Infrastructure & Automation Engineer
I build and operate self-hosted infrastructure — virtualisation, containers, network edge, and the automation that keeps it running.
I run a self-hosted estate of 20+ services across virtualisation, containers and a hosted edge — and I document the failures as carefully as the successes. Below are the problems that taught me the most.
Selected work
Case studies
Each of these is a real incident or build, written as problem → constraints → decisions → outcome. Names and addresses are abstracted.
Migrating 20 public services across a subnet renumber
A LAN renumber invalidated routing for every published hostname at once. DNS looked correct while every route was dead — finding the real failure layer took separating three independent config surfaces.
Recovering a corrupt SQLite database — and knowing when not to
A media manager began returning HTTP 500. The database was malformed, the most recent backups were also corrupt, and the automatic repair tool produced a file that passed integrity checks but silently destroyed data.
400ms to 30ms: diagnosing DNS that looked correct
Name resolution was slow and some hosts failed entirely. The configured resolvers were valid, publicly reachable, and completely useless from the affected machine — because a VPN was capturing the traffic.
A torrent pipeline that survives VPN reconnects
Seeding requires an inbound port, and the VPN rotates that port on every reconnect. Keeping the client, the port mapping and the tracker status in agreement needed automation rather than discipline.
Self-hosted media and photo stack on commodity hardware
Photos, music broadcasting, remote desktop and dashboards, all served from a home rack with no cloud dependency — including the edge, the identity and the monitoring.
The estate
How it fits together
One hypervisor, a container host, a storage share and a hosted edge. No inbound ports are open, and no service is published without terminating at the edge first.
Tooling
Stack
Tools I have operated under load, not simply installed.
Virtualisation & containers
Operating systems
Networking
Storage & data
Automation
Observability
Contact
Get in touch
Happy to talk through any of the above in more depth — including the parts that went wrong first.