01
Virtualization
Proxmox VE, virtual machines, Linux containers, storage, backups, clustering, and infrastructure management.
Technical Lab Journal
HOMELAB / INFRASTRUCTURE / NETWORKING / LINUX
Building, breaking,and fixing infrastructure.
I'm Cole Stephens. This is my technical lab journal where I document the projects I'm building, the problems I encounter, how I troubleshoot them, and what I learn along the way.
THE LAB
What I'm Working With
Hands-on infrastructure projects built around a continuously evolving home lab environment.
02
Networking
OPNsense, VLANs, routing, DNS, VPNs, firewall policies, wireless networking, and troubleshooting.
03
Self-Hosting
Docker, reverse proxies, monitoring, media services, password management, and internal applications.
04
Automation & Monitoring
Home Assistant, Prometheus, Grafana, alerting, scripting, and automating repetitive infrastructure tasks.
LATEST LAB ACTIVITY
Recent work from the lab.
Projects, troubleshooting notes, infrastructure changes, and lessons learned while operating the environment.
View all entriesLab Note
Troubleshooting Split DNS with Cloudflare Pages
Diagnosing an SSL failure that only occurred on my home network and VPN after moving a public site to Cloudflare Pages.
Project Write-up
Self-Hosting NetBird for Remote Homelab Access
Deploying a self-hosted NetBird environment to evaluate an open-source alternative for secure remote access to my homelab.
Lab Note
Building Out My Homelab Monitoring Stack
Notes from deploying Prometheus and Grafana and beginning to centralize monitoring across my Proxmox environment.
Project Write-up
Building a Raspberry Pi Homelab Rack Dashboard
Turning an unused monitor and Raspberry Pi into a dedicated kiosk display for real-time homelab information.
LAB JOURNAL
Documenting the process, not just the result.
Each entry focuses on a real project or problem: the goal, the implementation, what went wrong, how I diagnosed it, and what I learned from the process.
$ whoami
cole
$ cat current-focus.txt
virtualization
networking
observability
self-hosting
automation
$_