I've always been a geek. I got my start with tech when I was a kid, but it really took off when I was in high school.

Years Active: 2003(?) - 2008

Picture forthcoming.

I had a few servers. One server was running Windows Server 2003 and was my Active Directory DNS server. Another server was another AD/DNS server.

Years Active: 2009

When I moved to Sandusky, OH to work at Cedar Point, I didn't really take much with me. I had my desktop, laptop, and a couple wireless routers. Not sure if any photos exist of this setup but I'll look and update accordingly.

Years Active: 2009-2010

After living in Sandusky, I moved to Orlando, FL. I didn't have a setup right away. Just a Windows XP desktop and my laptop. Several years later, I moved into an apartment with my useless roommate who moved out on me. He wanted to be in this apartment but the only thing they had was a 3 bedroom. The third bedroom was used as an office. I had a Linux server setup and a Windows Server 2003 AD server. There wasn't anything special here. I had started my web hosting business at this point so the AD network was called “nodespace.local”.

Years Active: 2010-2012

By this point, I had moved out and on my own into an apartment from my old coworker. I resetup things but being broke (my salary was $38,000/year or somewhere around there), I didn't have much to invest. So I got some old desktops from work to use as servers. I forget what I all had here, but I found some old Cisco phones at work and brought them home to learn with. I setup a Trixbox PBX and ran phones around my apartment. The above is when I was getting started. That one cable on the ceiling was going to the phone in the kitchen. Later, I got more phones setup, including one in my bedroom. In this picture, you can see where I cleaned up the cables using actual cable mounts.

From 2012 until 2019 I had a bit of a hiatus from home labbing. I tried to get back into it when I bought my first home. Unfortunately, I lacked money and skill and used some equipment here and there. I did have a single Dell PowerEdge R210II running Hyper-V, Proxmox, and XenServer eventually going back to Proxmox. It ran a few VMs like AD, NeoRouter, etc. Nothing fancy. Eventually, I bought a dedicated server coloed in Buffalo NY. I used this as a “lab” with ZeroTier.

Years Active: 2019 - Present

Now that I was able to invest a little more, I got a dedicated server in North Carolina and installed Proxmox on it. I also added a pfSense VM. With this, I setup an IPSec tunnel so I could have these servers on my network. This grew out a lot thanks to me moving to Unifi. This let me get IPSec tunnels all setup and until I get another house, everything just lives in the North Carolina data center.