Putting together a history for two reasons: 1) I’m giving a talk on Wednesday and 2) It’s fun
My home lab traces back to my first Macbook in 2008. I wanted to run Windows, for reasons I can’t recall but probably were just, “I can’t”. A friend down the hall in my dorm did IT support for the college and gave me a key for VMWare Fusion. I never got Windows installed, but did get Ubuntu and Fedora installed. I was slightly familiar with GNU/Linux before and had even tinkered a little bit, but having a virtual machine on my laptop was next level.
Fast forward almost ten years and I’m working in technical support. Want to push my skills past a help desk into the world of cybersecurity. Someone gave me a list of tools to learn and off I went. Spun up virtual machines on my gaming desktop to learn tools and then learn the fundamentals and more. Slightly backward, but hey I’m getting there. Someday I’ll figure out how these computer things really work.
Today that gaming PC is just a sticker-laden shell of what it was. The case is there, but that may be it. It’s now a Frankenstein of server parts: An AMD Opteron 16 core server processor, 32GB of ECC RAM, a hodgepodge of hard drives, a cool server motherboard with IPMI, and four NIC’s. That’s just the big server. I have some Raspberry Pi’s, an Nvidia Jetson Nano board for AI development, laptops, small computers, and a full stack of Cisco Meraki networking gear.
What’s it doing lately? I host Plex on my NAS because I constantly blow away my hypervisor for some reason. The biggest benefit is that the NAS sucks less power I assume. Plus, it’s always going to be on anyway. The big server is mostly used for testing these days. I’m running NextCloud on a small computer with an Ubuntu server image. Another small computer is hosting the Security Onion stack as a SIEM.