A fine March Wednesday, I spun my home lab and loaded configuration into PNET labs, as I began working through a workbook, that is when I was reminded of a planned vacation that was coming up that very weekend. As I really didn’t want to shut the entire thing down; it takes ages to reboot, […]
I’ve had a home lab for learning and skill development from past many years, however, COVID situation and lock downs had many of us move away from our traditional work locations, back to our native parental towns. Most of us opting for remote work. Lock down and Exodus This experience in itself compelled me to […]
I own a Dell PE R620 server running ESXi 6. Fortunately for me, it has a iDRAC7 enterprise licensed card installed that lets me remotely power on and off the server module via scripting – on click of a button. Power On This script logs into the iDRAC via SSH and switches on the server […]
Came to know through a colleague about this refreshing new platform called PNETLab. This is a much more polished cousin of EVE-NG. Having spent large part of lockdown learning with EVE-NG on GCP, this was the best thing to come across. Free lab bundles Main feature for me are the downloadable labs which contain not […]
To increase hardware resources for our learning lab deployed in previous post, we would stop the instance and modify the type. For my learning lab, suppose I’d need 2 vCPU, ~12GB RAM and about 20 or 30GB HDD. So let’s compare costs for various combinations available to us. Read [link] for more on various machine […]
I need to prepare for a big datacenter build project that’s coming up based on newer networking technologies. As I don’t have access to my home lab presently due to COVID-19 lock-down so I’ve decided to build one on GCP. I posted a related post few years ago – read [here]. Cost Looking at cloud […]
I recently virtualized my desktop PC’s windows 7 ultimate over to my ESXi host using VMware vConverter Tool. During the conversion process, the VMDK for the OS was created as a 175GB thick vmdk hard disk file as my C:\ was of the same size. I have space constraints on ESXi host, therefore I shall […]
This note is to document how I finally managed to connect a HD44870 (JHD162A) based generic 16×2 LCD with my Raspberry Pi 3. I was at it for two days but the module just wouldn’t display any text, only the back light would stay lit but just won’t display any text. Wiring I followed [this] […]
My primary goal is to create an inexpensive lab environment which can run on my desktop. Objectives Create an enterprise like network structure – Simulate L3VPN clouds, internet cloud, some IPSec VPN tunnels DC-DR running some server workloads, few service VMs A remote branch office network Use this infrastructure to practice new technologies Use the […]
This topic is about BGP’s ability to prefer another router (kinda de-prefer, actually). The following diagram will make it clear. In this situation, it may be a better choice to traverse from R1 to R2 via the point-to-point link instead of going over the ISP Cloud. Here R1 and R2 are eBGP peers only. The […]
