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HomeLab

Self-hosted infrastructure powering all my personal computing needs. A production-grade homelab with networking, compute, storage, surveillance, and smart home automation running 24/7.

At a Glance

The rack, by the numbers.

The N5HQ homelab rack — UniFi Cloud Gateway Fibre, patch panel and Flex switch cabled above the Dell OptiPlex compute nodes, with the UGREEN DH4300 Plus NAS alongside.
The actual rack — gateway · patch panel · switch · compute, NAS alongside
n5ubuntu · docker
5Stacks
21Containers
61Images
5Volumes
10Networks

Compute — 3 Nodes

3× i5-9500TCPU
80 GBTotal Memory
18Total Cores
9.2.10Proxmox VE

Storage — UGREEN NAS

DH4300 PlusModel
16 TBHDD Volume
3 TBSSD Volume
4Bays
Key Components

Always learning, always building.

Networking

UniFi Cloud Gateway Fiber, managed switches, WiFi 7 APs, and fiber connectivity — supporting 50+ connected clients across all networks, with all three nodes on bonded 2.5GbE uplinks

VLANs & Firewall

Five isolated networks — Management, Home, Guest, IoT, and Cameras — with inter-VLAN firewall policies enforcing least-privilege traffic rules

DNS & Ingress

Split-horizon DNS and DHCP served from the UniFi gateway; public access runs entirely over outbound-only Cloudflare Tunnels, with no inbound ports open on the WAN

Compute & Storage

Three Dell OptiPlex Micro nodes — matched i5-9500T CPUs, 18 cores and 80GB memory across a three-node Proxmox VE cluster, Ubuntu and Docker running as a VM on top; UGREEN DH4300 Plus NAS alongside — 16TB HDD volume + 3TB SSD volume for Linux ISOs, backups, and photos

Observability

Full monitoring stack with Prometheus metrics, Grafana dashboards, and Loki log aggregation — custom homelab overview dashboard built via the Grafana API

*arr ISO Automation

Radarr, Sonarr, and Prowlarr automating acquisition and organisation of Linux ISOs; Discord webhooks push real-time notifications on downloads and status changes

Surveillance

UniFi Protect cameras + Aqara smart cameras with 24/7 recording

Smart Home — Matter & Thread

HomeKit, Philips Hue, and Meross devices unified via Home Assistant; Matter and Thread over Matter for local, cloud-independent device control

API Integrations

Custom automations via Home Assistant REST API, UniFi Network API, Grafana API, Cloudflare API, and Discord webhooks — services talk to each other without manual intervention

Virtualisation & Redundancy

A three-node Proxmox VE cluster with 2-of-3 quorum — guests spread across all three nodes, including a Home Assistant VM and LXC guests carrying duplicate monitoring and a second tunnel connector, so one node failing is not an outage

Automated Ops

Nightly update pipeline that reads changelogs, judges risk, and requests approval over Discord before applying; restore-verified backups; self-hosted Forgejo as the primary git remote, mirroring to GitHub