Windows Home Lab?

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…

Home Router Upgrade

It’s been a busy day or 2 for me getting parts together and getting ready for a fairly big shift around my home network environment. It’s all being done in the name of education as I want to run a CHR as my border router to give me some real horsepower for some scripting I’m looking at trying to do.

As part of the move around I will end up removing a MikroTik RB3011, HP N54L and a PoE injector and will be swapping over onto an RB260GSP (taking the place of the PoE and converting to fibre), a rack mounted server and a CHR which I’m currently about finished configuring.

Over the next few days I will be installing the 260GSP switch/converter and re configuring the CRS125 switch in the cave and then it should be about time to “cut over”  and get my CHR live.

This is all a test though and there is a possibility it’ll all move back if I can’t put up with the noise from the server in the cave.

6-config-moved