arthur@homelab:~$ cat ~/homelab.md

Homelab

A living system for learning, self-hosting, and controlled overengineering.

The homelab is a hybrid collection of local hardware and carefully selected remote infrastructure. It runs the services I use, provides a realistic environment for experiments, and gives each mistake somewhere educational to happen.

Design principles

• Own the important data. Storage, backups, and recovery plans matter more than dashboards.
• Private by default. Internal services live behind Tailscale and split DNS unless they genuinely need public access.
• Configuration is documentation. Important service configuration is captured in Git alongside operational notes.
• Observe before guessing. Metrics, logs, probes, and alerts should explain what a system is doing.
• Prefer understandable systems. Clever machinery eventually needs maintenance at an inconvenient hour.

Simplified topology

public internet
      |
      v
caddy-external ---- encrypted tailnet ---- caddy-internal
                                               |
                    +--------------------------+------------------+
                    |                          |                  |
                 services                  storage           monitoring

The lab uses Incus containers for system-level isolation, Docker Compose where application packaging makes sense, Caddy for public and private routing, Tailscale for the encrypted service network, and Prometheus-compatible monitoring for visibility.

This page will evolve into a complete tour of the hardware, networks, storage, services, and the reasoning behind them.