stubbornpackets
From the lab to the lake — documenting real homelab engineering
Homelab at a Glance
- Proxmox VE cluster (3-node)
- Kubernetes (k3s + Talos experiments)
- LXC containers and lightweight VMs for services
- Palo Alto PA-440 firewall
- Cisco ISE (ERS, LDAP, policy enforcement)
- Python-driven automation for identity & access
- Overlay networking (Tailscale / WireGuard)
- Terraform / OpenTofu for declarative infrastructure
- Ansible for configuration management
- GitHub Actions for CI
- This site itself (Hugo + Cloudflare Pages)
- Ollama running local LLMs
- MLOps patterns in the homelab
- Log analysis + anomaly detection experiments
- Intelligent network automation prototypes
Core Focus Areas
Network Engineering
Cisco ISE (ERS/LDAP), Python automation, identity-driven security, Palo Alto, endpoint management.
Explore posts →Infrastructure as Code
Terraform, Ansible, Kubernetes on Proxmox, GitOps, policy-as-code, and reproducible environments.
Explore posts →ML Integration
Local LLMs (Ollama), MLOps patterns, anomaly detection, and intelligent network automation.
Explore posts →Site as Code
This entire notebook is infrastructure as code. Content lives in git, the site is built with Hugo, and it is deployed to Cloudflare. The long-term goal is to use Terraform and Ansible to create, publish, and update new lab notes with minimal manual work.
Featured Lab Experiments
Policy as Code: Cisco ISE + Terraform
Modeling network access policies declaratively and enforcing them through GitOps pipelines instead of click-ops.
Local LLMs for Network Operations
Running private models with Ollama to parse logs, suggest configurations, and detect anomalies in a homelab environment.
Lab Notebook Philosophy
This site is my public working notebook — real configs, scripts that actually ran,
network diagrams, lessons learned, and experiments integrating ML into network operations.
No fluff. Just practical knowledge from the lab to the lake.
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