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A lot of times I see discussions about whether or not homelabbers should use rackmount servers or tower servers. I’m going to share my reasons for preferring rackmount gear. Scaling vertically No, I don’t mean scaling out a web application or anything like that. I mean physical space. You can pack a lot of power […]

Well dear homelabber, you’re on a budget. You have some old Cisco 2960s you bought off ebay. You also found some cheap fiber transceivers that are not Cisco name brand. Perhaps you have some that you bought from Ubiquiti and they work fine. You plug them into your Cisco switch and… there’s no link! You

So you took my previous advice and decided to ditch Ubiquiti and go (back) to Cisco like me. Good for you. If you’ve never touched Cisco gear before, let me make this perfectly clear: it is a different world. You can royally screw up your network. You will get really annoyed with some things. It

In my previous post, I said that I was going back to Cisco because of Ubiquiti’s poor handling of their security breach. That’s not the only reason why I’m going back. Houston, we have ads This has received mixed opinions, but if you’re telling me about something, regardless of whether it’s your own product or

This blog post has been in the works for a while, but after the latest snafu with Ubiquiti, I’m calling it quits and going back to Cisco. What happened Yesterday, Brian Krebs posted an article that the Ubiquiti breach was “catastrophic” according to a whistleblower. Yikes. We all knew the breach was bad, but it

File this under “Technical Drama” but if you haven’t heard, Netgate, the developer behind pfSense, sponsored a FreeBSD kernel module for Wireguard which brought it into pfSense 2.5.0 which was released back in February. Netgate committed these changes to FreeBSD and this module was slated to be included in FreeBSD 13.0 set to be released

I run Lenny on my FreePBX server with his own DID that I give out to vendors or in cases where I don’t want to give out my cell phone or business number. It comes in very handy because this isn’t just a bot. This is a bot that will listen and then respond. There

In my homelab, I run HP servers. I’ve always liked HP servers since my employer switched to them from Dell in 2012.  At home, I’ve ran a HP ProLiant DL160 G6 for a couple years now. It’s a beast! Very reliable hardware and doesn’t make too much noise. But there’s one problem with older generations:

On my old network, I always ran it flat including my servers. Since I have moved and brought a server into my house (in addition to my colo’d servers), I needed to have a dedicated server VLAN. I wanted to leave my Proxmox management interface on my main network. Create your VLAN If you have

Way back in 2014 or so, a friend of mine asked me if I wanted some firewall stuff he had but wanted to get rid of. I said sure, and drove out to meet him and pick it up. So about 7 years later (wow, where has the time gone?!), I decided to break out