← All projects

SecureBytes Platform

Active April 26, 2026 · 6 min read

Self-managed Proxmox cluster running production-style network and security infrastructure — wildcard TLS, public status page, and selective Cloudflare Tunnel exposure.

SecureBytes platform infrastructure overview
9
internal services
2
Proxmox nodes
2
public endpoints

What's running

A pair of Lenovo Tiny / SFF nodes — a P920 workstation as the heavy compute box and a ThinkCentre M710q as the lightweight node. Networking from a Netgate 2100 running pfSense Plus, a UniFi USW-Lite-8-PoE switch, and a UniFi U7 Pro AP, all managed through a self-hosted UniFi controller on the cluster itself.

Vaultwarden
self-hosted password manager
Pi-hole
internal DNS + ad blocking
Gitea
self-hosted git server
nginx
central reverse proxy
Grafana
observability dashboards
Security Onion
network IDS / SIEM
Cisco CML
network simulation lab
Uptime Kuma
public status page
Buffalo NAS
shared storage

The interesting parts

Wildcard TLS via Cloudflare DNS-01

Every internal service resolves to *.lab.securebytes.net with a valid cert. Let's Encrypt wildcard provisioned through Cloudflare's DNS-01 challenge using acme.sh. Renewal is automated. The API token is scoped strictly to edit DNS on the securebytes.net zone, nothing else.

Selective public exposure via Cloudflare Tunnel

Two services exposed publicly — a Grafana ops dashboard at ops.securebytes.net and the Uptime Kuma status page. Admin paths gated by Cloudflare Access with email-OTP. No port forwards, no public IP exposure — the tunnel daemon dials out to Cloudflare edge.

Internal DNS that actually works

Pi-hole v6 holds records for every *.lab.securebytes.net hostname pointing at the nginx proxy. pfSense DNS Rebind protection needed an Alternate Hostnames entry — a gotcha that silently breaks hostname access in the default config.

Public-from-day-one repository discipline

Full operational reference with internal IPs lives in private Gitea. The public GitHub version is sanitized — same architecture, runbooks, and design decisions, no operational secrets. After a May 2026 audit found IPs leaking through commit history, the dual-repo workflow was tightened.

Roadmap

Migrating service deployment from manual pct create to Ansible roles
Proxmox Backup Server on the NAS with scheduled backups and tested restores
Lynis hardening pass on every LXC — before/after scores
VLAN segmentation: management, lab, IoT, DMZ
MFA on Proxmox / pfSense / UniFi / Vaultwarden / Gitea

Stack

ProxmoxpfSenseUniFinginxLet's EncryptCloudflarePi-holeSecurity OnionUptime Kuma
GitHub →Live →
Next →
Tailscale Zero-Trust Access