Things in Motion

Learning a lot more these days about technologies such as Qubes, Terraform and setting up a Kickstart file for a minimal CentOS install to throw down an OpenStack-based “homelab” virtual lab that future professors might use to help their students learn…but that will get some work as a capstone project later on.

In my free time I finally got the unRAID server running as a storage provider and scraping host…so I might have more to report on the scraper project soon as I delete my social media more and more, as well as hold onto Youtube media that might be uploaded to a decentralized source now as peoples’ channels get shut down. Also might begin archiving some projects in the #FOSS world.

Also I’ve been doing work on just learning OpenStack since there seem to be quite a few moving parts that I should learn bit by bit before tackling an entire sandbox for it head-on. I’m still moving at the pace I learned while out West and am thankful for what I learned in Silicon Valley- I will return…

Some developments

Recently I've mainly been focusing on some open source projects I've been helping my friends out with, working on dashboarding and on-call automation at a Tesla internship and attempting to finish Legend of Zelda: Breath of The Wild.

I gotta say, as much as I love Nintendo games, damn that one is a bit more brutal than previous iterations! Previously, you could actually manage to live for a while in Zelda games...now it's as if Nintendo partnered with From Software...Nonetheless, onward with more tech blather.

I've recently been working on more self-hosted things. I'm likely going to host my own Sandstorm instance with Rocket.Chat and some other apps on there when I get back home in August from California. The Factorio Ansible playbooks that I somewhat talked about here on another page are still in development- Ansible can further my understanding of how automation can be used in both personal and professional environments. I'm also looking into Terraform to see how, upon return to the midwest and my homelab, I can map out my infrastructure for future reference.

Outside of homework and open source projects, those playbooks and tools I covered...I haven't done much outside of work at Tesla. I'll update this again when I get time...usually once a month.

A New Chapter

While still working- rushing- to get my homelab remotely accessible in time before I fly out to San Francisco to intern at Tesla Motors, I'm struggling with balancing hanging out with friends, playing Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild and working on this homelab. So many friends and family want to say hello before I leave for five months.

Sorry for the few updates, I just haven't found time to update this site in a while. The holidays are quite busy. Looking forward to seeing what this new job, albeit temporary, on the West Coast brings. I've needed a break like this for a while. The slow, bureaucracy-filled norm that I'm used to with companies I've worked for in the Midwest will likely have no place out at Tesla if I'm hearing correctly. Here's my chance to work somewhere great and bring back a different mentality to the Midwest.

Happy holidays everyone and I'll see you in the new year! 

Life is moving

Life is moving along! Classes are going. Sometimes it's hard to keep one's head above the water in the cases of professors who don't understand or like you, but I attempt to power through anyway. Also learning in Scripting Languages courses recently that Python might be my new best friend for the Scraper project, once I get my servers mounted.

Recently did some work on rackmounting my servers, but learned that my HP DL380 G7 needs special rails or adapters for its rails to fit in square rack holes. The Dell R710 was succesfully mounted, awaiting a RAID card swap so that the hard drives can be passed directly through to unRAID. Also learned that my idea for using a Raspberry Pi 3 to monitor room ambient temperature, humidity etc has already been done before so that'll be fun and easy to setup for the new "server room" in the basement.

Other than the fact that the Scraper and VPS projects have been put on hold due to the inevitable delays caused by needing rails + parts for the servers, I should be able to complete the Lakka Box once the heatsink for the Dell gets here!

Alex out!

Further Projects - Update!

More parts that I need for projects coming in during these future weeks. I'll be reviving the servers and finally racking them using a cheap rack that  I found for the VPS Instances project, as well as setting up a Raspberry Pi 3 with a SENSE HAT to monitor the temp/dampness of the basement room the server rack will be in so as to monitor environmental variables that could hurt them.

For the Pi 3 with SENSE I'll likely either look into Parrot IoT, Ubuntu with Snaps or Raspian- regardless of what I use, it'll be command-line based.

I also recently got a Pi Zero W from someone; might look into some legal pentesting I can do with that in an Altoids tin. That'd be cool and definitely help my college fix their rampant wireless issues.

After racking my servers, because I can't sleep with them whirring next to me, I'll likely begin my foray into the unRAID space for the R710 to become a storage center and begin throwing ProxMox back on the HP dl380 so I can more effectively manage the vms....just no idea yet what I'll be doing for a frontend to the VPS Instances I'll sell or lend out to friends...with time I guess I'll learn!