The Homelab
Proxmox, k3s, four VLANs, and local AI. A real production network that happens to live in my house.
The problem
I wanted real hands-on infrastructure experience, not just tutorials. Reading about VLANs and Kubernetes only got me so far. I learned more once I had things running and had to fix what broke.
What I built
A homelab that’s grown into the whole stack:
- 2 Proxmox hosts and five Raspberry Pi 5s: four k3s nodes and one Proxmox quorum witness
- Segmented VLANs: trusted, IoT, DMZ for public-facing services, and guest
- A Tailscale subnet router for remote access
- TrueNAS for backups
- Home Assistant running the house
- A self-hosted media stack
- Local AI on an RTX 5070 Ti (Ollama, faster-whisper)
- Beszel and Uptime Kuma watching 60+ services, with alerts to my phone
Stack
Proxmox, k3s, TrueNAS, Tailscale, Home Assistant, Ollama, faster-whisper, Beszel, Uptime Kuma, Telegram.
What broke and how I fixed it
A voice-assistant TV integration kept taking over the screen mid-show to show an announcement. I moved announcements to a dashboard page that was already open. Now the page updates without taking over the TV input.
Separately, a monitoring checker kept marking healthy hypervisors as down. Turned out they were answering HEAD requests with a 501 Not Implemented, and the checker read that as an outage. Falling back to a GET request fixed it.
Incident log
Everything that breaks gets written up as a ticket: symptom, triage, root cause, fix, verification. See the incident queue.
What’s next
Automated test restores, and runbooks for the most common fixes.
Like this one
The resume has the rest of the story.
See resume →