stayz3ro.dev

Notes from building and running my homelab. HA DNS, Proxmox, networking, IaC, and the move toward platform engineering. Each post links the repo behind it.

stayz3ro.dev on Cloudflare: one zone, a static blog and a VPS Aug 31, 2026

The second Cloudflare cutover. A freshly registered domain, apex and www on Pages, service subdomains on a VPS behind Caddy, and email locked shut on a domain that sends none.
Moving my portfolio from GitHub Pages to Cloudflare Pages Aug 29, 2026

chrisalorenzo.com was a GitHub Pages project site with DNS parked at the registrar. This is the migration to Cloudflare Pages, DNS and all, plus the parts that bit me.
The DNS panel that wasn't authoritative Aug 24, 2026

Deploying Caddy for status.stayz3ro.dev should have taken an hour. It took a night, because every DNS record I added went to a zone nothing on the internet was reading anymore.
Hardening a public VPS before it hosts anything May 11, 2026

A fresh Netcup VPS: non-root access, key-only SSH with a safe reload workflow, UFW, Fail2Ban, then moving SSH off the public internet once a domain pointed at it.
Cutting over from mesh Wi-Fi to a managed network, live May 10, 2026

Moving routing and DHCP off a Deco mesh onto a TP-Link ER605 and a managed switch, with the Deco dropped to AP mode, while HA DNS and the Proxmox services stayed up.
Moving services off my workstation and into Proxmox Apr 28, 2026

The homelab services started on a gaming PC. This phase moved them onto a Proxmox host: an Omada Controller LXC, a Docker monitoring VM, a self-hosted RustDesk server, and validated backups.
Remote access without opening ports Apr 25, 2026

Adding Tailscale to the homelab for private administration, plus a subnet router so the whole LAN is reachable, with no public SSH anywhere.
Monitoring the DNS stack Apr 19, 2026

Adding Prometheus, Grafana, Blackbox and Node Exporter, and Alertmanager to the HA DNS setup, and testing the alerts by breaking things on purpose.
Building highly-available DNS for my home lab Apr 12, 2026

Two Raspberry Pi nodes running Pi-hole and Unbound, a Keepalived virtual IP, and monitoring that watches the client path. The build and the failover tests.
Taking control of DNS with Pi-hole Apr 6, 2026

The first real change to the homelab: a single Pi-hole node in the DNS path for filtering and query visibility, and why DNS is a good place to start.
Knowing the network before building on it Apr 5, 2026

The baseline before any of the homelab work: understanding the ISP gateway, the router, and the DNS path, then the Xfinity to AT&T Fiber migration and the bridge-mode versus IP-passthrough difference.