PERSONAL ENGINEERING LAB
Learning / research
Treating a Home Infrastructure Lab Like an Operated Platform
An evolving maintenance plan for a personal virtualized and containerized lab—not a scheduled automation system.
Operations / Learning Notes · 1 min read
These are personal lab projects and learning notes. Architecture diagrams are simplified for publication; internal addresses and sensitive configuration are omitted. Professional work is documented separately.
Why a checklist
Repeatable checks matter more than a one-time successful installation. This is an evolving operational plan, not evidence that each check is automated or regularly completed.
Maintenance checklist
- Review Proxmox updates, kernel changes and reboot implications.
- Inspect hypervisor and VM health, CPU/memory pressure and headroom.
- Review SSD/NVMe capacity, filesystem trim and storage health.
- Check K3s readiness, unhealthy pods and service exposure.
- Review MetalLB/NGINX Ingress configuration and endpoint reachability.
- Inspect monitoring availability and alerting configuration.
- Review Tailscale connectivity and DNS resolver ownership.
- Plan backups, snapshots and a restore test before risky changes.
- Record what changed, why, how to validate it and how to undo it.
Tradeoffs and evidence boundary
A checklist is useful only when matched to the actual system and impact of the change. These practices are proposed checks; no formal SLOs, scheduled automation or regularly completed restore drills are claimed.
Lesson and next step
Make operational assumptions explicit. Apply the checklist to a future non-sensitive change and record the actual validation and recovery observations before claiming repeatability.