POPIA, PCI-DSS, and My Proxmox Cluster: Bank-Grade Security at Home

cw@wagner.org.za (Chrisando Wagner) — Mon, 27 Jul 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A recruiter once asked me, half-joking, whether I ran my home network “like a bank.” I laughed, said no, and then drove home and found I’d left a Grafana dashboard exposed on a LoadBalancer IP with no auth in front of it. That was years ago, before the current cluster existed, but the discomfort of that gap never quite left me. My day job is Cloud Architect at a banking group, where POPIA and PCI-DSS aren’t abstractions — they’re the reason certain designs get rejected in review before they ever reach a pull request. My homelab is not a bank. Nobody’s card data lives on it, no regulator will ever audit it, and I will say that plainly and repeatedly in this post so nobody mistakes what follows for a legal claim. What I’ve done instead is take the discipline those regulations instil — because I practise it forty hours a week whether I like it or not — and apply it to four nodes and a Mikrotik router in a room in Johannesburg.

Security on Chris Wagner

POPIA, PCI-DSS, and My Proxmox Cluster: Bank-Grade Security at Home