River Rooks // Homelab Gateway & Service Router

Systems Architecture • Network Forensics • Bare-Metal Infrastructure

Welcome to the entrypoint for my self-hosted environment. I am a cybersecurity and systems student at the University of Alabama College of Engineering. This portal acts as the root router for both my external public services and internal virtualization infrastructure.

Rather than relying on commercial cloud silos, every application listed below runs directly on physical hardware housed in my home lab. Network traffic is segmented across dedicated VLANs (Management, Server DMZ, IoT) and shielded behind an OPNsense firewall with Suricata intrusion prevention and an automated Traefik reverse proxy handling Let's Encrypt TLS wildcard certificates.

Looking for technical writing? The Technical Notes & Blog service is where I document firmware reverse engineering, CTF binary exploitation, and zero-trust routing architectures. All public utilities (CyberChef, Stirling PDF, Git Forge) are open and ready for immediate use.

GATEWAY: OPNsense 24.7 (Intel N100)

COMPUTE: Proxmox VE 8.2 (AMD 5900X)

STORAGE: TrueNAS SCALE (48TB ZFS)

SECURITY: WireGuard Full-Mesh

dev-blog@system:~$ route-service --list-all --highlight=blog

SERVICE IDENTIFIER	ROUTING DOMAIN / PATH	ACCESS LEVEL	DESCRIPTION	DISPATCH
> Technical Notes & Blog	~/notes/ • rooks.dev/notes	[FEATURED BLOG]	Technical writing on firmware reversing, heap exploitation, and networking.	[OPEN BLOG →]
Forgejo Git Forge	git.rooks.dev:2222	[PUBLIC OPEN]	Self-hosted repositories: Ansible IaC, dotfiles, and POSIX parser modules.	[VISIT FORGE]
CyberChef Suite	chef.rooks.dev:443	[PUBLIC TOOL]	Client-side decoding, hex analysis, hashing, and CTF payload processing.	[OPEN CHEF]
Stirling PDF Studio	pdf.rooks.dev:443	[PUBLIC TOOL]	Local document manipulation: OCR, PDF merge, split, and sanitize.	[LAUNCH PDF]
Uptime Kuma Telemetry	status.rooks.dev:3001	[PUBLIC METRICS]	Live latency metrics, cluster ping monitors, and real-time SLA status.	[VIEW STATS]
Proxmox Hypervisor	pve.rooks.dev:8006	[INTERNAL AUTH]	KVM VMs and LXC container cluster on AMD Ryzen 9 5900X (12C/24T).	[CLUSTER VIEW]

dev-blog@system:~$ tail -n 5 ~/notes/dispatches.log

~/notes/dispatches.log • RECENT TECHNICAL WRITING

Full Archive →

2026-07-20 Reverse Engineering IoT Firmware: SPI Flash Extraction

[#firmware] [#hardware] • 8m

2026-07-15 Building a High-Availability Traefik Router with Docker Compose

[#homelab] [#docker-traefik] • 12m

2026-07-10 POSIX sh vs. Bash: Portability in Modern Scripts

[#posix-sh] [#unix] • 6m

2026-06-28 CTF Write-up: Heap Exploitation in glibc 2.35

[#ctf] [#binary-exploitation] • 15m

2026-06-14 Zero-Trust Network Isolation with WireGuard & OPNsense VLANs

[#networking] [#wireguard] • 10m