My Homelab Setup for Learning Infrastructure and Security

Why a homelab

Certificates like Security+ teach concepts. A homelab teaches consequences. When you misconfigure a firewall rule and lose access to your own server, you understand network segmentation in a way that no multiple-choice question can convey. The homelab is where theory becomes muscle memory.

The hardware

I run Proxmox on a used mini PC with 32GB RAM. Proxmox lets me create multiple virtual machines and containers from a single host, which means I can spin up isolated environments for experiments without buying additional hardware. It also handles snapshots, so mistakes are recoverable.

Tailscale for remote access

Tailscale creates a WireGuard-based mesh VPN that connects all my devices without exposing anything to the public internet. My homelab services are only accessible from devices on my Tailscale network. No port forwarding. No exposed SSH. This is zero-trust networking made practical.

Wazuh for security monitoring

Wazuh is an open-source SIEM that collects logs from all my VMs, detects anomalies, and alerts on suspicious activity. Running it in the homelab gave me hands-on experience with log analysis, rule tuning, and incident investigation — skills directly applicable to production security monitoring.

What I would build differently

I would use Ansible from the start to manage configuration. Manual server setup does not scale, even in a homelab. Having everything in code means I can rebuild the entire environment from scratch when I want to start fresh — which happens more often than you might think.