Hardware

The environment the writeups on this site run on.

What each part is, and what it does. I leave out firmware versions, addresses, and network topology, partly because they go stale within a month and partly because they are the only details here that would be worth anything to someone poking at the lab. If you want to know why a particular choice was made rather than what it is, that reasoning lives in the project writeups.

Compute

Where everything else on this site actually runs.

  • Hypervisor (HPE ProLiant DL380 Gen9) — Proxmox VE, with ZFS underneath it for the datastore. Every service written up here is a VM or container on this box.

Network

The wired core, and how the segments are kept apart.

  • Switch (MikroTik CRS326-24G-2S+) — The wired core everything else hangs off.
  • Main router (MikroTik E62iUGS-2axD5axT) — Primary gateway for the main network.
  • Secondary router (MikroTik RB760iGS) — Runs a second, smaller network kept separate from the main one.
  • Wi-Fi (GL.iNet GL-MT6000) — Running OpenWrt rather than the stock firmware.

Connectivity

Getting to the internet, and what happens when that stops working.

  • Backup ISP (Starlink) — Failover path when the primary link is down.

What this page is not

It is not a spec sheet, and it is not the interesting part. Hardware is the constraint I design against, not the achievement. The decisions I made inside those constraints are the thing worth reading, and they are written up one project at a time.