My Home Lab, V2

I segmented my network, wrote tests to prove it, and watched the tests pass while measuring nothing at all. Then the same disease turned up in my home automation, and left a freezer switched off for thirteen hours in a house full of green ticks.

A Growatt inverter, a Raspberry Pi running Solar Assistant, and Home Assistant on Proxmox. Bridging them took an MQTT broker, a form that silently discarded everything I typed, and a decision to keep the link read-only. Then it stopped watching the house and started switching it off.

The rules that seal my IoT segment, in the order they have to be written, and the two that look redundant until you understand what they are for.

Matrix strategies, OIDC auth, registry caching, and a few footguns I hit setting up CI/CD for a monorepo.

How I use Longhorn for distributed block storage across my Kubernetes homelab. Replication, disk tags, GitOps management, and what happens when a node disappears for nine days.

Set up a GitHub Actions workflow to build and push Docker images to ACR. Spoiler: the OIDC token approach doesn't work with buildx. Here's what does.

A 5kW hybrid inverter and a 5.12 kWh battery, bought to ride out power cuts. Three years later the panels went up and it quietly became the primary supply, with the grid as the fallback.

How I use Cloudflare Pages for deployments and Cloudflare Access to protect my staging environment with email OTP authentication.

The three mini PCs I bought for a Kubernetes homelab, what they cost, and what is left of them eighteen months later.

A tour of my Kubernetes homelab on Talos Linux with GitOps and full observability, and why I tore the whole thing down in August 2026.

The Cloudflare Pages dashboard is fine but I'd rather just curl things. Here's how I set up staging and production branches pointing to different domains without touching the UI.