Start here: what this lab is

This is a home lab. One Proxmox host, a pile of virtual machines, and a small-but-real platform running on top of them. I built it for two reasons: to have a place to practice the things I do (and want to do) as an infrastructure engineer, and to write down how and why each piece works so someone newer to the field can follow along.

These two shelves are the result:

• Core Lab Infrastructure — the foundations: the edge firewall, the way VMs are created, how everything is monitored and logged, the Git server, the registry, and the wiki you're reading right now.
• Building a Kubernetes Platform on Proxmox — the cluster itself and everything bolted onto it: storage, load balancing, an API gateway, CI/CD, and databases.

A note on what you'll not see here: real public IP addresses, real hostnames, or real passwords. Everything sensitive has been swapped for placeholders (203.0.113.x for public IPs, example.com for the domain, <REDACTED> for secrets). The private 10.100.100.0/24 range and the VM names are kept as-is, because they make the guides concrete and they're not secrets.

Why bother documenting a lab? Because the lab isn't the point — the reasoning is. Anyone can copy a kubeadm command off a blog. What's harder to find written down is why you'd cap ZFS ARC before adding VMs, or why the database admin account never leaves localhost. That's the stuff I've tried to capture.