Infrastructure I designed and built outside of work.
I built and run 802 Secure Learning, a self-hosted lab and training environment. It operates like a small production site, with real users, monitoring and offsite backups.
Proxmox VE cluster on Dell PowerEdge servers with a quorum device. Upgraded both nodes across a major version and a Debian release with no lost data, and set staggered start-up order so dependent services come back cleanly after a power event.
Diagnosed failing drives from SMART grown-defect counts on a hardware RAID controller, swapped them hot and rebuilt the array while services stayed online. Caught a replacement drive failing during rebuild and pulled it before it cost redundancy.
Built a dedicated Proxmox Backup Server on ZFS mirrors with client-side encryption, nightly jobs, pruning and weekly verification. Encrypted snapshots sync daily to Backblaze B2, and restores are tested from both the local and offsite copies.
Segmented the network into separate VLANs and subnets with least-privilege rules between them, and automated firewall changes with Python and REST APIs. Deployed a SIEM with agents on every server and the firewall, tuned so only high-severity alerts reach email while vulnerability findings are tracked in a dashboard.