Infrastructure
Homelab
A production-minded home infrastructure setup built for reliability and learning. Everything here is documented, monitored, and rebuilt when it breaks — which is how I've learned most of what I know about systems administration.

Hardware

  • UGREEN DXP4800 Plus NAS — Intel Pentium Gold 8505, 32GB RAM, 4-bay
  • Dell PowerEdge R620 — 128GB RAM, dual redundant PSUs, running Proxmox VE
  • Samsung T7 external SSDs for transcode cache and scratch storage
  • UniFi Cloud Gateway with 2.5G managed switching

Virtualization

  • Proxmox VE hypervisor on enterprise rack hardware
  • Multiple VMs for isolated workloads and testing environments
  • iDRAC out-of-band management for remote administration

Containers & Orchestration

  • ~30 Docker containers managed via Docker Compose
  • Standardized conventions across all services — consistent UID/GID mapping, timezones, external bridge networks
  • Portainer for container lifecycle management and monitoring
  • Intel QuickSync / VA-API hardware acceleration passthrough

Networking & Access

  • Pi-hole with Unbound for recursive DNS resolution and network-wide filtering
  • Tailscale mesh VPN for secure remote access
  • Cloudflare Tunnel with Zero Trust authentication for external services
  • Segmented /23 network with static addressing and documented IP allocation

Monitoring & Reliability

  • Uptime Kuma tracking 24 service monitors with alerting
  • Homepage dashboard aggregating service health across 10 logical groups
  • systemd .mount units with Docker dependency ordering — resolved recurring boot failures after power loss
  • Automated nightly maintenance jobs via cron

Self-Hosted Services

  • Immich — photo management with GPU-accelerated machine learning
  • Home Assistant + Zigbee2MQTT + Mosquitto for smart home automation
  • Self-hosted streaming services with hardware-accelerated transcoding
  • Custom FastAPI applications with SQLite backends
© 2026 Ian Knight