Written

Windows Home Lab?

by

I’ve got an IT based project on again! It’s been an absolute age since I’ve been “interested” in my IT and computers and servers and all things good like this but I’ve got a project on my hands, add in as well I currently have a renewed interest in learning and relearning some network essentials and generally needing to sharpen back up on these things (more to come on that in the future).

So…
I had a spare HP Gen8 Microserver with one of the 1260 Xeon’s (4c8t) and 16GB RAM so a decent little box by most accounts. A quick amazon order for 2 Oracle SSD>HDD mounting brackets and I’ve got 2 Crucial 240GB SSD’s in the first two 6Gb SATA drive bays.

A quick hop over onto Gamers Outlet and I’d bagged a Server 2022 license and probably 10 minutes of installing later I have a decent little server running. This is being used now in 2 parts, firstly for my project to look at guest accounts, remote desktop access and how to lock down users. The second part of it is to spin up a HyperV environment and get some MikroTik CHR’s talking to each other! A return to MikroTik world albeit brief as I don’t envisage my work going that way again any time soon, it was good to use Tik to understand the concepts and replicate in my own way.

More to come as the IT project unfolds and yeah maybe more networky stuff…

1 Week on

by

I’ve had Zen’s FTTP 900 product now for just over a week and whilst I’d love to say so far I’ve absolutely thrashed it, sadly I’ve been caught out with a bout of Covid (first time) so wanting to protect the family I moved out into isolation for a week. this meant I wasn’t at home and able to use the connection but the family were still benefitting from multiple streams but I also benefitted vastly from the enhanced upload.

Having nothing to do but stare at walls, I worked my way though a load of my old Plex content, streaming the original files was an absolute breeze and regularly I was peaking 20Mb of upload bandwidth and that was fairly consistent across most of the days I was away. No issues there.

Hopefully I’ll have something a bit better to be able to trumpet about the amazing new connectivity.

Go Gig or Go Home

by

Install day was today and I’ve finally gone to FTTP. Installation was an absolute breeze, I’d put in a draw cord to get the fibre into the house and the Openreach engineer even took down the copper as well so nice and tidy. I have a neat little ONT in my house next to the living room patch ports and we are running a CHR with Gb internet.

Before install from a wired in connection during a working day.
Following install but before ONT upgrade
After ONT upgrade and a PPP drop and reconnect, this was Steam downloading a game on my CHR.

As you can see, the move wasn’t flawless, following the upgrade, my download speed held at the 55Mb I was profiled at previously but following an ONT firmware upgrade and then a PPP disconnect and reconnect from the CHR, we released the full power. My laptop couldn’t even manage to get the throughput due to the USB dock for a speedtest so a Steam download on the main gaming/editing PC was in order to show it off.