/dev/blog0

For all of us that run our own home labs we know (or should know) the price of what it costs us to run our equipment every month. Previously I spent some time with a Kill-A-Watt meter performing an energy audit on my equipment and found that it uses about 650 watt/hrs of power. At 12 cents per kwh I’m spending $78/month on my lab, over $900/year. 60% of our monthly electric bill goes towards my work hobby.

I’ve tried to slim some servers down by moving them to a laptop running Debian & VMware Server but there are creep-cpu-usage problems involved with that. The laptop running VMware Server wasn’t all the beefy either, a Athlon 2800+ with 512mb of RAM. 1 or 2 guest OSs before things start to slow down. No RAID setup, no firewire, no expandability; a good stop-gap system until I could figure out what I wanted to do.

Through a lot of reading I’ve decided that an VMware ESXi system was the way to go if I wanted to virtualize my servers and have enough room left over to delve into Cisco Call-Managers, IDS/IPS systems, Nessus scanners, Asterisk, Olive’s, and just stand alone systems for trying new things. I also needed a NAS to centralize all the usb/firewire drives that I have laying about. The NAS needed to have RAID capabilities and act as an iSCSI target so I’ve chosen to go with FreeNAS. Read more…

I took the 640-801 test and got my CCNA on the first try. The Mrs. sacrificed a lot (leaving me alone to study, household projects went unstarted and those started, unfinished etc.) and to her I will be forever grateful. It was Cisco’s changing of their CCNA path that really drove me to complete the test prior to them changing the required info around. Next up will be the CCNP, but I can study without putting my family second.

I’ll finally be able to get started on the many projects that I’ve back burnered over the 2 years or so that I should of been studying for my CCNA. I’d usually come up with a good idea or something to upgrade somewhere and my ‘I shouldn’t be doing this because I don’t have my CCNA yet’ would promptly stop me.

Read more…