Building My Home Lab
🏗️ Why I Built This Lab
Over the past few years, I’ve been designing a home lab to simulate enterprise environments — complete with routers, firewalls, SIEM systems, authentication servers, and containerized applications.
The goal is to learn, test, and document complex architectures in a controlled environment.
This lab is the foundation for my research in cybersecurity automation, threat detection, and infrastructure design — areas that require hands-on experience beyond theory.
⚙️ What’s Inside
My setup runs primarily on Proxmox with a mix of Debian, Rocky Linux, and Fedora VMs.
Each tier is isolated and designed to mirror a production network:
| Tier | Purpose | Examples |
|---|---|---|
| DMZ | Externally exposed services | Web, DNS, Proxy |
| App | Application layer | Docker clusters, CI/CD |
| Data | Storage and analytics | Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL |
| Mgmt | Administrative tools | Grafana, Keycloak, Ansible |
Networking is handled through FRRouting (OSPF + VRRP) and UFW firewalls, providing redundancy and realistic routing behavior.
🧩 Technologies Used
- Proxmox VE for virtualization and clustering
- Docker Compose for service orchestration
- FRR for routing simulation
- Elasticsearch + Kibana for log analytics
- Grafana for metrics and dashboards
- Keycloak for authentication
- MinIO for S3-compatible storage
🔍 Current Projects
I’m currently documenting deployments such as:
- Setting up Grafana for unified monitoring
- Building a centralized logging pipeline (Elastic Stack)
- Deploying Nextcloud and Outline for internal collaboration
- Simulating SIEM detection workflows in air-gapped environments
Each post on this site will walk through configuration, architecture, and lessons learned — so others can replicate or adapt similar setups.
🧠 Vision
This lab is not just a collection of servers — it’s a living research environment.
Over time, it will grow to support:
- SOC operations simulation
- Secure CI/CD pipelines
- Network segmentation testing
- Container hardening and compliance validation