About

Hi there, I’m Rico a data technician currently working as a lone sysadmin in a company of 25ish people. I took over from an outsourced MSP as the company wanted more control, and faster in house support. It suited the MSP great, as they were working on retiring.

I have a home lab where I’m still waiting for the rack, so its possible to have something “clean. Right now it’s pretty much all thrown on a self or 2 and plugged in. The wife is actively trying to kill me over this :S but has so far tripped over the cables.

A bit about my home lab setup:

4 Raspberry PI’s all with different purpose in life.
– One is acting as a Reverse Proxy with Traefik and using CloudFlare as DNS resolver.
– Another is running Ansible, which I still need to finish the setup on.
– The last 2 I haven’t decided on yet.

7 Lenovo Tiny’s of different ages, but overall spec is an I5 with 8GB of RAM and all is running Ubuntu Server in Minimized edition.

– One is running Docker with various things, such as CheckMK and Netboot.xyz
– Another is running Windows Server 2022 (Windows was NOT happy with this machine, but I found a big enough stick)
The idea is to be able to spin up Kubernetes at some point.

1 Lenovo Tiny with an I3 and 8GB of RAM, which is the test machine that gets crunched every few weeks and the project moved over to a more permanent machine if I find it useful.

As for networking I have a Protecli Clone PFSense machine with 4 LAN that is connected to an Ubiquity 16 port PoE switch for the “main” network.
Whenever I get the rack, I will be installing a Cisco SG300 28PP unit into it, which will act as the backbone of my rack and home lab.

After the rack the next ‘big purchase’ is going to be a small NAS for a bit of backup and to reduce the load on the internet connection whenever netboot.xyz is running.

Thanks for reading 🙂