🧠 Ceds HomeLab (Enterprise Infrastructure & Monitoring Lab)

A production-style infrastructure lab showcasing real-world systems engineering, monitoring, and platform operations.

This environment functions as a personal datacenter, combining virtualization, Kubernetes orchestration, observability, and secure external access.


🚀 What This Lab Demonstrates

  • Infrastructure design (Proxmox + virtualized services)
  • Kubernetes orchestration (12-node K3s cluster)
  • Network segmentation (VLAN architecture)
  • Monitoring & observability (Grafana, Prometheus, Uptime Kuma)
  • Secure service exposure (Cloudflare Tunnels + reverse proxy)
  • Real-world system integration (data, services, automation)

A focused project within this homelab that demonstrates monitoring, logging, and security concepts.

👉 View SOC Lab Project

🏗️ Architecture Overview

This lab is built around three core layers:

🖥️ Infrastructure Layer

  • Proxmox VE hypervisor
  • Virtual Machines + LXC containers
  • TrueNAS storage backend (ZFS, NFS, SMB)

☸️ Orchestration Layer

  • 12-node K3s Kubernetes cluster
  • Workload segmentation (ingress, data, monitoring)
  • MetalLB + NGINX ingress

🌐 Access & Networking Layer

  • VLAN segmented network (UDR)
  • Nginx Proxy Manager
  • Cloudflare Tunnel (zero port-forwarding)

🎯 Purpose

This lab is designed to:

  • Simulate production-style environments
  • Build hands-on infrastructure experience
  • Develop monitoring and system visibility skills
  • Serve as a real-world engineering portfolio project

📸 Key System Views

🖥️ Proxmox Infrastructure

Proxmox

🖥️ Proxmox Workloads

Proxmox

☸️ K3s Cluster Nodes & Pods

K3s Nodes

🌐 Reverse Proxy (Nginx Proxy Manager)

Nginx

📊 Service Monitoring (Uptime Kuma)

Uptime Kuma

📊 Grafana Dashboard

Grafana


🌐 Network & VLANs

The lab runs behind a UniFi Dream Router (UDR) with VLAN segmentation:

Network Subnet Purpose
Main 10.10.10.0/24 Daily-use devices
MyHomeIOT 10.10.20.0/24 IoT devices, TVs, consoles
HomeLab 10.10.30.0/24 Servers, services, K3s, storage
Guest 10.10.99.0/24 Guest Wi-Fi

The HomeLab VLAN (10.10.30.0/24) hosts all core infrastructure.


🧱 Core Components

🖥️ Proxmox VE

  • Main hypervisor for VMs and LXCs
  • Future expansion to a Proxmox cluster (+5 nodes)
  • Uses TrueNAS for shared storage (NFS / iSCSI)
    📁 See: proxmox/

💾 TrueNAS (ZFS Storage)

  • Manages ZFS pools and datasets
  • NFS exports for Proxmox VM storage
  • SMB / media dataset for Jellyfin & Arr stack
    📁 See: truenas/

☸️ K3s Raspberry Pi Cluster

A 12-node K3s cluster built on Raspberry Pi hardware for orchestrating containerized workloads across the lab.

Current and planned uses include:

  • Containerized applications
  • Ingress-based routing
  • Monitoring workloads
  • Future GitOps and Helm-based deployments

📌 Full cluster repo:
https://github.com/ced4568/ced-k3s-homelab


🌐 Reverse Proxy & Cloudflare Tunnel

  • Nginx Proxy Manager (NPM)
  • Cloudflare Tunnel (no port forwarding)
  • Wildcard DNS: *.cedshomelab.com

Traffic Flow: Internet → Cloudflare Edge → Tunnel → NPM → Internal Services

📁 Docs: docs/Add_New_Service_Guide.md


🏠 Home Automation

  • Home Assistant (Proxmox VM)
  • IoT isolated on MyHomeIOT VLAN
  • Secure access via Cloudflare + NPM
  • trusted_proxies configured

📁 Config: home-assistant/


📊 Observability (Ceds NOC)

The lab includes an observability stack built around:

  • Prometheus for metrics collection
  • Grafana for dashboards and visualization
  • Uptime Kuma for service-level monitoring

Current and planned monitoring coverage includes:

  • Proxmox performance
  • K3s cluster health
  • Service uptime
  • Infrastructure visibility improvements over time

📁 See: monitoring/


📊 Live NOC & Automation Pipeline

The homelab powers a public-facing live NOC dashboard at noc.chasedumphord.com.

An automated Python script runs on Biggie (Proxmox node 10.10.30.192) every 5 minutes via cron. It pings all 28 systems, records latency and online/offline status, writes a structured JSON file, and pushes it to GitHub. The dashboard updates automatically.

Biggie (10.10.30.192) — cron: */5 * * * *
  → noc_update.py
    → ICMP ping 28 systems
    → record latency + status
    → write data/noc-status.json
    → git commit + push to ced-portfolio
      → GitHub Pages deploys (~30s)
        → noc.chasedumphord.com auto-refreshes

🖥️ Full Node Inventory (28 Systems)

Proxmox Cluster — 6 Nodes

Node IP Role
BigWorld 10.10.30.250 Proxmox VE Hypervisor
Biggie 10.10.30.192 Proxmox VE Hypervisor — NOC script host
Snoop 10.10.30.153 Proxmox VE Hypervisor
TooShort 10.10.30.120 Proxmox VE Hypervisor
Tupac 10.10.30.74 Proxmox VE Hypervisor
DrDre 10.10.30.227 Proxmox VE Hypervisor

K3s Cluster — 12 Nodes

Role Node IP
Control Plane django-1 10.10.30.72
Control Plane django-2 10.10.30.245
Control Plane django-3 10.10.30.128
Ingress Worker node-1 10.10.30.219
Ingress Worker node-2 10.10.30.134
Ingress Worker node-3 10.10.30.222
Data Worker node-4 10.10.30.126
Data Worker node-5 10.10.30.239
Data Worker node-6 10.10.30.208
Monitoring Worker node-7 10.10.30.198
Monitoring Worker node-8 10.10.30.216
Monitoring Worker node-9 10.10.30.29

Services, Monitoring & Edge — 10 Systems

System IP Layer Role
TrueNAS 10.10.30.143 Infrastructure Network Attached Storage
Nginx Proxy Manager 10.10.30.210 Networking Reverse Proxy
Prometheus 10.10.30.140 Monitoring Metrics Scraping (Active)
Grafana 10.10.30.68 Monitoring Metrics Dashboard
Uptime Kuma 10.10.30.14 Monitoring Service Monitor
Dashy 10.10.30.61 Services HomeLab Dashboard
Home Assistant 10.10.30.104 Services Home Automation
PrimeStation 10.10.30.233 Services Media Server
APRS iGate Home 10.10.30.129 Edge RF to APRS-IS Gateway
APRS iGate Mobile 10.10.30.35 Edge RF Mobile Node

🧭 Documentation

  • Add new service: docs/Add_New_Service_Guide.md
  • Architecture diagrams: docs/Ced_Homelab_Diagrams.md
  • Roadmap: docs/roadmap.md

🚀 Future Plans

  • Full Proxmox cluster
  • Cloudflare Zero Trust integration
  • GitOps for K3s deployments
  • Internal container registry
  • Advanced monitoring + alerting
  • Portfolio site:
    • chasedumphord.com
    • cedshomelab.com

⚠️ Security Practices

This repo never stores:

  • API tokens
  • Private keys
  • Passwords
  • Sensitive configs

All secrets are handled locally or via .example files.


👤 Author

Chase Dumphord
Digital Systems Engineer | Infrastructure | Data Systems | Automation

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/toochase-dumphord/
GitHub: https://github.com/ced4568

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Description
Production style homelab 6 node Proxmox cluster, 12 node K3s on Raspberry Pi, live NOC dashboard with Prometheus + Grafana
https://noc.cedshomelab.com Readme
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