breadNET

Welcome, you've made it over the ~waves~ of the internet

This is my site. I know, not amazing, but we all started somewhere. I do have plans to move to wordpress and self host it, but that's something I need to learn!

A little about me:

I left school in 2018 and worked in a warehouse during the summer till I got my GCSE results. From there I started attending Oaklands College for a level 3 Btec in IT. This I did not enjoy. It took me 6 months to find an apprenticeship at an MSP in the area . I've been working with Office 365, SpamTitan, Mailstore, Citrix, Windows, Machpanel, email migrations, a smidge of linux, vmware, hyper v, server migrations and finally, working on the helpdesk. I have learnt alot about computers and how they like to break. fun.

Now I am working at a cloud company which is a masive shift for me as I am learning alot each day. I am a Junior System administrator. It costs me nothing to say this, but I love my job here!

Since I left school I used to have a 'server rack' in my bedroom made out of 2x4 wooden planks. Whilst looking back now at this, I'm not sure how we're still here writing about this on account of it being a plain blatant fire hazard. Luckily, being that I landed a job in a warehouse, it taught me the value of money. I decided I wanted an actual server. I saved up all my wages and purchased a 48u rack (Yeah, they're actually quite big) and a couple of servers. Not really sure how my parents were ok with this but hey, gotta work with what you have!

I started with Citrix xen and soon learned the pains of corporate licenses (mind you, I still haven't actually had my first job in IT) so I decided to start looking. It was around here when I became a FOSS addict. I found xcp-ng and Xen orchestra. This was amazing, finally, I can run VM's at scale and not have to line the pockets of David Henshall with license fees. I decided that sure, all good and well having a server, but I need the actual stuff to support it. I purchased a cisco switch as at this point I was really serious about my CCNA (yes, I am still working on it, but it's on the back burner for a while) so it would be a learning experience for me! This is when I first learnt about vlans. man did this cause a mess which also taught me how to reset a cisco catalyst switch. (cv fillers!) Now it's all good and well having a switch and a server, you now need something to route those juicy packets. I decided that the best bet for me is a pfsense firewall which I built on top of a dell r210ii. It works, and has space for a 10g upgrade should I decide to go for it.

Somehow I managed to keep my bank account above £10 and only get a call from my bank about fraud as someone (me) was splurging my hard earned cash on enterprise gear. odd.

I digress.

Finally I have managed to get everything setup to the point where I am comfortable to host servers (well, vm's) on there and not worry about issues. I have set up backups and fail over on some of my mission critical vm's (bind, password server and database server) which is all good.

That, for the most part, takes us up to now where I'm playing with more cloud native (eh, not sure if you'd call it that but..) technology like ansible and cloud-init to speed up the process of building and deploying a vm for my learning.

You can read more about my servers, what I'm running and see it on my youtube channel (basically a bone yard)