Homelab

I'm Tuomas Tielinen, a Systems Architect with 15+ years of experience, currently expanding into Cloud Architecture. This is my personal homelab. More about me →

The ideas here come from two places: the platforms I work with professionally, and podcasts like Linux Matters and The Late Night Linux Family. Some of the result earns its keep in everyday life — media, photos, and home automation that get daily use — while the rest is deliberate experimentation, somewhere to try things without a production system on the line. Throughout, I document why each choice was made, because that reasoning is the part worth keeping.

Architecture at a glance

The stack is built in layers. At the base, a Proxmox hypervisor runs the network's router and firewall (OPNsense) as its single VM, and is itself managed entirely through Ansible. Above it sit two servers running uCore, an immutable, image-based OS from the Universal Blue project: the base image is swapped and the host reboots to update, so the servers stay reproducible and drift-free. It's the same atomic, container-native model that enterprise platforms like OpenShift are built on — an immutable base OS with everything running in containers. Everything that runs on them is a Podman container declared as a systemd Quadlet, so services are version-controlled units rather than hand-placed daemons — monitoring hosts the observability backends, kontti runs media, photos, and the local AI stack.

Tying the layers together is an observability pipeline: Prometheus scrapes metrics from every host and container, Grafana Alloy ships journal logs to Loki, and Alertmanager routes anything that breaches a rule to Telegram — a deadman switch included, so silence itself raises an alarm. Data durability follows a 3-2-1 strategy: Borg backups to a local NAS, replicated off-site to Backblaze B2. The through-line across all of it is the same one I apply professionally — immutable infrastructure, declarative configuration, and monitoring you can actually act on — documented here decision by decision.

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