Why a Homelab?
Every homelab starts somewhere. Mine started with the frustration of paying for cloud services I could run myself, and curiosity about what actually happens when packets travel across a network.
Current Goals
- Full network segmentation — IoT devices on their own VLAN, completely isolated from the trusted network
- Self-hosted DNS with ad-blocking (Pi-hole / AdGuard Home)
- A proper NAS for media, backups, and general storage
- Monitoring stack — Prometheus + Grafana so nothing breaks silently
Hardware on the Bench
| Device | Role |
|---|---|
| TP-Link ER605 | Router / gateway |
| TP-Link SG2008P | Managed PoE switch |
| TP-Link OC200 | Omada hardware controller |
| TP-Link EAP245 | Wi-Fi access point |
| Proxmox VE × 2 | Compute nodes (virtualisation) |
| Proxmox PBS | Backup server |
What’s Coming Next
The first series of posts will cover setting up a flat-to-segmented network from scratch — starting with the router/firewall choice all the way through VLAN tagging and inter-VLAN routing rules.
Stay tuned.