Anuar Hill

Personal Systems Architecture & Infrastructure Lab

Overview & Intent

This lab serves as a personal sandboxing environment to explore network design, containerization, local AI processing, and hardware management. It is not an enterprise IT deployment, but rather proof of hands-on technical curiosity, systems thinking, and structural problem-solving outside my core engineering and operations roles.

Architecture Overview

Homelab Architecture Diagram

  • Figure 1: Network topology showing Cloudflare zero-trust ingress, OPNsense stateful firewall/routing, isolated DMZ & LAN VLANs, and Proxmox compute clusters.

Hypervisor & Compute Management

Proxmox VE Cluster Summary Dashboard

  • Figure 2: Proxmox VE dashboard showing resource allocation, containerized microservices (LXC), virtual machines, and node telemetry.

Core Stack & Modules

1. Hypervisor & Compute

  • Platform: Proxmox VE running on mini-PC hardware.
  • Deployments: Isolated Linux Containers (LXC) for low-overhead microservices and full Virtual Machines (VMs) for segmented applications.
  • Maintenance: Automated backup retention rules and local image management.

2. Network & Security Architecture

  • Routing/Firewall: OPNsense instance managing strict inter-VLAN routing rules and stateful firewall policies.
  • Zero-Trust Ingress: Cloudflare Tunnels for outbound-only encrypted web traffic, bypassing open inbound ports (80/443 remain closed).
  • Remote Access: WireGuard VPN for secure administrative access while off-site.

3. Automation & Computer Vision

  • Home Assistant Core: Orchestrates local hardware integrations, MQTT messaging queues, and automated notification pipelines to Telegram.
  • Frigate NVR: Hardware-accelerated local video analytics utilizing Coral TPU processing for object and facial recognition without cloud reliance.
  • Telemetry & Alerts: Real-time system monitoring, threshold alerts, and backup failure reporting.

Practical Takeaways for Business & Operations

  • Root-Cause Troubleshooting: Diagnostic methodology built on network packet inspection, log analysis, and iterative configuration testing.
  • Data Isolation & Security: Deep understanding of access control, privilege separation, and least-privilege security principles.
  • Vendor-Agnostic Integration: Experience unifying disparate protocols (MQTT, HTTP APIs, SIP, Modbus/Zigbee) into cohesive operational dashboards.