It has been a few weeks off of posting, that does not mean the work has stopped! I started my last college course on the 1st of November and will be graduating towards the end of December. Super excited to knock this off my list as it has been a long time coming. With that being said because of school I have less time to sit down and write a quality post. I am ahead in my coursework so I plan to get some out over the next week. Starting with today to talk about my most recent update to the lab!
It goes without saying that it is quite a humble setup but we all have to start somewhere. Probably about 6 months ago a member who works at the base I am stationed at offered me a free server to play around with. That is the bottom server as you can see in the picture, HP Proliant DL360 G5. Although he did not want nothing for it, I feel I will always be in his debt as it only increased my passion for this field.
I was able to learn so much with the Proliant server but with that being said it was limited in HDD and RAM. Being in Japan I had a hard time finding exactly what I wanted as it would not ship. I then did some digging and found an awesome deal for a Dell R620! I purchased this as my Graduation present. I figured it would allow me to continue my studies, justifying the purchase. I now have 64GB of RAM and 800GB HDD.
I had it only set up for a week and already was able to learn so much. All of which I hope to share throughout the next two weeks. On this server I plan to run various services and labs for learning purposes. Some will stay as they will add to my home environment but some will be temporary. For example I now have a DNS server running on PiHole, I have several self hosted Docker containers (FreshRSS, NextCloud, Homer, Portainer, more coming) I have Ubuntu server running NGINX for my reverse proxy and migrated my previous Minecraft server over. I also created another lab for Windows Server 2019 as I still have so much to learn!
For those that read this post, be on the look out for a few instructional posts later this week. Until next time, Never Stop Learning!