Monday, December 19, 2022

A Little Homelab and Life Update

I'm going to start writing more on my blog. No! Really! You do believe me, right? Ok, can't blame you if you don't. I come back to this from time to time and think this time I'm really going to dive into it, only to get sidetracked in some other direction. I promise I have a good excuse this time.

Since I last posted, I have gone back to school on a part-time basis while continuing to work full-time. I decided it was high time to finally get that Associate's Degree I started on decades ago. My days have consisted of going to work in the morning and going home in the evening to do homework. I just completed the Fall semester which included a Technical Mathematics class and a Speech class. I enjoyed both classes quite a bit, but I must say I'm glad for some down time of an evening for a while. We're on Winter break now and I'll only have one class left to take in the Spring semester which will allow me to finally graduate in May.

I haven't completely ignored my home-lab efforts during this time, however. I've re-done most of what I talked about in my last post, lo those many months ago. Now there is no domain controller, though it may return someday when I have more time to really learn it. It was an interesting exercise and not hard to get setup initially, but I found I really needed focus on other things first.

I finally added a home built pfSense firewall/router as the gateway for my network. It is connected to my ISP fiber modem and then everything else goes from there. I've been learning about vlan's and have setup a couple in pfSense and my old MikroTik RB260GS switch.

I've been learning about Cisco as well and am fortunate to have a couple old Cisco switches a friend gave me. I can hook them up when I need to, though they're both a little too noisy and power hungry to use all the time on my little home network. Those fans really get to going at times, so I only power them up if I plan to spend some time in Cisco training.

I still have my Proxmox virtual machine server running and I've been trying out several different things using VM's on it. Most recently I set up a NextCloud server, a Guacamole server and a Cloudflare Argo tunnel so I can reach the NextCloud and Guacamole from anywhere. Finally, the VM I was using as a file server was getting a little unstable for some reason, so I created a new one to replace it and then removed the old one after migrating all the stored files off it.

I'm off for a couple weeks now since the college is closed for break, so I'm sure I'll work on some more of this stuff soon. I'll try to do a more timely job of posting about it, but I make no promises I can't keep.