About

I'm Alex — Senior DevOps Engineer by trade, homelabber by night. About 14 years in IT total, the last 6 deep in DevOps, with a Network Engineering degree I paid too much for and no certs to show off — most of what I actually know came from breaking things on the job and figuring out why. Fun fact: I placed 4th in my state for SkillsUSA Computer Information Technology senior year of high school, which is either an impressive head start or proof I peaked early.

Like a lot of people here, Plex was my gateway drug into homelabbing. These days it's grown into a small star-system-themed lab: a 3-node Optiplex Micro cluster — Alphacentauri, Deltacephei, and Proximacentauri — running Ceph over a custom 2.5G backhaul and handling most of the workload; Gammacephei, an Unraid box running my media stack (the *arr suite, Plex, Immich); Cygnus, a Dockhand-managed game server host; Bodes, a dedicated Crafty box; and Arp142, a UNAS-PRO handling backups and photo/doc storage with an auto-backup to Backblaze. Off-site, a Linode node runs UISP for the business, and an AWS Lightsail instance runs Gatus (with ntfy likely joining it soon). All of it tied together over a 100% UniFi network with 10G backhaul. This blog is where I write about that: the wins, the 2am outages, and whatever new thing broke my lab this week.

Outside the lab I run Alex's Guardian, a small IT consultancy for local end users and small businesses, built on one rule: transparent IT, no surprises. General IT support, computer builds, CCTV installs — if it plugs in and confuses you, I've probably fixed one.

I dabble in open source here and there — mostly CI/CD workflows, build pipelines, and containerizing other people's apps rather than writing new code from scratch. I also handle all the tech for my local Lions Club (website included), because apparently I can't say no to more IT work in my free time. Much to the chagrin of my wife, who is a saint for putting up with me and my hobbies.

Off the clock I'm a dad (to two crazy kids), a range regular, and a sucker for vintage WW2 firearms my wallet keeps vetoing. Also got a gardening habit I'm itching to write about — just waiting until I've got my own property to set it up the way I actually want. Expect posts about that in the future!

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