Modern IT infrastructure, in five pillars
The framework I use to keep infrastructure sane: five pillars on four foundations, every component a CI wired to the rest.
Notebook
Networking × Security
How anything reaches anything else — switching, routing, firewalls, segmentation. · Protect it — hardening, least privilege, detection, evidence.
Two gates in front of the website
Defense-in-depth at the homelab edge with CrowdSec: known-bad IPs dropped at the door, then an in-band WAF reads what's left. And why it's deliberately fail-open for now.
When your gateway hijacks DNS
An internal site that wouldn't load, a resolver that was never asked, and the dead-IP query that proved a 'helpful' gateway was answering DNS behind my back.
Why my homelab lives behind VLANs
Segmentation isn't just an enterprise checkbox. Here's how I split a single Proxmox node into safe zones.
A Cisco ISE MAB fallback that won't lock you out
A critical-auth VLAN so a dead RADIUS server doesn't take a whole floor offline.