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
How anything reaches anything else — switching, routing, firewalls, segmentation.
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.
Teaching an AI agent to speak Technitium
Building a DNS skill for our network agent, and the two-layer permission model that hid our zones in plain sight.
Phase 2: internal DNS and the bootstrap chicken-and-egg
Standing up an authoritative internal resolver as code: split-horizon, encrypted upstreams, and the moment the new DNS box couldn't resolve its own installer.
Phase 0: read the house before you renovate
The first phase changes nothing. It just reads live state and proves how wrong the plan already was. Discovery is the cheapest phase and the most valuable.
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.