What happens when you’re a volunteer-run academic event with almost no budget, but need to support thousands of concurrent users? We decided to embrace the home-lab mindset and scale it to the extreme. In this talk, we’ll share how we transformed the home lab mindset into competition-grade infrastructure powering events like WRCCDC, PRCCDC, many others. Using second hand hardware and resources, we’ll walk through our migration from VMware and a SAN to an entirely open-source stack built on Proxmox and TrueNAS, and how we replaced Active Directory with authentik + LDAP to eliminate licensing and increase flexibility. Along the way, we’ll cover the planning, hardware challenges, licensing challenges, design tradeoffs, training, and scalability lessons learned while running production infrastructure in a purely volunteer environment. If you are an educator and trying to string together a learning space for students or if you’ve ever wondered how far you can stretch open-source tools this is the talk for you.
