This page is where I write about the infrastructure I run outside of work - the servers, services, and experiments that make up my homelab.
Why I run one
A homelab is the one place where I get to break things on purpose. Production environments demand stability and caution; here, I get to test ideas, watch them fail, and rebuild them better. It's the same discipline I apply at work, just with a lot more room to experiment.
Infrastructure
I run everything bare metal - no hypervisor layer to abstract away. OPNsense handles routing and firewalling at the edge, giving me full control over segmentation and traffic rules. The hosts themselves run Debian, with a self-hosting platform layered on top of the personal services — this website included — to handle the day-to-day admin (users, DNS, certificates) so I can focus on the parts I actually want to tinker with.
Beyond that, I containerize services with Docker. That's where Authentik lives, tying authentication together as my SSO provider across the services that support it, alongside internal DNS, a document management service, and an observability stack to keep an eye on all of the above.
Backups
Backups follow the 3-2-1 principle as closely as a homelab budget allows: local snapshots, offsite copies pushed with Kopia to S3, and scripts wrapped in flock locking so overlapping runs can't corrupt a repository. I'd rather spend an evening improving a backup script than spend a weekend recovering from one that failed silently.
Operating Systems & tooling
My daily driver is Arch Linux - I like understanding exactly what's installed on a system rather than working around a black box. The same philosophy carries over to the homelab: I'd rather run something a bit rougher around the edges and understand it fully than run something polished I can't fully explain.
What's next
The homelab is never really "done" — that's part of the appeal. Current areas I'm exploring include tightening monitoring and alerting, and continuing to refine the backup chain so a single point of failure never turns into a real loss.