I have been somewhat lucky in my life when it comes to office test labs....

Many, many years ago, I started off having a test server and an MSDN subscription on which I spent hours of my unpaid OT learning via installing, configuring and testing many different Microsoft softwares. And playing around with a Sparc5? workstation back then. When you make a mistake, it was to refer to the physical manual or to call someone who has done it before. 

Years later, I joined Shell IT which gave me access to the best ever test lab I used. I missed that lab. It was bigger and better equipped than many SME data centers of the day. I had fun there learning about SAN storage arrays, advanced server management, scripted deployment and the early days of VMWare 4.x and Linux 5.x. I spent a lot of time on my main role setting up and testing the HP storage boxes in different configurations in order to get the best performance possible. And when possible, went to learn on OS management, file distribution etc...
Those were fun days and learnt a good deal of knowledge which I have used over the years.

Sometime back I found a few spare servers in my office. Specs were decent and no one else seemed to claim them so it became 'mine'. But what ensued to get it up and running took many months and I am happy to say it works now and I will improve on it over time.

Just sharing on some of the things to think about when setting it up

1. I got the power!!!
Finding power and a place to host it was a challenge. Getting the rack  shipped, installed, ensuring the necessary PDU and power sockets are available... testing it so we don't trip the electrical board. 

2. Be Cool!
And related to this is the air conditioning! Although the room I chose is connected to central air conditioning and is pretty well isolated from noise, it does get warm after a few hours with 5 servers running! Definitely need to look at some improvements for this. 

3. Unwanted Sound Management
It does get noisy! Once the equipment starts spinning up to max fan speed, it does get on your ears. A good pair of headphones work wonders in keeping you sane! And also, luckily for me, the servers allow me to manage the fan speed to be quieter.... Now if I can get the switch to do the same as well, I would be a happy guy

4. Offline all the time
A major realization I had is that because the lab is going to be offline all the time, there was no way for me to easily download and install software. Simple things we take for granted like Chrome, JRE, flash (because older software still uses it), and the other myriad of tools which we usually just download as we go. This posed a challenge initially because we had to keep going back and forth to download stuff.

5. Building up my repository
Not just on skills but on my software repository. Linux is great in a way, I just need to do a RepoSync and upload the VM to my test lab and this will get me most of the frequently used software. Just remember to sync epel as well! But for Windows and VMWare, downloading all the ISO and OVAs take time but getting access to the correct accounts and sources takes much longer. Luckily I work for a company which I can request MSDN platform access and VMWare partner accounts. :)

Now that I have gotten the basics all completed in the last few weeks, I need to get some time to set up what I want... I do dream that my test lab will be fully scripted and I plan to use Ansible and vRA to do it. If I have time, I wont mind trying out other SW as well to do all of this, 

I will also need to have some stuff to demo so I will have to relearn Cloudera again and install it so that I can load some data sets (probably the airline one) and write some code to show how it works... Maybe this time I will add in some of the visualization tools as well. 

And lastly, to configure all the advanced VMWare stuff on my little lab since I am allowed to use it and it would be interesting to see how easy it is to deploy, use and maintain a full vCloud solution.

In the meantime, I am waiting for some equipment to arrive for my new home project with my RPI. I'll share more on this in another post once they arrive. I am sure someone has done it and done it well but you can only learn so much by cloning other people's repositories!

I actually wrote a nice long post earlier but somehow it got screwed up and disappeared.

So for this month

1. I am still looking into more Silver coins.... I believe that it will go up and hopefully hit a GSR of 40-50 in a couple yeara time. It wont make me a millionaire but I hope I can make the collectibles free!​
2. Since I am lucky enough to have a decently sized testlab in my office, I will have to look at building it out more in my free time. Only issue is that as it is disconnected from the internet, I have to always ensure I have the nevessary software available. I finally got my Yum server working and will get it up and running on my lab soon. The goal is to be able to have the common software, added the extras (epel) and synced over thr Cloudera repo to rebuild my cluster again
3. Ansible to automate everything. I did ansible a few years back and its time to relearn it and write more playbooks. Deploy VM, configure it for basic use, maybe push out a few kubes for DB or something. But definately to reimage my RPI when I need to instead of having to reinstall and reconfigure it when I want to try something new
4. I need to get a new wifi dongle for my RPI. I am going to build a small fun project for the office to see who is there and this will be based on the MAC addrrsses of the phones or laptops available. I would want to try avoiding doing any packet interception for ethical reasons and will have to spend more time thinking of this.
5. So why do I need a wifi dongle? I spent the last couple weekends trying to get Nexmon to work with the built in wifi chipset but maybe due to the different OS version it didnt work. https://pimylifeup.com/raspberry-pi-nexmon/
6. So will give it a try again while i wait for my new wifi dongle with the correct chipset.
7. Stickyfingers Kali Linux image.... Great for noobs and rusty guys (like me)... Got it installed but havent found time to play with it... Also having issue to get the wifi into monitor mode
8. Sometimes at work, I do wonder why processes are so difficult. Makes small issues grow big without any reason.

Anyway, thats enough for now. I hope I can get used to using Weebly app to write from my phone but will see how it goes.