Real-world homelab projects covering infrastructure, virtualisation, networking, storage, monitoring and self-hosted services built and tested inside Realm Labs.
I wanted to segment my home lab without replacing perfectly capable managed switches. This is how I approached VLANs across two HP ProCurve 2510G switches, including tagged uplinks, untagged access ports, management traffic and the mistakes that can make a VLAN design fail even when the config looks right.
I turned a spare Raspberry Pi 3 into a dedicated full-screen dashboard appliance using Debian, X, Openbox and Chromium. This is the complete setup, including autologin, startx, kiosk mode, display blanking and the Chromium keyring prompt that had to be fixed properly.
I wanted a cleaner way to deploy and recover Windows machines without carrying USB installers around. This is how I split PXE boot services onto a Raspberry Pi while keeping WinPE, Windows images and deployment files on my Synology NAS — including the DHCP, TFTP and port 69 problems I hit along the way.
After moving Node-RED from my Raspberry Pi to my Synology NAS, I realised there was one part of the setup I had not rebuilt. Manual control. Most of the models in the lab are already controlled using MQTT, including my…
Monitoring Realm Labs didn’t start as one big project. Like most things in the home lab, it grew. Initially, I just wanted to know whether a Raspberry Pi was getting hot. Then I wanted to know what Proxmox was doing.…
Portainer is probably one of the longest-running pieces of software in Realm Labs. Long before the current Synology, Proxmox, Home Assistant and centralised automation setup existed, I was already using Docker on a Raspberry Pi. And almost immediately, I put…
When I first started experimenting with Active Directory in Realm Labs, the obvious platform was Windows Server. That’s what Active Directory is built around, after all. I already had Windows Server running virtually under Proxmox, which gave me somewhere to…
Proxmox updates are usually straightforward. A few package updates, a reboot, and everything comes back. But major upgrades are different. When the hypervisor is hosting virtual machines, containers, storage mounts and parts of the home network, the last thing I…
This one looked like a Docker Engine problem. It wasn’t. The host itself had a modern Docker installation, the daemon was running normally, and the API version was current. But one application still refused to start with an error along…
As Realm Labs grew, I already had Prometheus and Grafana giving me detailed metrics about the infrastructure. CPU load. Memory. Storage. Network interfaces. Service performance. That was useful, but it answered a very specific question: What I also wanted was…