Home lab and home automation

Where I keep the professional skills sharp on my own gear. The house runs on the same disciplines as the day job: segmented networking, virtualization, monitoring, and automation, just aimed at a home instead of an office.

Network and infrastructure

• Edge and routing a Firewalla Gold SE handling IDS/IPS, WireGuard VPN, and network-wide ad-blocking.
• Switching and Wi-Fi HP Aruba Instant On switching with fiber interconnects and Aruba access points, managed centrally.
• Compute a Windows Server Hyper-V host plus a custom NVR box running Plex, Jellyfin, and Milestone XProtect for cameras and media.
• Monitoring a PRTG, InfluxDB, and Grafana stack watching hosts, network, and storage.

Home Assistant at scale

Home Assistant ties it together at genuine scale: 370+ devices and 3,578 entities driven by 96 automations across Zigbee, Z-Wave, MQTT, and Bluetooth, spanning lighting, climate, media, cameras, and security. It is the same problem shape as enterprise automation, integration breadth, reliability, and clean state management, in a lower-stakes lab I fully control.

Maker shop

The bits-and-atoms side: a Bambu Lab P1S 3D printer and an Ortur laser, used for enclosures, mounts, and the occasional woodworking or electronics build.