Welcome! This is a work in progress wiki that is ever changing. Expect things to move around and break.
This hosts all my knowledge to help reproduce what I do so other people can but also for me. I also will have a lot of different items as well as configurations of different services I use. I plan to also go through my entire network and document this so I can help map out my network and also see where it will evolve from now. I also will document any milestones in this. Think of it as a blog of some sort with a lot of documentation.
Hello! My name is Stephen I currently work in Financial IT in a DataCenter running huge workloads with 99.999999% uptime. I have been in my homelab journey since 2018. I have always been facinated with technology from a young age. I got started with a very old Dell Poweredge T110. Once I was in my own rental home I was able to expand my lab into a larger lab with new unifi gear, a synology DS220+ nas and down the road my old job I could take home old servers.
The next server and is still in production to this day (August 2024) was the Dell Poweredge T430. It had both processors. No ram and no raid card. I had to figure out what to get especially the raid card. I had figured it out pretty quickly eventually and got it up and running. I had originally started out with ESXI 7 and started learning it from there. Eventually I purchased a Poweredge R720 and got that up and running and began learning how to start up and administer AD environments as well as start learning networking with VLANS.
Unifi Network gear was a huge help to me learning networking. I used it for about 4 years as my router UDM-PRO for about 1 year or less and immediately upgrading to the UDM-SE when it released to the general public in the US. I eventually had issues with the UDM-SE as it got old and went through a lot during a move and remodel near it. I decided in April of 2024 to upgrade it but with nothing currently at the time when looking I did not see anything else from the unifi line. (Nothing against them if I had waited I could have tried out the EFG.) I, against everyone yelling at me not to, went with Arista NGFW. (You may know it as Untage. Arista bought it.)
I currently run a 42U rack with 1 Synology DS923+, a Dell Poweredge T430 running Unraid, 1 Cisco C220 M5SX with ESXI 8, 1 Cisco C240 M5L with ESXI 8, and a Dell Poweredge R740 with ESXI 8. I run HomeAssistant for my home automation on an Intel Nuc clone Intel N100 mini pc. My lab always changes with different devices coming in and out and I will try and documement what I have learned and different progress points into it. Eventually I will show off pictures of the racks in my Lab.