My First Post - Homelab Intro

I started working on a homelab with it somewhat being an ADHD hyperfocus, but it’s grown into a hobby. One year later and here we are—me setting up a blog on a whim to document things.

The domain name? I’m into espresso as a hobby, and I work in cybersecurity. EspressoSec felt right.

The general thought process was that I wanted someplace to test out ideas I’d gotten at work but didn’t have the space or time to explore there. My day job involves working with Kubernetes, log aggregation pipelines, and SIEM infrastructure in enterprise environments. The homelab mirrors that stack—Proxmox nodes acting like EC2 instances, K3s standing in for EKS. This creates abstraction layers similar to what I work with professionally, giving me a space to experiment before applying ideas at work.

I also wanted to physically implement what I was being forced to write plans about for school.

For a baseline, here’s the infrastructure I have in place:

Hardware:

• 3 mini PCs
• 24-port Ubiquiti switch
• Synology NAS
• Eaton UPS

Software:

• Proxmox cluster
  • AdGuard
  • GitLab
  • Proxmox Backup
  • K3s cluster

I used Claude during planning as a brainstorming aid and sanity check.

I iterated on the Proxmox deployment a few times before getting it right, learning a lot about how it works along the way. Same with the K3s cluster as I discovered how to configure things.