Homelab

I've created more than just this page actually, and I have a little experience with several different ways to do it.

The first webpage I made is actually still up to this day. You're welcome to check it out!
http://wrightatkittyhawk.weebly.com/index.html
I made this page in Junior High as part of a history fair project. The email I used to create this site was lost when I entered High School, so you can rest assured that I haven't made any changes to it since then (though I might have wanted to)

In my certificate seeker program at the DATC, I learned a little bit of web design, and my second page was born.
https://eportfoliojoshuavalentine.wordpress.com
I learned about several different hosting sites and how to create websites using pre-made templates

The beginning of this webpage was actually a subdomain on my family Google Workspace. It's still up, but it's just a lighter weight clone of this webpage.
josh.valentine-family.org
I taught myself the basics of Google Sites with this page, and I'm slowly expanding into some of the cooler parts about it.

The last webpage I'm working on is my wife's ecommerce project. She owns her very own pottery business. She designs, makes, and sells wonderfully nerdy mugs, dice towers, mushrooms, and a bunch of other things.
I studied around several ecommerce platforms and settled on one that was inexpensive and could be combined with other platforms.
You can visit my wife's webstore at emberglowtreasures.com

My Homelab set up is quite fun if I do say so myself. At the current moment while renting, I have everything behind my own firewall/router connected to the router where I'm renting.

I learned Palo Alto firewalls from my dad, and from some of my own tinkering. Everything on my network is configured by me, including NAT and Security policies, subnetting, and VLANS.

I prefer to go with wired networking for the most part because I've grown up with the mentality that "hard wired is faster than wireless," though I'm aware that with WiFi 6 and talks of WiFi 7, this isn't always the case anymore. The main "hub" of my physical network is a GS108EP smart managed NETGEAR switch, that I've configured to handle all of the VLANs for my network.

I used to run Low Volt cables as part of a wiring company, and because of that, I just have a box of CAT 6 cable that I terminate whenever I need "patch" cables. 90% of the wiring around my home has been terminated by me. The other 10% has been courtesy of the Internet companies that come by and "donate" a patch cable every now and then, or that include one with router purchases/loans

Outside of the physical world and on the digital end of things now.

I currently have 2 machines running VMWare's ESXi with several virtual machines running on each. One was built for that kind of thing, and the other was an unused laptop that I repurposed. Installing ESXi onto the laptop was a fun adventure involving custom packages and USB NICs, since the OS wasn't designed to work with that hardware. I made it work though.

One machine is running a minecraft server 24/7 currently, but also has been used for several other gaming servers such as Counter Strike, Team Fortress 2, Ark, and Space Engineers. It resides in my DMZ and has appropriate Security and NAT rules to prevent lateral damage in case of any breaches. It lives in it's own world.

I still need to get around to taking pictures of everything, however where I'm renting I don't actually have my own consolidated space in "the backrooms," so it rests where my landlord decides it will.