In the dynamic landscape of home labs, enthusiasts are constantly seeking innovative solutions to enhance productivity and collaboration. One such powerful tool is Nextcloud—a self-hosted, open-source platform that transforms your home lab into a secure and private cloud storage and collaboration hub. In this guide, we’ll explore the ins and outs of setting up and… Continue reading Unleashing the Power of Nextcloud in Your Home Lab: A Comprehensive Guide
Building a home lab storage server
Over the past few years, my home lab has grown, shrunk, grown, gone to the cloud, and come back to our apartment… it’s been all over the place. One of the main things we use our home lab setup for is Plex – we love watching hard to find shows, some have come on DVD/Blu-Ray,… Continue reading Building a home lab storage server
Installing Cisco vWLC on ESXI
As I’ve progressed through the CCNA studies I’ve been slowly increasing my home lab capabilities. I wanted to be able to create a multi-site lab with complex routing and switching as well as a simulated office environment with a firewall and physical access points. To do this I need a Wireless Lan Controller, and Cisco… Continue reading Installing Cisco vWLC on ESXI
Extending the life of an unsupported Macbook Air
Recently my wife’s Macbook air has been giving her issues connecting to many websites due to an expired root SSL certificate for Let’s encrypt. More info here. Basically, since Apple no longer supports this machine, we couldn’t update it and fix this issue and Google Chrome no longer has updates for the version of OS… Continue reading Extending the life of an unsupported Macbook Air
Install and Configure NTT BGPalerter
NTT has built a cool piece of infrastructure monitoring software called BGPalerter. BGPalerter is software to monitor streams of BGP data to provide real-time detection of visibility loss, RPKI invalid announcements, hijacks, and more. I will be setting up this tool to monitor my BGP announcements for loss of visibility in the global routing table,… Continue reading Install and Configure NTT BGPalerter
Comparing low cost content delivery networks
One of the projects I’ve been working on a lot lately is deciding on a content delivery network to use for delivering images and files on clients’ website. I wanted a CDN that could deliver images and video relatively quickly throughout the United States as that is where most of my clients are located. A… Continue reading Comparing low cost content delivery networks
CCNA Lab Design 1: Physical Lab vs Packet Tracer
One of the most common questions about building out a CCNA lab I’ve seen on the internet is should I buy equipment and start a physical lab, or should I use Packet Tracer to study for the CCNA. There have been videos from many Youtubers covering this and it generally comes down to two points… Continue reading CCNA Lab Design 1: Physical Lab vs Packet Tracer