About
I’m Richard, a Melbourne-based homelab enthusiast and Lego nerd who writes about self-hosted infrastructure, DevOps practices, and the overlap between the two.
I run a lab split across a colocation allocation and my home, I care about doing things properly, and I write up what I build so I don’t forget how it works.
What I Write About
Most posts fall into one of four areas:
- Virtualisation and hypervisors — Proxmox VE, VM and LXC management, storage, and running infrastructure across multiple sites
- Self-hosted DevOps and cloud engineering — secrets management, CI/CD pipelines, IaC, and applying production-grade practices outside of work
- Linux fundamentals — LVM, disk management, and the filesystem layers that everything else sits on
- Automation and platforms — GitHub Actions, Terraform, and the tooling that keeps configuration reproducible and out of your head
The Homelab
The lab spans two sites with different purposes.
Equinix ME1 (Colocation)
The colo allocation at Equinix ME1 handles anything that needs to be externally accessible, high performance, reliable power and internet, and some level of redundancy. If it needs to stay up or face the internet, it lives here.
Melbourne (Home)
The home side is for bulk storage, media, and services that benefit from low latency to the local network. It also acts as an offsite backup target for the colo, and is where most development work happens before anything graduates to production.
Across both sites
The two sites are connected via an IPSec tunnel for site-to-site traffic, with Tailscale layered on top for management access and interconnectivity between nodes. Between the two, nothing needs to be exposed publicly just to be reachable from the other side.
- Proxmox VE as the hypervisor on both ends
- Proxmox Backup Server for scheduled VM and LXC backups, with cross-site offloading
- HashiCorp Vault for centralised secrets management across CI/CD pipelines and self-hosted services, including Docker containers that need secret injection
- Authentik for SSO across self-hosted services
- GitHub Actions with self-hosted runners for CI/CD workloads
Infrastructure is managed as code where it matters. Vault policies and GitHub Actions roles live in Terraform. The goal is a reproducible environment that doesn’t rely on remembered configuration and has enough fault tolerance that a mistake doesn’t become a disaster.
The Lego Side
Away from the terminal, I collect and build Lego, mostly City and trains. I have a large collection of Lego trains and the long-term plan is to build a full Lego City layout with a railway as its centrepiece. It’s a slow project, which is fine.
Get in Touch
The best way to reach me is via email: hello@burgoyne.email
You can also find me on GitHub, where the dotfiles and boilerplates that back up a lot of what gets written here live.
If something on the site saved you time or helped you solve a problem, I’d genuinely like to hear about it.