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The lab bench.

Hands-on experiments, tool reviews, home-lab builds, and step-by-step how-tos from my own infrastructure. If I'm writing about it here, I've actually run it.

About this Gridexpand for full context

LabGrid is the builder's section. Home-lab architecture, hypervisor and container experiments, network gear write-ups, self-hosted services, tool comparisons, and the how-tos that come out of breaking something and fixing it. The rule for anything posted here is simple: I've run it myself, usually on my own hardware, and the numbers and caveats are honest.

The scope overlaps with InfraGrid and ThreatGrid but the style is different. LabGrid posts are procedural, reproducible, and opinionated about specific products — which router, which firewall distribution, which observability stack, which tool earned its license cost and which didn't. Expect screenshots, config snippets, and post-mortems of the experiments that failed.

If you maintain a home lab for professional growth, or you're evaluating something before putting it in front of production traffic, this is the Grid to watch.

All Posts in This Grid

10 articles · newest first

Home Security Lab: The Minimum Viable Stack

What the lab actually needs: hypervisor, routed VLAN, EDR trials, AD test forest, packet capture. Everything else is fluff.

Setting Up Whonix: Step by Step

Windows + VirtualBox + Whonix. Install, bootstrap Tor, first onion service, common pitfalls.

Local LLM for SOC Prototyping

Ollama + Llama on a dedicated box. Why local matters for prototyping, what you can't prototype locally.

Proxmox vs ESXi in 2026

Post-Broadcom ESXi pricing. Proxmox for home + mid-enterprise. Feature parity for 80%, honest gaps.

Hardening Your Home Network

Separate IoT VLAN, DNS filtering, WPA3, guest network, Wireguard for remote access. Practical list.

Bitwarden Enterprise: 18-Month Review

What works, what's rough. SSO + team shares (good). SCIM nuances + mobile UX (uneven). Verdict: yes with caveats.

1Password vs KeePassXC vs Bitwarden

Honest comparison. 1Password UX best. KeePassXC best for sovereignty. Bitwarden best value.

Personal OSINT Workstation Build

Compartmentalized browsers, VPN stack, Maltego free tier, SpiderFoot, case file workflow.

The Home Lab Threat Model

The lab IS internet-exposed whether you mean it to be or not. Segment, backup, don't reuse passwords.

From Home Lab to Production: Lessons

What translates (Terraform, container intuition). What doesn't (scale, failure modes, politics, humans).