Field notes from experiments, certifications, and ongoing technical practice. Not a portfolio of completions — a record of process. Experiment. Failure. Learning. Improvement.
Working through Cisco's networking curriculum — subnetting, routing protocols (OSPF, EIGRP), switching, STP, and network design principles. Studying for the CCNA exam with a focus on understanding protocol behavior, not just passing the test.
Learning Terraform's resource model, provider ecosystem, and state management. Writing configurations for cloud resource provisioning and exploring remote state backends with S3-compatible storage. Goal: production-grade IaC patterns that translate beyond the homelab.
Exploring Intune for device and endpoint management: compliance policies, enrollment profiles, application deployment, and conditional access rules. Learning how modern enterprise endpoint management actually works in practice rather than on paper.
Continuous experimentation with the Proxmox cluster: HA configuration and failover testing, VM template management, ZFS storage tuning, and network bridge configuration. The lab is never really finished — just iterated. Each breakage is a data point.
Running large language models on homelab hardware via Ollama. Testing different model sizes against available VRAM, exploring quantization tradeoffs, and experimenting with local API endpoints for internal tooling. The question is always: how much capability fits in this constraint?
Ongoing observations from studying and practicing network behavior: how ARP resolves across VLAN boundaries, routing table decisions under different metrics, firewall stateful tracking, and the persistent gap between textbook theory and actual packet behavior.
Done, but part of the record.
Explored custom Docker bridge networks, inter-container DNS resolution, Compose service isolation, and persistent volume strategies. Outcome: containerized service stack now managed through Portainer with reproducible Compose definitions and deliberate network segmentation.
Setup and configuration of Homarr as a unified homelab service dashboard. Configured service integrations, DNS-based discovery, and deployed behind a reverse proxy with SSL termination. Now stable and running without intervention — which is the goal.
Some experiments graduate into something more permanent. Projects are the things that made it through.
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