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.

What I'm Working With

Hands-on infrastructure projects built around a continuously evolving home lab environment.

01

Virtualization

Proxmox VE, virtual machines, Linux containers, storage, backups, clustering, and infrastructure management.

ProxmoxLinuxZFS
02

Networking

OPNsense, VLANs, routing, DNS, VPNs, firewall policies, wireless networking, and troubleshooting.

OPNsenseVLANsVPN
03

Self-Hosting

Docker, reverse proxies, monitoring, media services, password management, and internal applications.

DockerNginxDNS
04

Automation & Monitoring

Home Assistant, Prometheus, Grafana, alerting, scripting, and automating repetitive infrastructure tasks.

GrafanaPrometheusAutomation

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

$_