A little over a year ago, I made a bit of a long-winded rant regarding on how my homelab is a mess. I haven’t been too active on social media besides my presence on X. However, I have been extremely busy in the background working with my sponsor mandolinsara to build out a usable, secure, and scalable platform to place my thoughts and host my future works. I figured now would be the perfect time to write a long-winded article on my journey starting from the beginning and concluding with the state of current affairs and what I’d like to accomplish going forward.
A Brief History About Me
I have always loved computers and technology and decided to make a career out of it. Beginning in mid 2012, I was attending a community college for network engineering. I was able to obtain base level certifications such as A+, MCSA, and CCNA. School really wasn’t for me, and I made the decision to drop out. By the end of the year, I was able to get an internship working at a local MSP. I was assigned to an onsite position at a local hospital imaging computers for their Windows XP to Windows 7 migration.
After three months, my internship ended, and I was looking for a full-time permanent role. My former boss introduced me to the owner of another local MSP that built and serviced multifunction printers. I was hired on the spot because they were looking to expand their business after acquiring another company. I went back and forth between building Konica Minolta MFPs and working helpdesk. To nobody’s surprise, I absolutely hated working with printers and they did not have the capacity to make me a full-time help desk associate. I spent around a year there before determining I needed to look for another role more in-line with my talent.
In the summer of 2013, I started a fulltime help desk role in corporate IT at a national conglomerate comprised of a dozen sister companies. I cut my teeth here on large scale Active Directory, networking, System Center, and basic systems administration. It was honestly the best job I’ve had. We had around 100 locations throughout the United States and the three of us absolutely killed it. After four years of working there, the IT Director was fired, and the CEO brought in…”an idea man” to take his place. The three of us scattered pretty quickly after that due to unstable office politics.
At this point, I decided to see if I could get a full-time systems administrator position. Many of my job duties on help desk overlapped with a systems administrator and I was determined to find a cushy desk job that paid well. I accepted a position at an MSP that was mostly desk work with a handful of onsite jobs. During my tenure at the company, the COVID-19 pandemic broke out and worked mostly at home. I started making TikTok videos while I was at home between tickets, and I believe that’s how I met most of my online friends and community.
Currently, I work in manufacturing IT as a systems administrator for a great company, surrounded by amazing people that aren’t afraid to be themselves. There have absolutely been busy days, but I don’t think I’ve been burned out yet. I’ve learned I excel in corporate, work at your own pace type environments. I’m doing much better now and couldn’t be happier.
A Brief History of My Homelab
Now that you know a bit more about me, it’s easier to explain why I homelab. I have a bit of formal training, but I am mostly self-taught. My goals have changed overtime, but my “lab” has always been production with testing capabilities.
Many personal server pictures have unfortunately been lost to time. The furthest iteration of my homelab I can trace back was very simple. As pictured above, I had an APC UPS, an HP Prolient ML110 G6, and a Lenovo NAS all networked by a Linksys 1900AC running OpenWRT. I was not utilizing any type of virtualization. If I remember correctly, I was running Windows Server 2008 which acted as a domain controller and seedbox. This was pre-Plex era. I remember utilizing Windows Media Center to stream all of my favorite movies and shows from the NAS. My media center PC ran Windows XP Media Center Edition on some Pentium 4, 2gig of ram piece of junk. For what it was, it was pretty wiz bang. I even had the official Microsoft remote!
After working in corporate IT for a bit, it was clear virtualization technologies were something I needed to explore. I was able to grab a StarTech rack from Amazon and load it up with scrapped equipment from work. I utilized a Watchguard XTM510 running PFsense, HP 1810 switches and HP Prolient 360 G6 servers running ESXI 5.5 and later 6.5. Although it was loud and power hungry, I enjoyed having the additional horsepower at home. This was MY network. I could experiment and run things as I saw fit!
When I moved, I specifically chose a home that had space for my homelab. The closet was perfect. It was centrally located in my home and out of the way. I scaled down to a single Dell R710 VMware host and Supermicro 846 chassis running (at the time) FreeNAS. It was clear by this time I needed to upgrade my equipment. It was old, power hungry, and noisy. I was experiencing weekly hardware issues and weird system crashes. I was spending most of my hobby money replacing failed components and hard drives. This solution was not sustainable.
The After Dark Era
A year ago this month, Sara joined my team as my NOC engineer and social media sponsor. She approached me after her initial plan to sponsor another tech creator fell through due to their undesirable behavior. She has a background in technology and has sponsored many other creators through her organization. I explained to her I needed fast, reliable servers to build my platform on. She was happy to fund glowy branding, a 10gb switch upgrade, an additional Dell R730, and build out the entirety of the secondary backup rack. We currently run around thirty virtual machines that will eventually be publicly documented. My goal is to build a production environment as publicly as possible to educate and empower others to do the same.
Conclusion
There were a few bumps in the road getting this environment online, however I feel the environment is mature and stable. There are a few things that can be done to tweak the environment. For example, I’d like to improve automation, monitoring, and go through an internal security audit by following an established security framework.
I am currently working on documentation, YouTube videos, and bringing OpenVPN up to snuff so I can image a laptop for Sara and bring her into SCOM and SCSM to wrangle tickets and delegate more NOC duties to her.
As you can imagine, there’s a lot of work to be done. I personally did not expect this endeavor to take as long as it did, but I’m glad everything is online, stable, and I have the horsepower to build out my platform. I hope you have enjoyed my reintroduction, a formal introduction to my partner Sara, and a breakdown of previous iterations of my homelab and what the future has in store for us.
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