Welcome to VertLab — My Vertical Laboratory
Every homelab starts with curiosity. Mine grew into something bigger: a place where I explore the entire technology stack from the physical layer all the way up to distributed applications and federated services. I call it VertLab, short for Vertical Laboratory — a space where every layer of the stack is intentional, observable, and part of a continuous experiment.
This blog is where I document that journey.
What Is a Homelab?
A homelab is a personal environment for learning, experimenting, and building real infrastructure at home. It’s where you can break things safely, test ideas freely, and architect systems the way you wish production environments worked.
For some people, a homelab is a single server running a few containers. For others, it’s a full-blown cluster with VLANs, firewalls, hypervisors, monitoring, and distributed storage.
For me, it’s a place to explore the entire vertical stack — not just the applications, but the layers beneath them that make everything possible.
What Makes VertLab Different
VertLab isn’t just a homelab. It’s a philosophy.
Instead of treating the stack as a flat collection of services, I treat it as a vertical system, where each layer builds on the one below it. I want to understand how data moves, how systems communicate, how failures propagate, and how to design for resilience.
VertLab is where I:
- Build clusters and distributed systems
- Experiment with Proxmox, Ceph, Docker Swarm, and more
- Design VLANs, DMZs, and segmented networks
- Explore DNS, email architecture, and federation
- Document everything so others can learn from it
It’s a place where theory meets practice — and where the OSI model becomes more than a diagram.
The OSI Model as a Vertical Stack in My Homelab
Most people learn the OSI model as a networking concept. In VertLab, I use it as a mental model for the entire homelab.
Each layer maps to a part of the environment I control, build, or experiment with.
Layer 1 — Physical
Servers, switches, cables, power, rack layout.
This is the literal foundation of VertLab.
Layer 2 — Data Link
VLANs, MAC tables, trunking, bonding.
Where segmentation and broadcast domains take shape.
Layer 3 — Network
Routing, subnets, firewalls, WireGuard tunnels.
The circulatory system of the lab.
Layer 4 — Transport
TCP/UDP behavior, load balancing, connection tracking.
Where reliability and flow control become real.
Layer 5 — Session
Reverse proxies, authentication boundaries, state handling.
The glue between users and services.
Layer 6 — Presentation
TLS, encoding, serialization, compression.
Where data becomes structured, secure, and consumable.
Layer 7 — Application
Containers, VMs, orchestration, dashboards, email servers, federated platforms.
The visible part of the lab — but only the tip of the vertical stack.
By aligning my homelab with the OSI model, I get a clear, layered way to think about complexity. It keeps me honest about what’s happening under the hood and helps me design systems that are resilient, observable, and fun to build.
Why I’m Writing This Blog
VertLab is more than a personal project — it’s a place to share what I learn.
I’ll be writing about:
- Cluster design and upgrades
- Ceph storage best practices
- VLAN and DMZ architecture
- Email self-hosting and DNS alignment
- Monitoring, logging, and observability
- Federated platforms like Pleroma and GNU social
- Creative diagrams and visual explanations
- And the occasional deep dive into the OSI model
If you’re building your own homelab, or just curious about how systems fit together, I hope VertLab becomes a useful resource.
Welcome to the Vertical Laboratory. Let’s explore the stack — top to bottom.