# What this is

This is a **home lab** — a small collection of always-on computers I run at home
for learning, tinkering, and running useful services for myself, my household,
and a few friends.

It started as a way to sharpen skills I use professionally (infrastructure,
automation, systems administration) and turned into a genuine hobby. Everything
here is self-hosted: instead of renting someone else's cloud, the services run
on hardware I own and maintain, on my own network.

The guiding principles, if you're curious:

- **Own it end to end.** Where practical, I run the open-source version of a
  thing rather than a subscription.
- **Private by default.** Almost nothing is exposed to the public internet; the
  handful of things that are sit behind a single, hardened entry point.
- **Run forever, quietly.** The lab is built to idle cheaply and stay up for
  months without babysitting.
- **Write it down.** This wiki exists because future-me forgets how past-me set
  things up.

None of the pages here contain anything sensitive — no addresses, passwords, or
network internals. It's a tour, not a blueprint.