I’ve been mentioning topics and technologies i’m involved in. I have been relying on the notes and resources online. This is a great way to for the initial exposure of the ideas. I wish that was enough. For certain things, it’s hard to grasp the concepts without actually interacting with the hardware/software. So i decided to start setting up a small home lab.
It took a little bit of time collecting some gently used hardware to power this. I also had to consider a few ideas of what i wanted the hardware to do. I will go into further detail for each service in the form of blog posts, but for now this is what I was planning.
- Hyper-V
- I’ve listed this service first for a reason. This will be the core of how all the services i will be listed will be able to run. It’s a great solution for this for many reasons. For starters, i don’t have a lot of equipment nor a huge budget for it. As long as the hardware and software is capable of virtualization, i could have the ability to spin up a few virtual machines each with a particular role. Also, this approach for infrastructure is common and also growing at a large rate. This exposure will be great.
- Active Directory
- One of my first servers i like to configure is an Active Directory server. I use daily at my work. That being said, a good rule to go by is that you never want to mess around too much with the production environment. Here, i can mess around with the setup and configuration.
- GitLab
- This service intrigues me the most for a few reasons. This server will be involved with development goals. GitLab is a repository service. It’s offered for the cloud or on-premise. I have chosen to go with the on-premise. Reason being is i already have a Github account which is cloud-based. Also, many companies use an on-prem version of a VCS so i wanted that exposure as well. This service also will be installed on Linux. I don’t have much experience with Linux which is why I wanted to also to pursue this.
- Cisco Switch
- i’ve acquired an older but usable Cisco switch. This switch has management capabilities so I can configure the device to help regulate security and traffic flow within my lab environment
- VoIP/SIP
- This service will provide the capability to make phone calls over the network. This is a great alternative over a home phone using the phone line. It also is much cheaper to utilize a VoIP (Voice Over IP) system per call.
- Plex Media
- This is the first server i’ve made. It’s a client/server media system. I primarily use Plex as an on-prem “Netflix”, but it can also involve music, photos, podcasts, and more. The upgrade will be making this virtual and toss old equipment associated with this service.
- SYSLOG
- With all of these services being available, it would be important to monitor these servers to make sure i’m aware for any issues. A SYSLOG server uses SNMP to collect event log data on computers and is managed centrally. This was something I was exposed to with work and I was intrigued to play around it.
- pfsense
- To briefly explain, pfsense is an open-source software that installs on a computer to provide firewall/router services. This will be important because there are certain