Quirky Network

Here’s a little information about me in case you’re a little curious about the guy writing network articles in his spare time.

I'm from Denmark and I’ve had an interest in technology from a very early age. It started with taking apart every kind of electronic device I could find and see what’s under the hood.

Later on I found interest in Photoshop and Illustrator (used for making this website), which is really fun to get into. However that was not quite nerdy enough for me, so I decided to pursue an education in web development.

Sometimes later...

After I finished my bachelor degree I found a job as a web developer for a small firm. Though I quickly realised that coding is not really my passion, so I decided to try out a career as an IT-Supporter instead.

It was here that I learned about networking and server administration. I find these areas of technology immensely fascinating. It’s the backbone of every company and organization and it’s basically what makes the modern world run.

After a 3 year internship at a university where I got my hands on networking, servers and IT-support - I can safely say that this is where I belong. I enjoy helping people with their IT problems and I enjoy server administration and networking as well. I created this website to help others learn about the networking world because it's so damn fascinating!

My Homelab

This is a picture of my rack at home :)

Every device in my house is connected to the rack one way or another. I have 3 access points for the wifi and my main desktop computer is connected via one of the fibre cables. Is fibre overkill? Absolutely, but it does have some benefits.

When I access files from the storage server I can transfer and download files at an amazing 10 gig speed. I can also edit 4k video directly of the server without any hiccups. Highly addicting!

Here is a brief description of the rack from top to bottom:

The first is the PfSense firewall. All incoming and outgoing traffic must pass this firewall. From here I control and manage all the connections and forward them to the appropriate servers. As an example - when the firewall receives a HTTPS request, then it will immedaitly redirect it towards the proxy server. The proxy server checks to see if the domain is known (such as this one). If thats the case then it will forward the request toward the web server. The web server then processes the request and deliver the code to your browser (such as this website).

The next two slots are there to organize all the cables. The first is a CAT6a Patch Panel and the second is a Fibre OM3/OM4 patch panel.

Now we get to the main switch that handles all the internal traffic. The access points are connected to it with regular cat 6a ethernet ports. The servers and my desktop computers are connected with fibre to utilize the highest speed.

Below the switch we get to the main hypervisor which handles all the Linux and Windows VM's that I host. I run ESXI with Vcenter for the full Vsphere package. When typing this I run these virtual machines of it:

linux-backup-01
linux-docker-01
linux-nextcloud-01
linux-plex-01
linux-proxy-01
linux-web-01
vCenter
win-controller-01
win-torrent-01

I wont get into detail how each VM is configured, maybe I will do that in a future article.

The next server is the main storage server. It hosts my personal data and all the shared data used by the VM's. I run FreeNAS on it with daily backups and ZFS snapshots. I'm very pleased with the stability of FreeNAS so far!

The last server runs Eve-NG which is utilized to practise my networking skills in a virtual environment. Right now it lacks power though, but it will be upgraded in the near future for sure!

What's in the secret drawer at the bottom? Who knows? Who will ever know?

About Me

Sometimes later...

My Homelab