I build the physical layer of the internet for a living — AV, security, and structured cabling for offices, and increasingly the data centres everything else runs on. Then I come home and run my own: three machines, seventy-odd containers, self-hosted mail on my own domain, and zero cloud.
About making things work, and keeping big brother's eyes out of my traffic.
Like a lot of people my age, the gateway drug was trying to get mods working as a kid. Config files, Java crashes, port-forwarding a server so friends could join — nobody tells you that's an IT education, but it is. I got addicted to the feeling of making the machine do what I wanted, and never found the off switch.
College was mechanical engineering: welding, manufacturing, machining, and small circuit work. Less glamorous than code, but it's where I learned to diagnose things methodically — a skill that turns out to transfer perfectly from a seized engine to a broken container stack.
First trade job: maintaining a hire fleet for a garden machinery business. Mowers, strimmers, chainsaws — endless 2-stroke and small 4-stroke rebuilds. They were running the whole operation on paper, so I dragged the process onto a computer system, and built them the machine to run it on, specced for exactly what they needed. First time the mechanical and computer worlds properly collided for me.
I didn't save up for my first PC — I funded it buying broken motocross bikes, fixing them, and selling them on. The flipping habit became a rebuilding habit: countless motorcycles have been through my hands since, and three vintage Kawasakis never left.
Now I work as a project support engineer installing networking infrastructure for offices — everything from AV systems to physical security. That's grown into data centre work, from small-scale builds up to spending over two months in America on one of the largest data centre projects in the world. Currently working towards my Prince2 certification to back the engineering with formal project management.
Everything I learn on site feeds the homelab, and everything I build in the lab makes the day job easier — custom tools for cable engineering, workforce planning, and meeting notes all run from hardware in my house. If I use a service daily, I self-host it. The full breakdown is below.
Three lab machines plus an overkill workstation, seventy-plus containers, every service behind a reverse proxy with proper SSL, and not a byte of it in the cloud. The homepage shows it all live — health checks, telemetry, and uptime straight off the hardware.
Jellyfin serves the library; Jellyseerr takes requests from family and friends. Behind it, the full *arr pipeline — Sonarr, Radarr, Bazarr, Prowlarr — finds, fetches, and organises everything automatically, with downloads forced through a VPN tunnel. Komga handles the comic collection. A request becomes a watchable title with zero clicks from me.
Immich backs up every photo and video with on-server machine learning for search — a self-hosted Google Photos with no Google. Nextcloud handles files and sync, and a transfer service moves files up to 50 GB without touching WeTransfer.
The thing everyone says not to do. Stalwart runs full mail for dvdp.co.uk — SMTP, IMAP, the lot — with Roundcube webmail on top and ClamAV scanning everything inbound. My email lives in my house.
J.A.R.V.I.S answers questions on the homepage by voice and chat. A research agent stack pairs it with private SearXNG search and a vector database, and a meeting-minutes service turns recordings into structured notes. None of it leaves the network.
A cable engineering toolkit, a workforce planner, BOM and load-letter processors, an Excel parser — a dozen-odd custom APIs and frontends written because the spreadsheet way was too slow. The job funds the lab; the lab pays it back.
Nginx Proxy Manager terminates SSL for every subdomain, with Authelia single sign-on and 2FA in front of the admin apps and Vaultwarden as the password vault. Pi-hole kills ads at DNS level for every device in the house, Whoogle proxies web search, WireGuard gets me home from anywhere, and Frigate runs AI object detection on the cameras. Uptime Kuma, Glances, Umami analytics and Watchtower keep the whole thing observable and patched — with push alerts when anything blinks — backed by encrypted, deduplicated restic snapshots on a separate machine.
Bought broken, rebuilt by hand, kept forever. Three vintage Kawasakis and one very silly Audi.
The cheat-code supersport. Kawasaki gave the 6R an extra 37cc over every 600 rival, so it pulls out of corners the others have to scream through. Screams anyway — the redline lives north of 15,000 rpm. The corner carver of the three.
Second-generation 10R, from the era before traction control — the litre bike journalists called an animal and meant it. No electronics between the right wrist and the rear tyre. The widow-maker generation, kept in proper health.
Kawasaki's shot at the fastest production motorcycle on earth, built to hunt the Hayabusa. Monocoque aluminium frame, ram-air, and pace that helped trigger the manufacturers' 186 mph gentleman's agreement. The flagship of the fleet.
Ten cylinders of German over-engineering, because three bikes apparently wasn't enough maintenance. It shares its name with v10audi.com — a photography and video site in the works, self-hosted on this same homelab, naturally.
v10audi.com →