I wanted a lab where I could practice networking, virtualization, and security on real hardware instead of reading about it. Everything is documented so I could rebuild it from scratch.

It runs on a custom mini server: an 8-core Ryzen 7 3700X with 64GB of RAM and layered NVMe and SSD storage, all quiet enough to live in my room.

I replaced consumer mesh gear with managed Ubiquiti UniFi: a gateway, a core switch, an edge switch, and multi-gig PoE. Traffic is split into VLANs with a zone-based firewall, and I moved the whole scheme to 10.x addressing so it behaves like a real production network and never collides with a coffee-shop Wi-Fi over the VPN.

The hardware build was easy; the network was the teacher. A VLAN trunk mismatch on the edge switch took a full debugging session to track down, and fixing it taught me more about tagged versus untagged traffic than any lab guide could.

Every service earns its place: LXCs for lightweight infrastructure, a Docker VM for containers, an isolated bridge with no uplink for anything I want to break on purpose.