The idea
I wanted useful self-hosted infrastructure at home, but the more interesting motivation is that it’s a standing playground for learning virtualization, networking, containers, and — increasingly — AI integration, without needing a reason beyond “I wonder if I could run that here.”
What it does
The homelab hosts a mix of self-hosted services — task management, note-taking, inventory tracking, password management, home automation, and change monitoring among them — exposed selectively to the outside world through Cloudflare Tunnel rather than opened ports.
How it works
Proxmox VE is the virtualization layer, running a mix of containers and VMs. pfSense handles routing and firewalling, with Nginx Proxy Manager fronting internal services and Cloudflare Tunnel handling anything that needs to be reachable from outside the network. Home Assistant and Zigbee2MQTT (over MQTT) cover home automation. InvenTree tracks physical inventory, Vaultwarden handles passwords, Vikunja and SilverBullet cover tasks and notes, and Changedetection.io watches pages for changes.
The infrastructure direction has been moving from individual standalone machines toward a small multi-node virtualization setup built on refurbished HP EliteDesk hardware, with enterprise switching and affordable 10Gb networking as part of that effort.
Interesting challenges
My homelab is part infrastructure, part experiment, and occasionally an excuse to buy retired enterprise hardware. The genuinely interesting problems are the infrastructure ones — resource management across a multi-node cluster, storage and backups, and network segmentation between “things I trust” and “things exposed to the internet.”
Progress and outcomes
The current environment runs the services above on Proxmox with pfSense and Cloudflare Tunnel in front. Multi-node clustering and high-availability are areas of active exploration rather than finished, running architecture.
What comes next
Further work on high availability, storage, and backups as the node count grows, plus continued integration between the homelab and AI-assisted tooling.