My improved Home Lab

I am constantly improving. One way to do that is to upgrade my home IT lab were i practice and improve my IT skills every week.

This is a diagram of how my home lab looks now.

It combines a cable modem, TP Link Router router, a Cisco managed switch with Vlan configured. It also has a Synology Network Attached Storage (NAS) that uses 4 8Tb hard disks in a RAID 5 configuration and it runs on a customized Linux distro. With the NAS i am implementing different types of backups. I can also use the NAS as a server to host many other services like a chat, a office suite similar to Libre Office and my own Google Workspace alternative.

I also connected it to my home’s video DVR security cameras. Also from my main PC im using VMware to run a virtual network that includes Windows Server 2016 with virtual PC’s joined to the home lab domain using Active Directory. From my TP-Link router i provide internet connectivity to my smart TV, other IOT devices tablets, and a Ecowitt weather station telemetry that feeds WX data to Weather Underground and aids in weather forecasts. The weather sensors use WIFI and are located on the roof of my house. You can take a look at my live WX telemetry at https://www.wunderground.com/dashboard/pws/ICAROL4

It took me a while to build all this but it’s fun and interesting. I plan to improve it some more.