And made a nostalgia wall with some of it!
Backstory: I bought this house specifically for this room. The door use to be in that back wall which opens into the garage. The first owners installed a door on the opposite wall so that they’d have more interior space, and walled off the garage. I figured this out when I attempted to fish cable further down and hit random mid plates which turned out to be a doorframe (hence the oddly-placed penetration). I believe they actually put a computer desk in here. And the tacky decals were I guess supposed to be a cheeky “look at the view from my office” kind of thing. Regardless, this room has its own HVAC and remains locked. So I don’t care how ugly it is lol.
After cleaning out a few old phone systems and phones, tons of old Cisco routers, and a couple of old ASAs, I decided to memorialize jobs past by keeping a few for the wall lol. I actually really miss doing voice work and it saddens me a bit that now everyone is moving to things like Teams calling. I don’t even have a DID at my current job 🙁 but I digress…
Current stack:
– 2Gig AT&T Fiber
– Verizon 5G backup via Cradlepoint (getting replaced with Starlink next week)
– UISP Router Pro which ingests all circuits, routes for my /27 block from AT&T, and breaks out internet to anything that needs a direct internet connection
– Unifi UDM Pro
– Unifi Switch Pro
– Digi Portserver for OOB
– ASA5525X strictly for AnyConnect
– Unifi UNVR
– Nortel/Avaya 4548 – ancient but great as a lab switch
– Palo Alto ION3000
– Palo Alto ION3000
– Palo Alto ION2000
– Palo Alto ION1200s
– Dell Precision T5820 – 4x1TB RAID – 128gb RAM – 2x10gbps NIC
– Tripp Lite 1500
– APC 750
On the top shelf I have a few MyCloud NAS’s, a Raspbery Pi for Homebridge, Lutron lighting hub, Philips Hue Hub, and my AT&T modem
The Precision runs HyperV with various Windows servers for DHCP, DNS, NPS/RADIUS, Zabbix, Veeam (to Wasabi), Duo Auth Proxy, SMTP Relay for Google Workspace, virtual VyOS routers and virtual Palo Alto IONs for lab testing for my job, and probably other things I’m forgetting about. But that’s the gist of it.
Why do I have this: I’m one of the lead network engineers for a huge company (like it’s a household name sized company) and I’m fully remote so I just find it easier to have my own lab gear within reach. Which is ironic because nowadays I spend most of my time over 1,000 miles away in a different city. But still I like that I don’t have to deal with smarthands at our data center lab lol. Unfortunately, my apartment in the other city is very small so I just have a much smaller Dell host running a few VMs for redundancy – DHCP, DNS, NPS. And replicating my Veeam server in case my main host ever dies and I need to get into Wasabi and restore VMs elsewhere.
Up next: Unifi UPS’s if they ever go back in stock, and hopefully some way to provide backup power for the HVAC, at least for short periods of time.
https://www.reddit.com/gallery/1w6u7gd
Source: r/homelab · by /u/teechevy703