The Lab

Home network, home automation, and self-hosted services — no theory, just the build.

Firewall: Hardware Specifications 

• OS: OPNsense
• Motherboard: ASRock B450M-HDV R4.0 (AM4, B450 chipset, micro-ATX)
• CPU: AMD Ryzen 5 4500
• Memory: Team T-FORCE VULCAN Z 32GB (2 x 16GB) DDR4-3200
• Chassis: Rosewill 2U rackmount (RSV-Z2800U) with 4 x 3.5" bays, 2 x 2.5" mounts, 2 x 80mm PWM fans, front USB 3.0
• Graphics: inexpensive discrete GPU (Ryzen 5 4500 has no iGPU)

Network : Switch Specifications

• 48 x 10/100/1000 Ethernet ports
• 802.3af PoE support
• ~370W PoE power budget
• 4 x 1G SFP uplink ports
• Layer 3 capable (routing-lite features)

Wireless : UAP-AC-Lite Specifications

• 802.11ac Wave 1, dual-band (2.4/5 GHz), 2x2 MIMO
• Max PHY rates: 300 Mbps (2.4 GHz) / 867 Mbps (5 GHz)
• 802.3af PoE, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet uplink

Wireless : UAP-AC-LR Specifications

• 802.11ac Wave 1, dual-band (2.4/5 GHz), 3x3 MIMO (2.4 GHz) and 2x2 MIMO (5 GHz)
• Max PHY rates: 450 Mbps (2.4 GHz) / 867 Mbps (5 GHz)
• 802.3af PoE, 1 x Gigabit Ethernet uplink

Core Compute : Hardware Specifications

• Dell Precision Tower 5810
• Intel Xeon E5-2630 v4 (10 cores / 20 threads, 2.20 GHz, Broadwell-EP)
• 128 GB RAM
• 1 TB SK hynix SC311 SATA SSD (OEM client drive, model HFS001T39TND-N210A)
• 2 x 1 TB Western Digital WD1003FZEX (WD Black 1TB)

Storage Platform Specifications (RS2423+)

• 12 x 3.5" / 2.5" drive bays
• AMD Ryzen V1500B (4-core / 8-thread)
• 8 GB DDR4 ECC RAM (expandable)
• 4 x 1GbE ports (expandable via PCIe)
• PCIe expansion slot for 10GbE or NVMe cache
• Synology Hybrid RAID (SHR) / RAID 5/6/10 support

Virtual Server Environment

All application workloads run inside Docker across three Linux virtual machines running on Proxmox. Each VM is Rocky Linux with Cockpit and Docker installed. I keep them logically separated so I can patch, reboot, or break one without flattening everything.

Server 1 (Primary Services)

• VM host: Proxmox
• Guest OS: Rocky Linux
• Management: Cockpit
• Runtime: Docker

Containers

Server 2 (Media)

• VM host: Proxmox
• Guest OS: Rocky Linux
• Management: Cockpit
• Runtime: Docker
• Containers : plex

Server 3 (Content + Data)

• VM host: Proxmox
• Guest OS: Rocky Linux
• Management: Cockpit
• Runtime: Docker
• Containers : mariadb , ghostcms

Server 4 (Management / Remote Access)

• VM host: Proxmox
• Guest OS: Windows 10
• Role: Remote management jump box
• USB passthrough: USB → COM port mapping for remote physical console access

Used as a virtual management workstation when I am remote and need to jump into the environment. USB-to-serial passthrough gives me out-of-band style access if I break something hard enough that the network path is gone.