Homelab
A segmented home network and self-hosted service stack built around a Cisco SF-300-24 switch — VLANs, subnets, a NAS, and containerized streaming + AI workloads.
Overview
The homelab is my permanent sandbox for applied networking and self-hosted projects. A managed Cisco SF-300-24 anchors the network, carrying separate VLANs for management, trusted devices, and untrusted IoT devices. They each have their own subnet and inter-VLAN ACL rules. A NAS handles bulk storage, and a Docker host runs the service stack (media streaming, internal tools, and a handful of small AI workloads). The setup doubles as study material: every certification concept I read about, I try to break and rebuild here.
Challenges
Configuring VLANs for a small footprint is harder than it sounds. it's easy to overengineer isolation until the network is difficult to maintain. Keeping the service stack reproducible via Docker Compose (instead of pet-server drift) was a conscious discipline.
What I learned
A good network all begins with the design, not the implementation.