Lab

I have a large computer and networking home lab where I keep my technical skills sharp and play with new ideas. I use this for most of my engineering projects, getting hands on on new learning opportunities, and some interesting home automation ideas.  

Here are just some of the hardware and projects I have in there today:

Physical Hardware

  • 7 HP Elitedesk 800 G2 Mini servers- each with 4 cores, 24 GB memory, 1 TB local storage
  • TrueNas with 16 TB of storage
  • NetGear 104 NAS Server, 12 TB storage
  • QNAP TS-459 NAS Server, 12 TB storage
  • Ubiquiti Dream Machine SE Pro
  • 2 Ubiquiti 48 Port Switches
  • Ubiquiti EdgeRouter Pro 8
  • Ubiquiti EdgeRouter X
  • 4 UPS Battery Backups,
  • Several Raspberry Pi’s
  • Several Win 10 Laptops and desktops along with Macs and Linux servers
  • Original Prusa MINI+ 3D Printer

Virtual Devices

  • 3 Proxmox Clusters containing a few hundred VM’s, LXC’s, and container’s.
  • Windows servers (2008, 2008 R2, 2012, 2012 R2, 2016)
  • Docker Swarm Cluster
  • Kubernetes Cluster
  • Linux (Ubuntu, SUSE, Puppy, CentOS)
  • Windows Active Directory, DNS
  • Pi-Hole, Zabbix, Maria DB, Hone Assistant, MS SQL, Syslog, NTP

Virtual devices change weekly.  I use trial versions of all software and rebuild things often.

I am also playing with Azure and AWS and linking those networks with my own. Since my goal is to keep the costs down, I am limiting what public cloud devices I run and only have a budget of about $100 in my public cloud resources.

Programming

I have written several hundred scripts and small programs over the years and in the process of organizing them in one place. I have 4 GitHub libraries, a OneDrive, and several archives that I need to go through. I plan to remove anything old, no longer needed, or out-dated and move the rest to my public GitHub repository.

I plan to move my 3 IBM private GitHub libraries to my private GitHub Site. Let me know if you have any questions on any of them

Workshop

I also have a fully functional workshop in my garage. I can do just about any woodworking or mechanical project (Pictures coming soon). This in additional to the 3D printer and soon CNC router I will never want to leave the house.