Homelab diary
A home datacenter in progress: firewalls in series, Proxmox boxes, and a Kubernetes learning track — built in public, mistakes included. Code lives in the homelab repo.
Bring-up from scratch
Everything except the Proxmox boxes was powered off. Plan: Deco mesh → FortiGate → PA-440 → lab network, firewalls in series for day-job reps. Remote access over Tailscale only — no inbound port forwards.
The watcher goes outside the failure domain
Spun up a Hetzner VPS (Ashburn) running Uptime Kuma via Compose — monitoring the lab from the cloud so it can report the lab being down. First monitor: this site's HTTPS and TLS cert expiry. Security pass: Kuma binds localhost only, exposed via tailscale serve — Docker programs iptables directly and bypasses ufw, so the host firewall alone wasn't enough.
Proxmox inventory
Both NUCs were quietly up 31 days: Ryzen 7 4800H (16c / 32 GB) and Ryzen 7 5700U (16c / 62 GB) on PVE 8.4. Mostly running game servers. Added the no-subscription repo and upgraded both to Proxmox 9 the next day.
k3s learning track scaffolded
Kubernetes from zero, in the public repo: install script (nodes join over Tailscale), a whoami smoke-test workload, and a learning path — Ingress → Longhorn → Helm → ArgoCD → migrate a real Compose service. Topology: control plane on NUC-1, worker on NUC-2; Kuma deliberately stays on the VPS.
First cluster
Provision the k3s control plane and worker, get whoami answering through an Ingress, then persistent storage with Longhorn. The Terraform episode of the video series gets filmed somewhere in here.