Project History
A running list of things I'm building, have built, or am actively maintaining.
Proving where network jitter lives: a three-script PowerShell toolkit
An inventory script, a sampling loop and a comparison tool for 'the network is slow' tickets: why average latency hides the problem, how to label every traceroute hop, and the timing bug in my own tool that skewed the results.
Migrating my lab domain controller from Server 2022 to Server 2025
Replacing a domain controller the proper way — build new alongside, prep the schema, move the FSMO roles, demote the old one — plus the adprep error that cost me an evening.
Hardening my Intune build: baselines, Defender, BitLocker and the bits that broke
Rebuilding my daily-driver laptop through Autopilot with an enterprise-grade security stack, and the six or so things that didn't go to plan.
Enrolling and securing a macOS device with Intune: from zero to full Defender for Endpoint
Setting up a brand-new macOS tenant in Intune from scratch — user-driven Company Portal enrollment, mapping an existing Windows policy baseline onto macOS equivalents, and a full 15-step Microsoft Defender for Endpoint deployment via Business Premium.
Going fully passwordless on a Microsoft 365 tenant: email, then straight to passkey
Configuring a solo-admin Business Premium tenant so sign-in is genuinely passwordless — enter an email address and go straight to Windows Hello or a passkey, no password field at all, with a break-glass account and Conditional Access enforcement behind it.
Building Layer 8: from nothing to a self-hosted blog with live security monitoring
The full story of how I built this site — from the initial decision to self-host, through designing the UI, configuring the infrastructure, hardening the security, and watching real attacks get blocked within an hour of going live.
A proper 3-2-1 backup strategy across the whole homelab
Tying TrueNAS, Synology, and my Microsoft 365 tenant together into a genuine 3-2-1 backup strategy — using SharePoint as the offsite copy, with versioning and retention already built in.
Monitoring the whole homelab with Uptime Kuma
A self-hosted status dashboard watching every service across the homelab — Proxmox, the blog, storage, and everything in between — with alerts the moment anything goes down.
Secure remote access to the homelab with Tailscale
Setting up Tailscale for zero-config, encrypted remote access to every device in my homelab — without opening a single additional port on the firewall.
Building a high-performance TrueNAS storage tier with Optane L2ARC
A 10GbE ZFS storage build using a striped pool of NVMe drives with an Optane L2ARC cache, hitting over 1.2GB/s sequential read to a gaming PC over iSCSI.
Zero-touch device provisioning with Entra ID, Intune, and Autopilot
Setting up Windows Autopilot for zero-touch deployment — a device ships to an end user, they sign in, and it configures itself automatically without ever touching IT hands-on.
Building a dual-pane file copy tool in Python with Robocopy under the hood
A desktop app for copying files and folders between locations — dual-pane UI, Robocopy-backed multithreaded transfers, size verification, and packaged as a standalone Windows executable.
Setting up a DMZ VLAN with UniFi for public-facing services
How I isolated my self-hosted blog from the rest of my home network using a dedicated VLAN and UniFi firewall rules — so a compromised server can't reach anything else.
Getting started with pfSense: my home firewall setup
How I set up pfSense as my home firewall — VLANs, firewall rules, DNS over TLS, and why I landed on it over other options.
Running Windows Server in my home lab: AD, DNS, and Group Policy
Setting up a Windows Server VM in Proxmox for Active Directory, DNS, and Group Policy — and why it's worth having even in a home lab.
Setting up iSCSI on TrueNAS for my Steam library
How I configured a TrueNAS iSCSI target over a dedicated 10GbE connection and presented it to my gaming PC as a local disk for Steam — with jumbo frames and write caching tuned for game workloads.
Synology setup: shares, Docker, and keeping it off the open internet
How I set up my Synology NAS for file shares, running Docker containers, and locking it down so it's accessible from my network without being exposed to the internet.