gigabit switches for Layer 2 connectivity
  • VyOS for advanced routing
  • ZeroTier SD-WAN for seamless multi-site connectivity

Security & Access

  • UniFi Cloud Gateway for security and Layer 3 VLAN management
  • Pi-hole DNS for malware and ad filtering
  • Squid proxy for controlled and audited web access
  • WireGuard VPN for secure remote access

Servers & Virtualization

  • Proxmox hypervisor for virtualization
  • Hardware: Power-efficient Intel i7 NUCs, Mac Mini (Intel i7), and Mac Mini M4 (AI Workloads)
  • Proxmox VMs hosting core public-facing services
  • Synology storage for centralized data
  • Unifi access points and controller for wireless 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

Proxies

Squid & SOCKS for testing

Flame

Dashboard interface

Portainer

Docker management

Plex

Media streaming

Home Assistant

Smart home automation

Grafana

Monitoring & visualization

InfluxDB

Time-series database

MongoDB

Production database

Terraform

Infrastructure as Code (IaC)

Ansible

Config management

WireGuard

Secure tunneling

OpenVPN

Remote access

Pi-hole

DNS filtering & ad blocking

Kemp

Load Balancer

n8n

Workflow Automation

llama.cpp

Local LLM