The low risk and low-to-no budget of a home lab environment often results in security taking a back seat. Services are sometimes left open and unguarded in the name of “Just Make It Work”. Home labs aside, the complexity of running even a halfway-decent security infrastructure makes doing so a non-starter even in many small business environments.

As a result, the largest and most easily exploitable gap you’re bound to find in many home labs and small networks is unencrypted traffic. This of course allows for a variety of attack methods against locally-hosted services.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, as my home lab and local area network have matured over the years, both I and my family have come to depend on the assortment of services that I run strictly within the four walls of our home. Knowing that our data is physically secure, we often tend to take other forms of security for granted.

Now that I’ve shared some of my physical infrastructure in my home lab, I want to share the service topology for the specific services I run at home for home automation, secure storage, and even this website.

On December 2nd, a surprise announcement made waves in the Kubernetes Twitter-sphere - that after the upcoming 1.20 release, Docker would be officially deprecated.

Oh no!

Due to widespread confusion over what “Docker” means in specific contexts, many people panicked - myself included. Due to its popularity and ease of use, the Docker engine has become synonymous with “containers”. However, Docker is really an entire ecosystem of container tools and processes, including building and shipping container images. So what does this announcement mean, and what are the implications for everyone using it?

Like many people in IT, I’ve been running a home lab for several years. My home lab has become progressively more complicated over the years as I’ve layered in new technologies that I want to explore and added new services to my home network.