Core Services & Integrations
Foundational infrastructure that powers the rest of the lab — automation, secure remote access, email, and tunneling. If Containers & Virtualization is the compute layer and Applications are what runs on top of it, this section is the plumbing that ties everything together and keeps it reachable, patched, and secure.
What's Covered
Why This Section Exists
Every other part of the lab — the containers, the self-hosted apps, the Microsoft and Tanium environments — depends on these services being solid. Automation keeps systems patched without manual effort, Cloudflare and OpenVPN control how (and whether) anything is reachable from outside the network, and Mailcow makes sure alerts and account notifications actually land somewhere. DNS and the reverse proxy decide how those services are reached from inside the network, and the three pages under DNS & Reverse Proxy are meant to be worked through in order: install Technitium, then split-horizon DNS, then Nginx Proxy Manager.
If it's not a specific app and not a hypervisor concern, it probably belongs here.