Home Lab, New House

  Recently many of you may have noticed a drop off and relatively sporadic nature of my posts, but the jittery post schedule hides a very fun secret, my wife and I are officially home owners.  Here in lies the difficulty and the slightly longer jittery nature of posts over the next few weeks, the house purchased is a foreclosure.  As of this past Thursday we finally got the keys, up until that point there was tons of planning, tons of meetings, tons of every imaginable thing plausible to get us in the house, but being a HUD home it was long, confusing, and completely convoluted.

  Let us discuss the fun side of this all though, the impending home lab.  The basement is going to be sectioned off into an entertainment space, and a man cave.  As a tech geek, there will be tables full of arduino boards, desktops, laptops, servers, switches, hubs, firewalls, gateways, and everything in between.  Instead of writing up things from a cramped single desktop desk in a small room the size of a truck stop bathroom stall, I will have sizable space to start performing full scale tests on an actual network.

  Could things get better?  Well I'm glad you asked my day job did a workstation refresh about a year ago and since that date we've had a solid 36+ workstations laying around the office, a bit on the dated side of life, but none the less a collection of workstations.  Our new CEO gave me the go ahead to take anything and everything that I want for myself.  Meaning I now have at my disposal a large collection of workstations that I can use for almost anything.  Despite the fact there are a bunch, I will most likely be minimizing my haul to the Dell precision 380's and Dell Precision 390's.  The 340's and 350's in our collection may be too old for my intended goals, I'm not sure just yet.

  Any more good news?  Once again with my day job we are planning a server migration from a bunch of dated physical servers to a new SAN an VMware based infrastructure.  This only furthers the pile of outdated hardware that becomes fair game.  The only immediate purchases I am looking are a physical firewall application, a networking rack, and a few switches.

  Better quality content in a home lab environment, with home lab servers, proper networking setup, with new projects, new programs, and new tasks await.  I do greatly apologies for all of the non-consistent posting that has been going on, but we are working our hardest to get into this house by October 31st.  It might be worth mentioning the state of the house as well, the progress, we have made, and what needs to be done as well.

  The house was previously owned by a heavy smoker and drug dealer, it was taken over by the united states department of housing and urban development.  Within the confines of the house the walls are stained yellow, there are bird droppings throughout the house, and most of the doors have been kicked in, walls are riddled with holes and the Air conditioning unit as well as appliances have been stolen from the house.

  As of Sunday night though, between my wife, her brother, my father, and I, we have removed a vast majority of the carpeting from within the house along with tack strips.  The plumbing issues have been mostly resolved, including a leaking shower, a leaking kitchen sink, and a crossed pipe issue on the kitchen sink.  The ceiling in the basement has been completely tore down, along with the wood paneling and a solid wood shelving unit.  Forty boxes of hardwood laminate were picked up Sunday, and a dumpster will be arriving on Tuesday for all of the waste to be taken away in.

  This week we will be clearing out all the debris and painting all of the walls, floors, and ceiling with Kilz Primer to get rid of and mask the horrible smells and stains, followed by painting, and then lastly floor installation.  From that point on we will be reliant on getting appliances in place, repairing the bathtub, replacing the toilet and sink, and then getting the HVAC unit replaced.

  We are pretty far in on this project already with the little amount of time we have had it, but once again we are trying our hardest to make a dead line of October 31st, but there is a lot of work to get done.  We are working our hardest to get in, and when all is said and done I want to reiterate the new quality of posts and quantity of content will increase, please bare with us as we work through this huge project to get into our new house, we will have delays in posts, but we are going to make it epic.

   And as always, be safe my goblins.  If you have an questions, comments, concerns, or wishes of good luck, all are appreciated.  Thanks again for your patience.

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