What I'll be sharing
HomeStack is a homelab I built and run myself. I'm sharing it because the most useful things I've learned came from things going wrong, and I wish more people wrote those down.
What the lab is
A small, real setup: two Proxmox servers, a firewall and switching I configured myself, Docker apps, an Active Directory and file server lab, DNS filtering, monitoring and security logging, and a way to reach it all from outside. It runs on modest, mostly second-hand hardware. Nothing here is a demo.
The builds
- How the network is laid out and why, from the firewall to the switching.
- Running Proxmox across two machines, and what runs on each.
- Self-hosting apps with Docker, and making them reachable from outside safely.
- A small Active Directory and file server lab with about a thousand test users.
- Security monitoring: what I collect, what the alerts look like, and which ones matter.
- Remote access through a VPN and a tunnel.
- Keeping a lab running through power cuts.
The outages and fixes
This is the part I'm most keen on. Each write-up covers what broke, how I found the cause, and what I changed.
- A full storage pool that froze every virtual machine at once.
- Two services fighting over the same port.
- A routing rule that quietly broke remote access for a long time.
- A server that hangs and needs its power pulled, and my hunt for the cause.
Diagrams, configs and mistakes
Network diagrams, cleaned-up commands and configs, and the mistakes I made along the way. Anything sensitive, like passwords, keys and addresses, stays out.
Hardware and cost
What I bought, what it cost, what I'd buy again, and what I'd skip.
Who it's for
People building their first lab, IT people who learn by doing, and anyone curious how a working setup fits together. I'm still learning, so I'll say when I got something wrong or don't know yet.
How to follow along
New posts will go up here. Shorter updates go on LinkedIn.
Have a question, or building something similar?