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This portal, building itself
The 3D scene on the home page
Most homelab dashboards are grids of status tiles — accurate, but static and a little forgettable. I wanted something that felt like it was actually alive : a WebGL scene rendered in the browser,…
From git push to running service — the portal's own delivery pipeline
The homelab's public portal didn't start as a full website — it started as proof that a change to code could travel, unassisted, from a commit to a running service on the cluster. Before investing in…
The self-service catalog — spinning up a web server or a database on demand
The portal exposes a self-service catalog: a small set of one-click actions (backed by an automation controller running real playbooks) that let an authorized user spin up disposable infrastructure…
Provisioning a bare Linux VM — a dozen small lessons in engineering rigor
The self-service catalog already offered two ready-made services (a web server, a database). This item is different in spirit: a bare Linux virtual machine, no pre-installed service, no hardening —…
A console in the browser — seeing a provisioned VM's screen without leaving the portal
Once the self-service catalog could create a virtual machine, there was still no way to actually see it — no screen, no console — without leaving the portal entirely and logging into the underlying…
Opening one port to the Internet — everything we found first
For most of this homelab's life, the portal — documentation, a self-service catalog, an admin panel, and more recently a small chatbot answering questions about the lab — only existed on the inside,…
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Incidents & discipline
A power outage and a provider switch — what broke, and why
A power outage hit while I was, coincidentally, also switching internet providers and replacing the home router/modem at the edge of the network. The timing made diagnosis harder than it needed to be…
Losing data once, and testing the fix this time
A storage bug had quietly caused a database behind one of the homelab's internal tools to lose its data on a pod restart — the kind of failure that's invisible until the exact moment something…
What this shelf does not show
Everything on this shelf is real — real engineering, real incidents, real fixes. But it's also a curated slice of a much larger, private wiki, and some things are left out on purpose, not by…
Elsewhere in this homelab
What is deliberately left out →