About a decade ago, I thought I had reached the promised land of home networking:

• A UniFi Security Gateway
• A Spectrum modem in bridge mode
• A couple UniFi access points

Wi-Fi was great. Things worked.
I genuinely believed: “This is as good as home networking needs to be.”

That’s the moment my homelab journey secretly began.

From Simple to… Whatever This Is Now

I’m just a normal guy who thought:

I didn’t have a rack.
No servers.
No observability.
No security pipeline.
Not even a media server at first.

Then came the first Plex box.
Then Emby.
Then Jellyfin.
Then VLANs.
Then metrics.
Then IDS.
Then automated blocklists.
Then a second node dedicated entirely to security.

Over the last 10 years, the homelab grew with me — piece by piece, upgrade by upgrade, mistake by mistake.

We no longer rent.
We have a house.
We have a network I’ve built like a personal art project over the last decade.
And, yes, I went from “normal” to “crazy” in the best possible way.

The Two-Node Ecosystem

🧠 Ghost — the Brain

Ghost is my main server running:

• Pi-hole + Unbound (core DNS)
• Grafana + Prometheus + Loki (observability)
• Uptime Kuma
• AMP for Minecraft
• Home Assistant integrations
• Unifi controller
• rclone for full backup to gdrive
• GitHub for IaC - scripting and backups
• Dashboards, visibility, and all the “production” stuff

Ghost is the heart of the house.

🛡️ sec-node01 — the Shield

A dedicated security node running:

• Suricata IDS
• CrowdSec + automated blocklists
• Promtail log shipping
• Node exporter
• OpenVAS vulnerability scanning
• Syslog ingestion

Ghost keeps everything running.
sec-node01 keeps everything safe.

The Network Backbone

Running across a MikroTik CCR2116:

• Multiple VLANs (Servers, IoT, Cameras, Guest, etc.)
• Traffic mirroring for IDS
• CrowdSec → RouterOS automatic blocklists
• Dual WAN (5-gig fiber + T-Mobile cellular backup)

At this point my network map looks like something a small ISP would draw.

The Philosophy I Ended Up With

Somewhere along the way I realized:

Every upgrade wasn’t about power or flexing.
It was about learning something new, solving a problem, or making the whole system more “mine.”

It became less about hardware…
and more about craft.

Family Humor Section (Because It's True)

My wife genuinely believes this current setup is the final form.
We all know she’s wrong.

And my dad — God bless him — asks me every week:

“Will you ever stop messing with it?”
→ Absolutely not.

“What exactly is a VLAN for again?”
→ I’ve explained it to him so many times I think I could get school credit for teaching.

And yes, my VLAN structure is now so elaborate that if someone in the house mispronounced one, half the devices would probably lose internet.

Worth it.

What’s Next: High Availability & Full Node Failover

My internet already has failover:

• Primary: Symmetrical 5-gig fiber
• Secondary: T-Mobile cellular backup (good enough for emergencies)

Now I want the infrastructure itself to have failover.

Not enterprise-level clustering, not Kubernetes…
just practical high availability for a homelab:

The Next Evolution:

• A secondary node for Ghost to fail over into
• Service redundancy for Pi-hole, dashboards, monitoring
• Optional IDS failover for sec-node01
• Floating IPs
• Shared or replicated configs
• Health checks & triggers

I’m not exactly sure which hardware I’ll choose yet — N100, another 7070, a micro PC — but I know the direction.

My next mission is simple: full internal failover.
When a node dies, the house shouldn’t notice.

It’s the next step in the journey.

Final Thoughts

I didn’t plan for any of this.
I just wanted good Wi-Fi and a stable network.

Instead I ended up with:

• Automated offsite backups
• IDS
• Automated blocklists
• Multi-node infrastructure
• Monitoring dashboards
• A decade-long education
• A homelab that grew up alongside my family
• Stories my dad keeps forgetting but keeps asking about
• A network my wife thinks is finished

It’s been chaotic, hilarious, educational, and deeply rewarding.

If you’ve fallen down this rabbit hole too…
you’re not alone.

And if you’re just starting?
Welcome — the journey is the best part.