Well, welcome to my little section of the internet. What’s this spot all about? Well, it’s mostly about my homelab. If you do not know what a homelab is, see this, maybe linux handbook article or even this noted.lol write-up.
Homelabs come in all shape and sizes. Some are small, raspberry-pi sized, others are multiple 42″ racks, etc. There is no right or wrong lab. As long as it serves the purposes you want, that’s all the matter. We all started off somewhere.
I have had multiple homelabs throughout my life. From the time I was 14 and had a PC with 16 modems stacked up in the corner of our living room, and a long coax cable running from that PC to my bedroom PC so I could login to my BBS (showing my age here) from my bedroom and do work on it. This is the 90s. I had saved up every penny I had for that BBS. I had already ran one before, but on a Commodore 64C. But I saved every penny I made from my paper route, birthday, summer job to both purchase MajorBBS and build the computer plus a few modems. Started off small, 4 lines.
Later, there was the networking homelab. Mostly routers and switches, a few servers to simulate traffic, or to use as Olives (For those who don’t know, back when Juniper Networks first started, they could not afford to build multiple systems for testing. When the Routing Engine was just a PC running FreeBSD with Juniper’s modifications. As long as you had a supported NIC, you could use these to route traffic. Mind you, no ASIC offloading, so some tasks would tax the CPU (this is 2000, not the CPUs of today). So while I had multiple 1RU servers, they all were olives for testing JunOS and routing/switching. This lab helped me get certifications, which is the point for some homelabs — personal growth.
So what is this blog about? I’ve wanted a place where I can do little write-ups about projects I’ve completed. Talk about the setup of equipment, etc. I wanted to finally keep track of changes, issues, fixes, and just everything about the lab. And finally, the majority of my friends are non-technical. They don’t get excited about Cascade Lake CPUs, all the issues Broadcom is causing for VMware customers, etc. They just don’t care. My work friends are mainly outside of IT as well. My IT co-workers, we’re friendly but don’t associate much outside of work. The perils of WFH, I guess.
I’ve been looking through old pictures, and have found pictures from different times in the life of the Ghetto Homelab. The next article will actually sorta be the “last” in the series. I’m going to discuss the current version of the lab, and some before/after photos.
So, without much further ado..The Ghetto Homelab!