The Lab

Three Proxmox nodes, Ceph, and 95+ containers — the home-lab production system behind every post.

The Lab

Everything on this site — the pipeline that writes drafts, the renderer that builds images, the monitoring that pages me when something breaks — runs on hardware in my house. This is the lab.

Compute & storage

  • 3-node Proxmox cluster — mixed enterprise hand-me-downs and workstation-class hardware, because a lab should be built, not bought
  • Ceph distributed storage — 21 OSDs, ~22 TiB raw, SSD and HDD pools, CephFS + RBD
  • TrueNAS — 4× 12 TB in mirrored pairs for media, shares, and backup targets
  • Proxmox Backup Server — deduplicated, scheduled, tested restores

The container fleet

95+ Docker containers on a dedicated VM, including:

  • Observability — Grafana (34 dashboards), Prometheus, Loki, Alertmanager, Uptime Kuma (67 monitors), and a formatter that turns raw alerts into readable push notifications
  • Security — Wazuh SIEM, Suricata IDS on a mirrored WAN port, Greenbone vulnerability scanning, CrowdSec, Authentik, Vaultwarden
  • Automation — n8n running the blog pipeline, plus Home Assistant integration and self-healing watchdogs
  • Media & apps — Jellyfin, Immich, Paperless-ngx, and a long tail of self-hosted tools

AI stack

  • Ollama on an RTX 5090 workstation — 30+ local models for private inference
  • Azure OpenAI for the production writing pipeline
  • Frigate NVR in an LXC with iGPU acceleration — object detection, face recognition, and license plate reading on the cameras, with AI-generated event summaries
  • A custom HTML-to-image renderer that turns LLM-composed layouts into the post images you see here — real icons, no hallucinated logos

Network

  • UniFi throughout — UDM Pro, PoE switching, meshed APs
  • Split DNS with ad-blocking resolvers, reverse proxy with internal TLS
  • Tailscale for remote access; nothing exposed that doesn't need to be

Why it exists

The lab is where I test what I preach professionally. High availability, backup discipline, monitoring, security posture, AI governance — it's easy to recommend patterns; it's better to run them and get paged at 2 AM when they fail. Posts tagged Home Lab document the wins and the incidents alike.

Curious how the blog itself is produced on this hardware? See How This Blog Is Made.

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