Busy couple of months

I have been away from all of this for a few months now, perhaps even half a year. In this time my wife has given birth to my son Cole and I have also purchased a house. Both things are equally as exciting and frustrating, I will try to keep this post on topic and not ramble but Cole has been nothing short of a gift and miracle.

The house is ancient and had to have its electrical rewired from the ancient standard of knob and tube. When the electricians performed that I asked them to run 2 100ft CAT6 cables from the basement to the attic. I attempted to snake the cables down the sides of the house but was horribly unsuccessful, getting the cable head stuck in the insulation. Yes I was surprised that the outside walls of my house are insulated, this makes sense to me now when I think about it. I had to cut the cable end off losing the actual plug part. I ended up ordering a wire noodler and this actually worked very well, challenging but very well. I would recommend doing this with a buddy to cut down the time going back and forth from the outlet to the attic. I then had to order an ethernet tool that spices the wires into an outlet and a punch to get them into the outlet contact portion. This was also pretty simple and now I have 2 gigabit connections going to my second floor.

The basement had nothing in it so I had to buy tables, and storage shelving. I had to take apart my entire homelab at my previous house and migrate it to the new house. Quick side note the new house has a FiOS connection which is just wonderful and the difference is quite noticeable. Not only did I have to disassemble and reassemble the homelab but many of the items were behind on maintenance. To my surprise the new version of FreeNAS was able to run VM’s which I now take advantage of. I used to have 4 towers running separate applications and OS’s but i think I want to consolidate some of those things in order to lower the overall power consumption. I have migrated Pihole onto Debian 9.3 and into a FreeNAS 11.1 VM running on 1 core and 1 gig memory. I created a second VM for Windows 10 running VNC server connected to the outside world as my gateway into the home system when I travel. I will need to make this a bit more secure, hopefully there is a freeware product out there that incorporates google authentication for sign on.

The first thing up and running was the Etherium miner which did double duty and mined some Hush coin for me before the scheduled airdrop. Money was a bit tight at one point and I had to sell some etherium to afford a new Neato robot that works very well to clean up Dexter’s hair. Holly was impressed by the “monopoly money” that was deposited into our account.

Most of the things running are running off the FreeNAS box and for some reason I feel hesitant to have a second system up and running however I do want to play around with pfSENSE at some point.

More pictures to come on the new setup.

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