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ijjtech

My Homelab

·179 words·1 min
Ian Jones
Author
Ian Jones

The Journey
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My homelab has been the impetus behind my technical growth over the past 6 years. What started in 2020 as a way to push past the limits of my technical support role at a startup quickly evolved into a full-scale testing ground for enterprise grade and open source infrastructure. This homelab allows me to break, build and secure systems in a way that gives me practical and tangible real world connection and growth

Architecture
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Network & Security:

  • Gateway/Firewall: OPNsense running on a Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q (24GB RAM, 256GB SSD).
  • VLANs:
    • Trusted
    • Guest
    • IoT
    • Management

Compute (Virtualization & Orchestration):

  • Primary Proxmox Node:
    • CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 5600X (6-Core / 12-Thread)
    • Board/RAM: B450 Tomahawk Max | 48GB RAM
    • Storage: 1TB NVMe SSD for VM/LXC Boot Disks.
  • Proxmox Cluster (K8s/Automation Sandbox):
    • 2x Lenovo ThinkCentre M715q
    • 1x Lenovo ThinkCentre M920q
    • Purpose-built for testing Kubernetes clusters, Ansible playbooks, and Terraform providers.

Data & Storage:

  • TrueNAS Scale:
    • CPU: Intel Core i7-8700
    • RAM: 48GB (Optimized for ZFS ARC caching)
    • Array: 4x 8TB HDD in RAID Z2 (approx. 16TB usable with double-drive parity).