HomeLab Blog: HomeLab Redesign and Reimplementation

Table of Contents

1. Overview
2. Why Start Over?
3. The Setup
4. What’s Next

Overview

I’m rebuilding my HomeLab from scratch so I can understand, and document, each piece in more detail.

This server is for learning and exploring:

• Self-hosting services with Docker
• CI/CD pipelines in Gitea/GitHub that build Unix and Windows release packages
• Testing in the pipeline: unit, integration, and system tests, plus quality gates
• Deployment orchestration with Kubernetes
• Terraform
• Observability with OpenTelemetry and Grafana
• Running it all in the cloud on AWS, GCP, and Azure, including identity management
• Ludus

The goal is to learn how to build and operate products at enterprise scale, not just write capabilities.

Why Start Over?

We recently moved from Georgia to Hawaii, and with the move I wanted to start everything fresh and document my steps for others to see and use.

The Setup

• Server: HP ProLiant DL380 Gen9
• Hypervisor: Proxmox VE
• Kernel: 6.17.2-1-pve
• Host node: wonderland
• Naming theme: Alice in Wonderland

What’s Next

Build out the first virtual machines on wonderland:

• rabbit: Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS with Docker, hosting Gitea
• tweedledee: Ubuntu Server 26.04 LTS runner for Unix release packages
• tweedledum: Windows 11 Pro 25H2 runner for Windows release packages

The first project to get a release package will be SNAILNET, my Win32 API TCP latency tool. tweedledum will build it and publish the package to its repository’s package registry in Gitea.