Tag - Homelab

Over the years I’ve had many people ask me how I manage networking on my single host lab environment. “How do you do VLANs and manage routing/firewalling without a physical device providing that upstream?” they would ask. Well, I use a PFSense VM. Which would usually be followed up by “Yea but how?” VLAN trunking on my dvSwitch and sub-interfaces within PFSense. Easy stuff! Let’s review requirements first: Be able to define multiple VLANs and subnets.

It’s been a while since my last post! I’ve been spending some time in my homelab with the latest vRealize Suite products. One of those fantastic tools is vRealize Log Insight. I won’t get into the details of the product, but one of the use cases I wanted to tackle for my homelab was ingesting any and all syslog messages I could find. A key piece of my homelab is a PFSense VM that I use for routing and firewall separation between my home network and the components nested snuggly in my HP Z800 Workstation.

During my time at iseek, a great colleague Angus Kelsey introduced me to a self-hosted budget management application Firefly III. I was impressed with the finish on the product and was happily surprised to find it was open source and could be self-hosted. I’ve got a FreeNAS server running at home for private workloads and wanted to install Firefly III on this server. Can’t be that hard, I thought. A quick search online didn’t find a straight forward article on installing exactly what I needed to get up and running.

Like many professionals in this industry, I have a homelab. Who would need a homelab anymore with the cloud as prevalent as it is? Well, someone who specialises in private on-premises clouds and the work required to make it a hybrid cloud. And to be honest, I love it. I get to build something that is truly mine with my own constraints and requirements and still try to reach maximum usefulness for the hardware.