How I brought this blog to life...

Jack Davies

— 1 min read
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Hey, I’m Jack. I’ve been an IT Infrastructure Specialist for the last 15 years, spending the better part of my career architecting systems and enterprise solutions for businesses. Recently, I decided it was finally time to carve out my own little corner of the internet.

Naturally, being the engineer I am, buying an off-the-shelf shared hosting package and clicking "install WordPress" felt entirely too sensible ... and far too easy.

Instead, you are reading this page directly from my home lab, hosted behind a CGNAT residential fiber connection courtesy of YouFibre.

The Setup

Under the hood, the foundation is straightforward enough:

  • The Hypervisor: A dedicated Proxmox VE host patched directly into my home LAN.
  • Network Segmentation: Inside Proxmox, a MikroTik RouterOS container handles routing to ensure the lab environment remains completely segregated from the rest of the household network.
  • The CMS: A lightweight VM running Ghost.

Spin up a VM, deploy Ghost, and you have a blog... right?

Well, not quite.

Defeating CGNAT

Because YouFibre runs Carrier-Grade NAT (CGNAT), I don’t have a publicly routable IPv4 address. Pointing an A record at my WAN IP and setting up basic port forwarding wasn't an option.

To solve this, I set up a small VPS over at Hetzner to serve as the gateway. Here's how traffic actually reaches this machine:

  1. Overlay Mesh: Both the Hetzner VPS and the local Proxmox environment run NetBird, creating a secure, wireguard-backed peer-to-peer overlay network between the cloud and my home lab.
  2. Reverse Proxy: Hetzner runs Nginx, accepting public HTTPS traffic for jackd.cloud and proxying requests securely through the NetBird tunnel straight to the Ghost instance in my lab.
  3. Graceful Fallback: If my home fiber drops, the power cuts out, or I manage to break something mid-experiment, Nginx serves a clean fallback page explaining exactly what went wrong instead of throwing an ugly generic timeout error.

Why Do It This Way?

Could I have just run Ghost directly on the Hetzner box and called it a day? Absolutely.

Would that have been any fun? Not in the slightest.

If you aren't over-engineering your personal infrastructure, what’s the point of running a home lab?

Welcome to the site. Expect plenty more unnecessarily complex builds, lab breakdowns, and technical deep-dives to follow.