The Beginning of my lab
What’s Actually Running The Lab?
I’ve always been equally obsessed with both sides of the coin: building a great community in-game and engineering the infrastructure that keeps it stable. I didn't want to just rent a shared host and call it a day. Instead, I’ve spent the last few months building out a dedicated homelab to run everything from this website to our Minecraft server.
Here is a look at the current stack.
The Hardware: The G4 Cluster and the Z440
The "brains" of the operation is a 3-node Proxmox cluster made of HP G4 Minis. They’re small, power-efficient, and perfect for high-availability tasks.
While the minis handle the light work, the Minecraft server needs raw single-core performance, especially with all the moving parts in the Create mod. For that, I’m running a Z440 workstation:
CPU: Intel Xeon E5-2667 v4
RAM: 32GB
The Goal: Keeping The Cove at a steady 20 TPS even when the automation gets out of hand.
The whole setup is tied together by an Archer GE400 router, a managed switch, and a UPS to make sure a 5-second power flicker doesn't wipe out everyone's progress.
The Software: K3s and Automation
This website isn't just a static page; it’s running on a K3s (Kubernetes) cluster. I have a VM on each Proxmox node joined to the cluster, which makes the site resilient and easy to manage.
The coolest part of the current setup is the "glue" that connects Discord to the game:
The Bot: I have a dedicated VM running a Discord bot that handles our whitelist applications.
The Tunnel: I’m using a Cloudflare Tunnel to keep the OAuth flow secure without opening up my home network.
Automated Whitelisting: Once you're approved on the site, the bot uses RCON to talk to the Z440 and whitelist you instantly. No manual entry required.
What’s Next?
The lab is a work in progress, but the next few upgrades are already sitting on my desk:
Firewall Overhaul: I’ve got a Firebat T8 Plus that I’m turning into an OPNsense box. It’ll sit as a DMZ between my router and the lab equipment for better security.
Nginx: Moving toward a more robust reverse proxy setup on the Proxmox cluster.
Monitoring: I’ll be spinning up Prometheus and Grafana soon. I want to see the actual heat and load metrics on the Z440 in real-time.
Building this has been a massive learning curve, but seeing the software and hardware finally play nice together is the best part.
— Stephen McCruden