Learning in production
I'm Jeff Riffle—a system administrator, lifelong tinkerer, and self-described cyborg. My homelab is where infrastructure theory becomes hands-on experience.
Current curriculum
This is more than a rack of hardware. It's a place to practice the skills that make real systems dependable.
Orchestration
Build, upgrade, and troubleshoot a highly available K3s cluster while learning how etcd, scheduling, reconciliation, and safe node maintenance fit together.
Networking
Explore eBPF networking, ingress, TLS, tunnels, service discovery, and policy—not just until packets flow, but until the path makes sense.
Resilience
Protect persistent data, verify every backup, rehearse restoration, and design for the day a disk, node, or entire cluster stops cooperating.
Observability
Connect metrics, logs, dashboards, and alerts so failures leave evidence—and capacity decisions are based on data instead of guesses.
Automation & security
Treat infrastructure as code, gate changes through pull requests, reduce configuration drift, patch vulnerabilities, and automate the checks worth repeating.
About the operator
System Administrator • Cyborg • Builder of things that should probably have a runbook
“It is what it is!”