Uses
The stack behind the site, the lab, and the rest of it. A colophon, not a recommendation. These are the things I run, kept short and current.
This site
- Astro, static output, content collections in TypeScript; every page compiles to flat files.
- Cloudflare Pages for hosting: push to
main, it builds and deploys, nothing to babysit. - Cloudflare for DNS, DNSSEC, and TLS; Namecheap stays the registrar.
- Google Workspace for mail, with SPF, DKIM, and DMARC doing the anti-spoofing.
- sharp image pipeline to webp; Fraunces and Inter, self-hosted.
- Source is public at github.com/kerbe42/jlwhite-ca.
The longer story (the DNS move, the email fix, the security posture) is in building jlwhite.ca.
The lab
- A four-node Proxmox cluster doing the job a rack of appliances used to.
- pfSense as an active/passive HA pair, fronting a dual-WAN edge (fibre + Starlink).
- Redundant Pi-hole for DNS; UniFi for wireless.
- Wazuh, Zabbix, and Graylog for monitoring and home-scale detection.
- Ansible and n8n for automation, including an LLM ops agent on a short leash.
More on all of it in the home lab.
Breaking things
- Kali Linux as the working box; nmap, gobuster, and curl for the basics.
- Hashcat for password work, on the host GPU, not inside a VM (a lesson learned).
- An intercepting proxy and the browser dev tools when a web target needs a closer look.
- TryHackMe for hands-on practice; the writeups are what comes out of it.
Making
- FDM printers: two Bambu Lab P1Ps with AMS, plus a couple of Crealitys (two Ender 3s and a CR-10 V3); modelled in Tinkercad.
- A Raspberry Pi 5 + Hailo-8 for edge inference; PlutoSDR and LibreSDR for RF.
- ESP32 and Pico W microcontrollers publishing sensor data over MQTT.
The bench is written up in edge-AI and RF; the prints in the print farm.
Growing
- Vertical hydroponic tower gardens under LED bars in a grow tent.
- pH and EC sensing, watched by the homebuilt PicoPH monitor.
The garden is over in greens, tower to table.