Homelab

As always, opinions in this section are solely those of my own, and not necessarily those of any organization I am currently affiliated with or have been in the past.

Over the years, there’s always been some level of ridiculous enterprise IT homelab occurring wherever I’ve lived. It started in my parent’s crawlspace, then grew bigger once I got my own apartment, peaking in my condo before Colleen, my SaaSy wife (seriously, she works for a company that makes a SaaS product), moved in and kept the techno-gadgets from invading all our free space. These days, I’m focusing more on an eve-ng instance running on Google Cloud for the heavier virtualized stuff (Cisco ISE, Juniper vMX, etc.), and running the lighter stuff in the condo (ArubaOS-CX, Windows VMs, etc.).

I never bothered writing down most of what I was doing in the past; figured there was no point given the amazing resources fellow homelabbers have produced such as Katherine McNamara’s network-node.com and René Molenaar’s gns3vault.com. Then out of the blue, I was introduced to a project involving ArubaOS-CX, and blown away at the lack of homelab examples given how promising this new platform is looking for campus switch plumbers such as myself. I’ve been feeling very motivated to write more after listening to Josh Duffney’s excellent podcast at packetpushers covering his new self-published book. While I don’t see my homelab hobby ever turning into a book for purchase, I think I can get some great content together here, and I’m glad you’re spending the time to read it!