Home lab, automation and self-hosting

Hi there 👋 I’m Roland, a self-taught tinkerer focused on building gadgets, automation systems, and process control solutions. I brew beer, but the real interest is in measurement, repeatability, and continuously improving consistency from batch to batch.

That focus led me deeper into electronics, including heating and cooling systems, temperature control, and embedded hardware. I also run a home lab where I experiment with infrastructure, networking, and self-hosted services.

New here? Start with the guided tour of my home lab, which links every project write-up.

The Homelab Console dashboard in dark mode, showing Publish and Certificates actions and a recent jobs table

A LAN-Only Web Console for My Home Lab

The scripts I used to run by hand from my desktop now live behind a small LAN-only web console. It uses passkey sign-in and a fixed list of audited actions. Claude drafts pages, and a security gate checks them before I approve anything.

The BookStack Home Lab shelf showing several synced reference books

A Git-Backed Home Lab Knowledge Base with BookStack

How I built an internal BookStack knowledge base where Markdown in a private Git repo is the source of truth, synced automatically by Gitea Actions, with public posts derived only by a manual, reviewed step.

A Grafana Node Exporter Full dashboard showing CPU, memory, network and disk usage

Homelab Monitoring with Grafana, Loki, Prometheus and Alloy

How I centralised logs and metrics for my homelab with Grafana, Loki, Prometheus and Grafana Alloy, and what I learned about push-based collection, alerting and code-generated dashboards.

Diagram of the acme.sh DNS-01 certificate automation across Cloudflare, Lets Encrypt, a local cert cache, and SSH push to internal hosts

Let's Encrypt for Internal Hosts with DNS-01 and SSH Push

How I replaced a dozen ad hoc certbot setups with one central acme.sh instance. It uses DNS-01 validation through Cloudflare and pushes each certificate to its host over SSH.

Diagram of the self-hosted mail flow through postscreen, milters, Dovecot, direct delivery and webmail

Self-Hosted Email: Running My Own Mail Server Again

How I moved my domain’s email from a hosted provider to a self-hosted Postfix and Dovecot server in my home lab, the design choices behind it, and what I learned along the way.