I’m a DevOps and Cloud Infrastructure Engineer at GE Aerospace building production-grade infrastructure at home: 6-node Proxmox cluster, 12-node K3s Raspberry Pi cluster, full observability stack, and a live NOC dashboard. This blog is where I document the builds, the breaks, and everything in between.
From Football to Kubernetes: How I Reinvented Myself Through Technology (Part 1)
If you came here looking for Kubernetes, Linux, Proxmox, Raspberry Pis, homelabs, clusters, DevOps, AI, or someone nerding out about infrastructure, don’t worry. We’re definitely getting there. But before we start talking about dashboards, servers, observability stacks, and why I willingly spend hours troubleshooting Linux problems I probably created myself, I figured it was time to tell you who I actually am. Because the truth is, technology wasn’t my first identity. Football was. And for a long time, I honestly didn’t know who I was without it. ...
How Trash Computers Built Ced's Home Lab (Part 2)
Missed Part 1? Start here: From Football to Kubernetes: How I Reinvented Myself Through Technology If you read Part 1, you know football was my first identity. Technology definitely wasn’t. At least not on the surface. But if I’m being honest, the nerd side of me had always been there. It just took me a while to fully let it out. And believe it or not Ced’s Home Lab didn’t start with expensive servers, enterprise gear, or fancy cloud infrastructure. It started with trash. No seriously. Literal trash. ...
I Found a Dell Tower in the Trash. Five Years Later It's a 6-Node Proxmox HA Cluster.
Most people see an old computer sitting beside a dumpster and think: “Yeah… somebody finally got rid of that thing.” Me? I saw potential. Now before anybody starts judging me yes, I know how this sounds. But if you’re in the homelab world, into computers, electronics, or just like tinkering with tech, then you already know the truth: Old hardware isn’t dead hardware. It’s just waiting for somebody nerdy enough to resurrect it. ...
Zero Open Ports: How I Expose 28 Homelab Services Without Touching My Router
Back in 2022, accessing my homelab remotely meant one of two things: either I was VPN’d in, or I was squinting at a sticky note trying to remember whether Grafana was on port 3000 or 3001. I had a growing list of services Proxmox, Grafana, Prometheus, Dashy, TrueNAS and every single one lived behind an IP address and a port number that I had to memorize, write down, or look up. 192.168.1.10:8006. 192.168.1.15:3000. 192.168.1.20:9090. It worked, but it wasn’t infrastructure. It was chaos with a static IP. ...
How I Built a Live NOC Dashboard for My Homelab Using Grafana + Prometheus
At some point in every homelab journey, you stop asking: “Can I host this?” And start asking: “How do I know when this thing breaks?” That question sent me down the rabbit hole of observability, monitoring, and infrastructure dashboards. Which eventually turned into something I probably took way too far a full blown Network Operations Center (NOC) dashboard for my homelab. And honestly? I regret absolutely nothing. Why I Built a NOC Dashboard When you’re running a 6-node Proxmox cluster, a 12-node Kubernetes cluster, TrueNAS storage, and a dozen self hosted services things break. Containers fail. Storage fills up. Services go offline. Networks get weird. ...