Why did I start a blog?

Why did I start a blog?

Well I guess there isn’t really a simple answer to that. I wanted somewhere to be able to share updates with what I am doing in the homelab and the home network as well as any development projects or ideas. I wanted somewhere to be able to write up the different things that I have setup, learnt, broken and whatever else. This is for two reasons really, firstly by writing things up I am more likely to remember them and retain the information, but if I don’t it will be here for me to find. Secondly, I want to be able to share some information that may help someone else. This day and age we all google different problems that we come across, ‘oh I get an access denied message’, ‘which networking kit should I buy’ to name a few that I myself have searched. There are already plenty of answers to most of the questions we all have, but sometimes they aren’t right. Now by ‘not right’ I don’t mean necessarily mean factually incorrect, maybe they aren’t worded in a way that helps you, or they may not fit that exact scenario that you have. I can’t promise my way of doing something will work for you, or that my scenario will be exactly the same as yours but hopefully they might help.

How did this all start?

I am by no means a networking or servers expert, and my day job isn’t as a SysAdmin or similar. In fact I am a web and application developer by day. My homelab started about four years ago now, when I started an apprenticeship. I had been looking for a while at getting a small NAS just to host some file shares. Then I got talking to one of the guys on my course about how cool it would be to self host some different services. Around this time I was also helping to make some changes to the home network and made my first leap away from ISP provided network equipment. At the time we where just using our ISP provided router/AP combo as well as some powerline adaptors but this was no longer sufficient. The first step that we took was to install two Unifi UAP-AC-LR access points and a 8 port 150W switch, also Unifi. This was one of the main points where I realised this was something that I wanted to learn more about and that I wanted to keep expanding. Another person joined our course a few months later, who just so happened to have a homelab of his own. About two months later, if not less my first server was on order. My Dell R710 arrived a week later. Quickly the next day I went to my friends house after work and spent until about 1am setting up the new server and getting the RAID arrays built etc. It was probably one of the steepest learning curves I have ever experienced, but now most of it is second nature.

The same day as the setup, my first rack arrived, a 12U StarTech rack. When I first saw it I thought there would be no way it would ever become full, how wrong I was… From here things grew a bit more again, next a UPS, and then a USG-Pro 4, but more about the rest of the lab in another post.

Where next?

Now the homelab has grown… a lot. With this the different things that I am learning, and want to learn has also grown and becoming hard to keep track of. I have a lot of backtracking to do for this, things that I have already setup or things I have already done, but then onwards and upwards.