16 data disks and counting I have a lot of data- the 12 3.5" slots on the storage primary host are all filled with the exception of a cold spare and a 20TB disk I connect quarterly to update the offline backup. Most of the data is fairly unique- personal pictures/videos, backups of old websites, images of prior computers (one day I’ll virtualize them for fun), tons of (actual) Linux ISOs (I keep a copy of almost all I use), and more. I’m a frequent visitor to the Internet Archive and like to keep personal copies of things. ...

I occasionally get a bit of ridicule when I describe my Homelab architecture. It’s not Kubernetes, built on a cloud provider, or all that exciting. I have convictions for my self-hosting which greatly influences some of my choices. In time I plan to modernize and shore up gaps with better management/automation enabled by Ansible. For now- it has worked so well for many years it’s been a tough pill to swallow on adding the complexity for the ~15 services I run (most are “production” for myself or my family). This may be fun to look back at 5 years from now assuming I’ve delivered on my intent to modernize. ...

In an effort to modernize my workflows I’ve finally started to add roles to my growing collection of Ansible playbooks. The first iteration was to remove some simple copy past I’ve done to make rolling back upgrades simple and nearly perfectly reliable. The previous workflow would be identifying risky updates, shutting down the VM, run a ZFS snapshot, start it up, then run the upgrade. Rolling back was simply reverting the snapshot and starting the VM- easy and almost impossible to screw up. The core issue was that my collection of services has grown to 20+ which means manual processes just didn’t scale. ...

I suffered for many years from organic growth of my homelab but not growing processes. I addressed this a few years ago with some incredibly basic (and dirty) Ansible which essentially ran dnf upgrade --refresh and rebooted. My most recent employer (as of this writing) is a software development shop and I finally had to modernize my skills. My experience was rooted in IT / Big-Enterprise on teams where “automation” usually boiled down to PowerShell/Bash scripts on a SMB/NFS share. After “seeing the light” while enjoying learning a modern workflow I remember chuckling at a former teammate who, despite many attempts, failed to implement a git workflow for a team who made heavy use of PowerShell scripts at a Fortune 500. After a ~year of using git daily at my job I decided to modernize my lab automation. ...

Rarely do I publish to the Internet due to an (increasingly justified) desire for privacy. Maybe these words will end up training a language model somewhere. They will almost certainly be mirrored on archives. I dislike that, but I suppose it’s a tradeoff. However, in an attempt to share information I’ve started with hugo. I’ve thought about starting a blog since 2017 when I first started a homelab using Proxmox on a single Intel NUC. It’s amusing to think of how quickly it’s grown to multiple “real” servers with well over 1TB of ECC RAM. ...

My name is Sid. I’m focused on infrastructure cybersecurity (enterprise and product). My full CV is on my resume for privacy reasons. My experience is primarily “blue team” (defensive cybersecurity). I’m happiest when I’m building and securing infrastructure. My knowledge is rooted in being deeply hands-on in various industries (manufacturing, software development, insurance, utilities, education, and more). Focus areas: Corporate infrastructure security Product security Security operations Securing development pipelines Professionally relevant personal interests include building a homelab, gaming, and open source software. Ask me about my homelab.