Substrate
Welcome to Substrate, an evolving space where I'm dipping my toes into the self-hosted ecosystem, learning more about hardware, networking, service provisioning, and more, maybe breaking some CPU pins along the way. If you're interested in the home lab space, let's connect! I'd love to learn more about this expensive but exciting hobby.
The brief
Welcome to Substrate, my hands-on project and classroom for self-hosting.
After years building software on top of someone else's infrastructure, I wanted to understand the layers underneath; the network, the metal, the services, and the glue that ties everything together. This page acts as a live status dashboard for the project, tracks some of the services and features I'm working on, and shows the process of orchestrating my own little mini "JWS" (Jens Web Services).
Current focus
Substrate is running on live, headless Proxmox, service layer is being implemented and updated.
See the live topologyRoadmap
- 1
Network & edge
In progressFiber handoff, gateway, firewall, switch, and VLAN segmentation.
- 2
Compute
In progressProxmox VE running headless on the OptiPlex; VMs and containers for everything that follows.
- 3
Services
In progressMinecraft, Portainer, Pi-hole, and the containers that make the lab useful.
- 4
Storage & backup
Up nextDedicated storage with ZFS and a 3-2-1 backup routine.
- 5
Failover & redundancy
FutureClustering, redundant power and network, and graceful failover as the lab grows.