Somebody please get this engineer a CLI

Monday, 01 January 2018 / Published in Networking, Personal
This post is a little war story about a time I helped out a friend of mine. My favourite movie for 2017 was John Wick Chapter 2. Not quite as good as the first movie but still awesome. In one of the  scenes Laurence Fishburn shouts “Somebody, please! get this man a gun” Just prior to Christmas a

Sir, If you’ll not be needing me I’ll close down for a while

Saturday, 02 December 2017 / Published in Personal
In preparation for watching Star Wars The Last Jedi I’ve begun watching episodes 4-7 (I have little interest in watching 1-3). Whilst watching Episode 4 – A New Hope C3PO asks Luke:  “Sir, If you’ll not be needing me I’ll close down for a while”. December is the time of year I ensure to take time off

Keep your tools close but keep your sharp tools closer

Tuesday, 31 October 2017 / Published in Certifications, Personal
Some downtime between contracts provided me an opportunity to continue with some home renovations. Specifically, replacing all ten of our internal doors. This was not a small task as our house is 40+ years old each door required a fair amount of trimming to fit properly. The best advice I was given was start each

Why I Didn’t Buy A Mac Book Pro

Sunday, 23 July 2017 / Published in Personal
This post is my reasons for why I didn’t buy a Mac Book Pro. I’ve just replaced my laptop as per my normal 5 ish year laptop refresh. For the first time, I considered a Mac Book Pro over my usual Lenovo windows based machine. This post is not a review of the laptop I

Update to the Gaming Rig

Sunday, 30 April 2017 / Published in Personal
Since living with the new Gaming Rig I built a few months back I decided to add some upgrades. This included a new CPU cooler, more RAM, another SSD and some cable extensions. I’ve been using the gaming rig as an overflow hypervisor when I need to build out larger labs. New CPU Cooler The

Consolidating VM’s In The Home Lab

Thursday, 09 February 2017 / Published in Lab, Personal
For the last few weeks I’ve been running out of RAM on both my hypervisors. Each server has the supported total of 32GB RAM and 1 x CPU Socket. The question I’d been asking myself was, do I purchase a third server or do I start consolidating VM’s in the home lab? The easiest and

Project Open Case Gaming Rig 2016

Monday, 31 October 2016 / Published in Personal
UPDATE – Since writing this original post I made a few changes to the rig which you can read about here It’s been 6 years since I built my last PC Gaming rig. It was time to build a new one so project open case gaming rig 2016 was born. My son is now 5

Star Wars Rogue One

Wednesday, 28 September 2016 / Published in Personal
I’m likely going to watch the Star Wars Rogue One trailers over and over again until December. I have a feeling this movie is going to be equally as good as Episode 7. It also breaks the time up between now and next years Episode 8 release in the summer. To say I’m excited about

Pictures of the home network lab

Wednesday, 31 August 2016 / Published in Lab, Networking, Personal
  The Net Assured DC the physical medium to a truly virtual world

Home Lab Versus A Cloud Lab

Friday, 01 July 2016 / Published in Lab, Networking, Personal
My last post detailed my home network lab setup. This post is an attempt to compare having a home lab versus a cloud lab. The cost to build my home network lab was around £3500. I plan on keeping the majority of the equipment for a minimum of 5 years. The cost comes to £58.00