HOMELAB · PROXMOX

The homelab is where the infrastructure and detection skills get rehearsed on something low-stakes and genuinely real. It runs Proxmox on a single laptop — a Ryzen 7 (7000-series), 16 GB of RAM, a 512 GB NVMe — deliberately modest, because the constraint is the lesson: you learn more squeezing real services onto limited hardware than you do with headroom to waste.

It hosts a Cobblemon Minecraft server and other game servers for friends, exposed to the internet through a playit.gg tunnel so nothing at home has to be port-forwarded or directly reachable. Alongside the game servers runs a Wazuh stack — so the same box that serves friends is also where I practise detection engineering against real logs — and a provisioning server used to stand up and tear down test environments on demand.

Running services other people depend on, even for a game, teaches what coursework cannot: uptime, backups, and the immediate cost of a misconfiguration when someone is actually using the thing. It is also where least privilege, segmentation, and zero-trust thinking stop being slides and become muscle memory — applied to a network I own, can break, and have to fix.