Hey, I’m Ward 👋
I’m a Belgian IT support engineer with 5 to 10 years of experience working in the field — helping businesses keep their infrastructure running, troubleshooting the issues that make no sense on paper, and learning something new almost every day.
Outside of work, I run a homelab built around an HP DL380 G6 server, Proxmox, OPNsense, and a growing stack of self-hosted services. What started as curiosity quickly turned into a passion — a place where I can test, break, rebuild, and actually understand how things work under the hood.
Why BeyondLab?
Most IT knowledge stays locked inside people’s heads, Slack threads, or obscure forum posts from 2014. I started BeyondLab to change that — at least in a small way.
Every guide here comes from something I’ve actually built or fixed. Every post is written the way I wish someone had written it when I was searching for the answer at 11pm on a Tuesday.
BeyondLab is for the IT professional who wants to go deeper. The homelabber who wants to build smarter. And anyone curious enough to ask “but how does it actually work?”
What you’ll find here
- Homelab builds — Hardware, Proxmox, TrueNAS, self-hosted services
- Networking — OPNsense, VLANs, DNS, Cloudflare Tunnel, UniFi
- IT support from the field — Real cases, M365, Exchange, Windows troubleshooting
- Step-by-step guides — Written to actually be followed, not just read
The stack I run
| Component | What I use |
|---|---|
| Hypervisor | Proxmox VE |
| Firewall | OPNsense (VM) |
| Switching | UniFi |
| Server | HP DL380 G6 |
| DNS | Unbound + Cloudflare DoT |
| Tunnel | Cloudflare Tunnel |
| Docs | MkDocs Material |
Get in touch
Found something useful? Have a question or just want to talk IT? Reach out on GitHub or drop a comment on any post.
BeyondLab is written and maintained by Ward from Belgium.