Introducing the Home Lab

Driven by some techie mental disability and the thirst to understand more i’ve slowly expanded out my home network into a “homelab”. A few months ago I picked up a cheap HP ProCurve 2824 from eBay, its a great gigabit switch with Layer 2 and basic Layer 3 capabilities, after a quick retrofit of the fans with some nice quiet Sunon Maglevs its been ticking over nicely as the core switch of my network.

In addition to the new switch I “acquired” Jo’s PC to use as a VM host, with some extra network cards and a bit more memory its now serving as a multifunction machine; pfSense, various lab VMs, and monitoring systems.

From time to time i’ll be posting about my latest experiments, what i’m learning, and how its now presenting a even larger drain on the electricity than it was previously.