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
As requested here are some (larger) pictures of the home network lab. Once I find some spare time Phase 2 will begin which will include replacing the spinning disks in the x86 servers to SSD’s and moving to using vSphere essentials licencing. A licenced version of VMware ESXi will enable me to move to automated

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

The Home Networking Lab

Wednesday, 29 June 2016 / Published in Automation, Lab, Networking, Personal, Security
Here is an overview of the Home networking lab setup. You might ask why even have a home lab these days? You can build a fairly grown up enterprise grade topology using virtulization? Agreed, especially if you have high spec workstation or choose a cloud provider for the compute. Why I built a home lab

Plan for the worst

Friday, 01 April 2016 / Published in Personal, Security
I was approached recently by friend requesting some help with a very difficult situation. A member of their family had sadly passed away. The deceased was a husband and father of two young children. My friend was trying to assist the wife of the deceased with various financial issues that arise when a someone passes away. The

Fortune Favours The Brave

Wednesday, 02 March 2016 / Published in Personal
One year ago I resigned from my employer to work for myself as a consultant. Just before doing so I emailed a friend of mine to ask his opinion and the last sentence in his reply was “Fortune Favours The Brave” The decision to go self employed was actually something I planned for some time. I’d