My Office

My Office

The place I spend most of my time.

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Setup

  • Internet: Starlink (I live in the country)
  • Wifi: eero Pro 6E Mesh
  • Desk: Jarvis Bamboo Standing Desk 72”
  • Chair: Serta Bryce Executive Office AIR Lumbar Technology Ergonomic Computer Chair.
  • Monitor 1: 49” SAMSUNG Odyssey Neo G9 Series G95NA 4K UHD
  • Monitor 2: 32” MSI Full HD Gaming Red LED Non-Glare Super Narrow Bezel 1ms
  • PC Custom Built 2023
    • OS: Windows 11 Pro with WSL 22.04 Ubuntu
    • Case: Lian Li Lancool 216 RGB Black Steel/Tempered Glass ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
    • Motherboard: GIGABYTE B650 AORUS Elite AX
    • Processor: AMD Ryzen™ 9 7950X3D 16-Core, 32-Thread
    • CPU Cooler: Lian Li GA2T36INB Galahad II Trinity 360 AIO CPU Liquid Cooler 360mm
    • Memory: CORSAIR VENGEANCE DDR5 RAM 64GB (2x32GB) 6000MHz CL30 AMD EXPO iCUE
    • Video Card: Sapphire 11322-01-40G Nitro+ AMD Radeon RX 7900 XTX Vapor-X
    • Hard Drives:
      • 1x 1 TB Crucial T700 Gen5 NVME M.2 SSD
      • 2x 2 TB Samsung 970 EVO Plus M.2 SSD
      • 2x 2 TB Samsung 850 2.5 inch SSD

Homelabs

Since I have already invested pretty heavily into my Gaming PC. I typically use it to host my lab environments using either Hyper-v or VMware Workstation Pro and GNS3 for virtual networking. There are some great tutorials out there for using Ansible+GNS3 to simulate managing routers/switch’s via code. I don’t have long running workloads that require constant uptime, so I spin up/down environments as needed. For hybrid learning, I extend my local labs into cloud hosting platforms like Azure and AWS when I have trial/credits available.

Future state, I have considered buying some “Mini PC”s like Intels NUC 12 pro or Asus Expertcenter PN52. The thought was to get 2-4 of them that run ESXi/vSphere but haven’t had a huge need to do it yet.

One of my goals this year (2024) is to put together some labs using automation and all the BuzzOps. The first project I’m going to tackle is located here Homelab, where I plan to use tools like HashiCorp packer/terraform and ansible to spin up a windows domain based lab with linux realm joined servers. The goal is to be able to spin up the environment and run various playbooks for configuring everything + install other apps like Grafana/Prometheus for monitoring.

From there I can more easily tackle learning new topics of interest more easily having the infrastructure available.

Favorite Places to Learn