The Stack

Two Docker engines, one hypervisor, one conversational operator. Everything below is live.

Compute Layer

homeserver — Proxmox VE 9 on 64 GB, hosting 13 VMs and 39 LXC containers: engineering workstations (TIA Portal, TwinCAT, OMRON, Codesys), media, network services and two dedicated container hosts.

xlc-debian-docker (CT 115) — 6 cores / 16 GB LXC running 31 containers: the IIoT core. docker-vm (.254) — VirtualBox Ubuntu node running 25 containers: the automation and SCADA wing.

Data Plane

PLC / SoftPLC (S7, Modbus, OPC UA)
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Node-RED  -->  MQTT mesh (Mosquitto · EMQX · HiveMQ)
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Ignition / FUXA   InfluxDB · TimescaleDB · PostgreSQL
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                  Grafana dashboards

Control Plane

Five MCP servers expose the lab to its AI operator: two Docker engines, Node-RED flows, the Proxmox hypervisor, and this WordPress site — 190+ tools for deployment, diagnosis and publishing.

Resilience is layered: restart policies and label-driven healing bring every container back after any reboot, Watchtower keeps images current, and Uptime Kuma verifies the result.