Practical homelab builds for infrastructure engineers. This is where enterprise skills meet kit you can actually afford. Guides cover mini PC clusters, refurbished Dell and HPE servers, Proxmox hypervisor setups, network segmentation with VLANs, and the power and cooling tradeoffs that matter when you run 24/7 at home. Every build documented here has either sat in a production rack or a real spare bedroom. No theoretical gear lists, no affiliate filler. If you want to learn Kubernetes on a £120 refurbished OptiPlex or run a dozen self-hosted services on a Pi cluster, start here. The homelab is a professional development environment, and this is how we treat it.
Uptime Kuma: Know When Things Break Before Anyone Tells You Here’s a question that changed how I think about my homelab: if Pi-hole goes down at 2am, how would you know? Not how would you fix it — how would you even know it happened? You’d wake up, your family would complain that the internet […]
Uptime Kuma on Raspberry Pi 5: Self-Hosted Monitoring That Builds SRE Skills Read More »
Ollama on Raspberry Pi 5: Run Local AI Models on Your Own Hardware Let me set expectations immediately: a Raspberry Pi 5 is not going to replace ChatGPT. It’s not going to run Llama 3 70B. It’s not going to generate images or do real-time voice transcription at any useful speed. What it will do
Ollama on Raspberry Pi 5: Run Local AI Models for Data Sovereignty and Career Growth Read More »
Home Assistant on Raspberry Pi 5: Event-Driven Architecture That Gets You Hired I’m going to let you in on a secret: the career reason to run Home Assistant has almost nothing to do with home automation. Home Assistant is an event-driven platform with a REST API, a WebSocket API, hundreds of integrations, a state management
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Nginx Proxy Manager on Raspberry Pi 5: Proper URLs and SSL for Your Homelab You’ve got Docker running. Portainer’s giving you visibility. Pi-hole’s cleaning up your network. And you’re accessing everything by typing IP addresses and port numbers into a browser like it’s 2003. http://192.168.1.100:8080 for Pi-hole. https://192.168.1.100:9443 for Portainer. Whatever port your next service
Nginx Proxy Manager on Raspberry Pi 5: Reverse Proxy Setup Guide with SSL Read More »
Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 5: Network-Wide Ad Blocking and DNS You Control Of all the projects in this series, Pi-hole delivers the fastest return on investment. Not in some abstract career-value sense — in the “my partner just thanked me for making the internet less annoying” sense. Within ten minutes of pointing your router at
Pi-hole on Raspberry Pi 5: DNS Ad Blocking Setup Guide with Docker Read More »
Portainer on Raspberry Pi 5: See What Your Containers Are Actually Doing There is a moment in every homelab journey where you realise you have lost track of what is running. You SSH in, type docker ps, and stare at a wall of truncated container names, port mappings, and status fields that tell you technically
Portainer on Raspberry Pi 5: See What Your Containers Are Actually Doing Read More »
Docker on Raspberry Pi 5: Your Foundation for Everything Else Every other project in this series runs on Docker. The reverse proxy, the monitoring, the DNS, the automation platform, the AI models — all of it. Docker is not one of the ten projects. It is project zero. The foundation that everything else sits on.
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The Commands That Actually Matter Docker has over 50 commands. You’ll use about 10 of them regularly. The rest are either for building images, managing swarm clusters, or edge cases you’ll look up once a year. This guide covers the 10 commands I run most frequently across six Docker hosts, with the flags I actually
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Why Docker on a Raspberry Pi Makes Sense I have three Raspberry Pis running Docker in my homelab. One handles DNS and ad blocking, another runs monitoring and a dashboard, and the third runs Listmonk for newsletter management. They draw about 5 watts each, run silently, and cost less than a month of any cloud
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The Windows Minecraft Server: Start Here, Graduate Later Most people’s first server of any kind runs on Windows. That is not a criticism. If Windows is what you have, Windows is where you start. I ran my own first servers on Windows Server 2003, and the fundamentals are the same regardless of OS: install the
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