When I decided to create a website, it was initially to self-host on my home server, just to say I did it. After thinking about it for a while and after spinning up a new VM, I decided to change the scope of what I wanted to use this website for. Instead of just doing it for the sake of doing it, I decided that I wanted to document my journey with my home lab, create write-ups on the processes I used, speak on what worked and what hadn’t, and ultimately preserve this adventure in a time capsule of sorts, and one day either look back on it fondly or offer it to other people to help them start their own journeys.
Tech write-ups and blogs on the internet are vast and plentiful, and I have no expectations of these chronicles becoming wildly popular, but I also wanted to flex a muscle that had become atrophied over the years: writing a compelling narrative. One thing I have noticed over the years of side-monitoring other tech blogs as I mash away at my keyboard, is that the information is usually presented in a fact-of-the-matter, no-nonsense fashion, and it’s clear as to why that is, it’s effective and easy to digest. With that said the blogs I remember the most and have bookmarked always had personality baked into them, so that is a direction I decided I wanted to follow.
A lot of my home lab is already built, and much more has yet to be conceptualized, so I am going to go back to the beginning and start with some of my first ideas that I had tackled. I’ll start with basic topics such as virtualization on a normal desktop and implementing a Pi-hole, and eventually move to things like creating a VM for Windows server 2019 for AD on my dedicated server and having all of my VMs send data to my SIEM. As I go back and start recounting my past endeavors, I am sure I will find misconfigurations or areas in which I could have implemented technology better, and I think that will be half of the fun. Being able to see the fruit of my growth by spotting and rectifying old mistakes will be a nice bar to gauge my current development, and I’m excited to begin the task.
I am going to try and make a post every week to ensure I stay on top of it. I’d hate for this project to sit and gather dust, even if I am the only one to ever enjoy it. My first post will definitely be about the project that I have used and appreciated more than anything else, the Pi-hole.
Until next time
-John