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+++ Categories = ["BLSE"] Description = "In this series, I discuss my homelab: what it is, how it's set up, and what it does. Part one discusses the physical components of the lab." Tags = ["homelab", "cableporn", "blse"] date = "2016-10-18T22:54:45-04:00" menu = "main" title = "Anatomy of a Homelab, part I - Meatspace"
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It's late 2016, and the "cloud" is everywhere. It is a mythical, monlithic entity at this point, provided by Amazon and Google and Microsoft, and meaning: "I don't need to spend money on hardware". But despite the widely-held beliefs of middle-managers and salesfolk, even the most modern of "clouds" needs something tangable - power and cooling and machines - humming along somewhere. When I first started with homelabs, they were small: a router and a server running some flavour of Windows or Linux, which could easily be mistaken for almost any corporate deployment in the late-2000's. As time has passed and I've grown into a seasoned Linux sysadmin, I've expanded and expanded my lab. However, while many of my ilk were flocking to the new cloud, with its on-demand instances and smooth monthly billing, I instead chose to double-down. I've always loved the hardware, and taking ownership of my house, I was finally able to get away with plans I never could before. And as the plans matured along with my abilities, I started looking to that cloud as inspiration. Today, I can safely say I'm proud of the cloud I've built, and hope now to share it with you, to entertain, to inform, and to inspire. My growth in knowledge has been long, and will never end, but at this time I hope I can impart something onto you! Please enjoy your read.
What and why?
The first question is: what is a homelab? Simply put, it is a collection of server and networking equipment that a person runs in their home, instead of in a company computer room or datacenter. Homelabbing is a popular hobby among the system and network administration communities, and among some who don't work in the industry. I myself got into system administration through tinkering with a small home server. Once I began my professional career after several years of schooling, I was finally able to afford a large system both financially and in terms of time. And here we are today.
If you're finding my blog for the first time, you should know that I'm a systems administrator (sysadmin) specializing in the open-source GNU/Linux operating system. This means I spend a lot of time staring quizically and typing furiously into a terminal window, making systems do my bidding. Some would say I'm a wizard, especially myself. This isn't just my chosen career, but my passion and my main hobby as well. It is also an industry that is constantly changing, even day to day, and keeping up and is good takes a lot of time. But to me, it is a pleasureful and immensely fun activity. To further the hobby side, I need an environment with which to work, and living in a full house with a basement to isolate the sound and heat, I was able to acquire a significant quantity of equipment over the year. And I still enjoy doing it; this is the "why".