Every blog has on origin story. This one starts with a second-hand server, a lot of curiosity, and a growing frustration with how hard it is to find honest, practical IT knowledge, without starting a conversion with some AI bot.

A bit of background

I’ve been working in IT support for the better part of a decade. In that time I’ve helped businesses of all sizes keep their infrastructure running - diagnosing Active Directory issues at 8am, chasing down Exchange mail from problems after lunch, and explaining to someone why their VPN stopped working right before an important call.

It’s a job that teaches you a lot. But it also teaches you how much you don’t know.

The homelab rabbit hole

Sometime ago, curiosity go the better of me. I wanted to understand things more deeply - not just fix them, but actually know why they work and what happens when they don’t. I got an opportunity and receive a HP DL380 G6 for free, well officially I’m still borrowing it. Installed Proxmox and started experimenting.

That was the beginning of the rabbit hole.

Since then the lab has grown into something I’m genuinely proud of. I run OPNsense as my firewall in a VM, manage my network with UniFi, host my own documentation with MkDocs, and keep experimenting with new services and configurations almost every week.

The lab has taught me more than any certification course ever did.

Why write about it?

Honestly? Because I wish more people had written about it when I was starting.

When you’re troubleshooting a weird Proxmox networking issue at 11pm, the last thing you want is a forum post that says “solved, thanks” with no explanation. Or a guide that assumes you already know what you’re doing. Or official documentation that read like it was written for someone who definitely doesn’t read documentation.

BeyonLab exists to fill that gap - at least a little bit.

Every post here documents something I’ve actually built, broken, or fixed. The mistakes are included. The “why” is always explained. And nothing is written from theory alone.

Who this is for

If you’re an IT professional who wants to go deeper than your day job allows - this is for you.

If you’re curious about homelabbing but don’t know where to start - this is for you.

If you’ve Googled a very specific error message and landed here - welcome, I hope this is the answer you were looking for.

What’s coming

Over the next weeks and months I’ll be covering:

  • Setting up Proxmox from scratch on enterprise hardware
  • Running OPNsense in a VM with full VLAN segmentation
  • Building a solid home network with UniFi
  • Self-hosted services worth running
  • And a lot more that I haven’t broken yet

Thanks for being here at the beginning. It means more than you’d think.

If you want to follow along, there’s an RSS feed at the top of the page - or just bookmark the site and check back when you need something.

- Ward