Home Lab Notes: VLANs, VPNs, and What Finally Clicked

Setting up a home lab is the rite of passage for any aspiring network engineer. Here is a breakdown of my current setup and what I've learned.

The Setup

• Hypervisor: Proxmox VE
• Router: PFSense (virtualized)
• Switch: Cisco Catalyst 2960 (eBay find)

The VLAN Breakthrough

Understanding tagging was the hardest part. Once I realized that the switch port needs to "know" which tags to accept, it all clicked.

# Example generic switch config concept
interface GigabitEthernet0/1
 switchport mode trunk
 switchport trunk allowed vlan 10,20

Secure Remote Access

I set up WireGuard for VPN access. It's incredibly fast compared to OpenVPN. The key was ensuring the handshake actually completed—checking firewall rules on the WAN interface was the missing link.

Future Plans

Next up represents messing with Docker containers and maybe a Kubernetes cluster just to say I did it.