Welcome to McCruden Labs

I built this site for two main reasons: to document my journey learning systems administration, automation, and reliability; and to actually put that hardware to use by hosting a great community.

Basically, this is half homelab documentation and half Minecraft server hub. Whether you're here to read about my journey or build automated factories, you're in the right place.

The Tech Lab

This entire site is powered by my own constantly evolving homelab. The Lab section is essentially my open notebook. It's where I document how I break things, fix them, and figure out modern IT infrastructure.

Expect raw, practical write-ups on:

Containerization & Kubernetes: Figuring out how to orchestrate services and scale apps.

Hypervisors & Virtualization: Managing the bare-metal hardware that runs it all.

Networking & DNS: Routing traffic, securing the network, and keeping everything online.

If you’re a sysadmin, a fellow homelabber, or just getting into IT, hopefully, you find my blog useful.

The Cove

There is no point in building an enterprise-grade server rack if you aren't going to host something fun on it.

The Cove is our dedicated, Create-based modded Minecraft server. It also happens to be the ultimate stress test for my homelab. Keeping a heavily modded server running smoothly for a community requires serious hardware optimization, network routing, and monitoring.

At the end of the day, we’re just a group of builders and redstoners having fun pushing the Create mod to its limits.

Get Involved

The project is always growing, and I'm glad you stopped by.

Check out The Lab for the latest in my learning journey.

Head over to The Cove to see what we're building in-game, or apply for the whitelist to join us.

— Stephen McCruden