Welcome to the Lab

Welcome to the Lab

This is BytesNation, a handcrafted tech lab where I document builds, experiments, and field notes across 3D printing, networking, cybersecurity, and datacenter architecture.

Everything here is built by one person, broken on purpose, and written down so the next person does not start from scratch.

Who Is Running This Lab

Combat veteran. Self-taught systems architect. Sixteen years of enterprise infrastructure, firewalls, datacenter design, and network operations. Started hosting gaming servers as a teenager. That turned into managing enterprise networks. Networks turned into firewalls. Firewalls turned into datacenter architecture and capacity planning. Somewhere along the way, 3D printers and microcontrollers showed up on the bench, because the fastest way to understand a system is to build one from the floor up.

No computer science degree. No formal training pipeline. Just obsessive curiosity and a habit of breaking things until they work.

The Physical Lab

The current setup is a two-node Proxmox cluster running on Beelink mini PCs. Quiet enough to run in a home office, powerful enough to virtualize a real network stack. VMs for pfSense, a VLANA virtual local area network that segments a single physical switch into multiple isolated broadcast domains without needing separate hardware. Read more →-segmented flat network, Unifi access points, and a monitoring stack built on Prometheus and Grafana. The cluster runs continuously on a UPS.

On the bench right now: a 3D printer for enclosures and cable management hardware, a Raspberry Pi cluster for experimenting with edge compute, and a dedicated test network for running attack-and-defend scenarios without touching production.

The lab is not a showroom. It is a working environment. Things break. That is the point.

What Gets Documented Here

Homelab and Infrastructure: Proxmox builds, network topologies, VLAN segmentation, storage configuration, monitoring stacks. The kind of setup you can replicate at home for a few hundred dollars instead of a few hundred thousand.

Cybersecurity: Threat modeling, firewallA security device or software that monitors and controls incoming and outgoing network traffic based on predefined rules. Read more → configuration, incident responseThe structured process of detecting, containing, eradicating, and recovering from a cybersecurity incident to minimize damage and prevent recurrence. Read more → workflows, CTF writeups, and analysis of real-world breaches. Defensive security first, always.

AI and Automation: Large language models, agentic workflows, Model Context ProtocolAn open standard for connecting AI assistants to external data sources and tools, enabling them to access real-time information and take actions. Read more → integrations, and what it actually means to wire AI into a production environment. Not hype. Hands-on builds.

3D Printing and Hardware: Functional prints, not decorative ones. Enclosures, rack accessories, cable management, custom brackets. If it saves time or improves a build, it gets documented.

Networking: Protocols, architecture, routing decisions, and the reasoning behind them. Why you would choose one topology over another. How to think about network design when budget, noise, and physical space are all real constraints.

Why Build in the Open

Most of what I know came from someone else’s build log. A forum post from 2014. A GitHub repo with no README but a config file that answered the exact question I had been stuck on for three days. A YouTube video from a homelab channel with 800 subscribers that explained subnetting better than any book I read.

Knowledge hoarding is a dead end. The field moves fast enough that yesterday’s secrets are tomorrow’s blog posts anyway. BytesNation exists because I got tired of being the person who figured something out and never wrote it down.

When I document a build, I document the failures too. The things that looked right on paper and did not work in practice. The edge cases. The second and third attempts. The polished end result without that context is useless to the next person who hits the same wall.

The Stack Running This Site

This site is built with Astro, a static site framework that outputs plain HTML. Blog posts are markdown files processed at build time. No CMS, no database, no runtime server, no dependencies I cannot audit. React handles the interactive pieces, Tailwind handles the styling, and the whole thing deploys to Render as a static site.

The code is available on GitHub. If something looks wrong or could be done better, the repository is open.

export function getAllPosts(): BlogPost[] {
  const markdownFiles = import.meta.glob(
    "../content/blog/*.md",
    { query: "?raw", import: "default", eager: true }
  );

  return Object.entries(markdownFiles)
    .map(([filepath, raw]) => parsePost(filepath, raw))
    .filter((post) => post.published)
    .sort((a, b) => b.date.localeCompare(a.date));
}

Static output means every page is pre-rendered HTML. No JavaScript required to read an article. No tracking pixels beyond Google Analytics, which you can block. No paywalls.

What Is Next

The first batch of posts covers the foundational layer: understanding how AI models actually work, building a Proxmox cluster on mini PCs, configuring network firewalls and WAFs, and wiring AI into your personal knowledge management system. From there, the content follows what is actually on the bench.

If you have a question about a build, a post, or the lab setup, the About page has the channels I actually check. The lab is open. Come in.