All series
// SERIES · 5 PARTS
The Homelab
The lab exists to learn on. Every post is the same shape: a real problem I hit, what I tried, what actually worked, and what it taught me — Proxmox and ZFS, a fleet of bare-metal misfits, an AI coworker, and the small devices that keep it all recoverable.
- 01My Homelab: One Proxmox Box, ZFS Pools, and a Properly Segmented NetworkThe lab started as services sprawled across whatever machine was awake — until one bad upgrade took them all down at once. This is what that failure taught me: one Proxmox host, ZFS snapshots as the undo button, and a network segmented by trust.
- 02The Fleet: Six Machines, and What the Hypervisor Can't DoThe plan was to consolidate everything onto one Proxmox box. Then a perf tool needed real PMU counters, a firmware flash needed a real serial port, and testing on ARM meant a phone running a custom kernel. Meet the fleet — and what each machine taught me.
- 03An AI Coworker in an LXC ContainerA dedicated container on my Proxmox host runs a coding agent that writes, reviews, and ships changes to this site — through the same git-push pipeline I use. The interesting engineering isn't the model; it's the guardrails around it.
- 04Waking the Lab: an ESP32, MQTT, and 102 BytesWake-on-LAN only works from inside the LAN — so I put a $5 ESP32 on the LAN. It subscribes to an MQTT topic and broadcasts magic packets on demand. The build, the failure modes, and what a hardware watchdog is really for.
- 05Who's Allowed to Talk to What: Identity and Access in the HomelabVLANs decide which networks can talk. They say nothing about which people can. Part 5 of the homelab series: a central identity service in its own VM, Tailscale as the front door, and why the break-glass path matters more than the lock.