I wanted a place to practice the networking and virtualization work I see at client sites, without risking anyone's production environment. It also had to be useful at home: camera recording, ad and tracker blocking, and one dashboard to see everything.
Back to all projects
[ Case study ]
Homelab infrastructure
A segmented home network and virtualization host I built to learn the tools I support at work, and to run real services my household depends on.
- Role
- Design, build, maintain
- Hardware
- UniFi, Dell OptiPlex, Intel NUC
- Stack
- Proxmox, LXC, Docker
- Status
- Running daily
The goal
The network
The network runs on UniFi gear: a gateway, an 8-port switch, and a Wi-Fi access point. I split it into three VLANs so a compromised smart plug can't reach my computers:
- Main for trusted computers and phones
- IoT for smart lights, plugs and other devices I don't fully trust
- Guest for visitors, with internet access only
Video recording
Frigate NVR runs in an LXC container on Proxmox, on a Dell OptiPlex 5070 Micro. Two problems took real troubleshooting:
- AppArmor blocked Docker inside the container. I worked through the conflict between the host's security profile and Docker's needs until the container ran cleanly.
- Video decoding pinned the CPU. I passed the Intel GPU through to the container and set up QuickSync (VAAPI) hardware decoding, which moved that work off the processor.
Two UniFi G3 Micro cameras also run through UniFi Protect on a Cloud Key Gen2+.
Network services
An Intel NUC runs the UniFi Network controller, AdGuard Home for network-wide DNS filtering, and a Homepage dashboard that shows the status of everything in one place.
What I learned
When I moved to a 500 Mbps fiber plan, the older gateway couldn't route at full speed. Tracing that bottleneck to the gateway's hardware limits, then picking a replacement (a UniFi Cloud Gateway Ultra) based on routing throughput, was a good lesson in finding the actual constraint before buying anything.