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.

Diagram of passkey SSO: browser to identity provider, then OIDC apps or nginx forward-auth

Passkey Single Sign-On for My Home Lab with Authentik

One passkey, one sign-in, thirteen admin interfaces. How I built single sign-on for my home lab with Authentik, which apps I left out on purpose, and why every app still has a break-glass way in.

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.

Diagram of the home lab suite: public site, LAN-only console, private Git server, knowledge base and the hypervisor cluster underneath

My Home Lab Suite: A Guided Tour

A start-here tour of my home lab as one connected suite, from the Proxmox cluster and mail server to publishing, media, electronics and brewing, with a link to every project write-up.

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.