About Me

Welcome to The Geek Bin!

The Geek Bin was created after 4 years of telling myself to keep a log of the things I do because some day I’ll need them, then 4 years later having to solve the same issue I already solved… the hard way. Now, here we are! I run a not-so-home lab, a small MSP-style business, and I’m finding new challenges as I go along.

I’m at this stage in my life where I know not to buy lots and that I should save, but, I end up buying things on an impulse, which is much like how my dive into labbing began. My lab started in early 2013, which I got my first Gen6 HP server and old Dell server. Within hours I had them setup and configured, ready to use. I installed VMWare on them, and I was off to the races — the rest is history now!

In my personal life, I’ve got an adorable toddler, another baby on the way, a terror of a dog, and an incredible wife. I love to hang out, laugh, and learn as much as possible. While I’m not playing with my son or dog, with my wife, you’ll find me out exploring nature and learning more technology.

What’s in my lab?

Currently, my lab sits in a data center which is about a 3 hour drive from where I live, it’s got one server in there and another one in build process.

Router: VyOS
Server 1 (Ivy): 2xE5-2650v2 / 64 GB DDR3 ECC Memory / 4x3TB HDD (Seagate LFF) / HPE DL360P Generation 8
Server 2 (Tree): TBD (8+ core processor) / 64 GB Memory / 4x3TB HDD / HPE (TBD)

Click here for photos of the servers (outdated as of 2020)

My colocation has metered bandwidth, I get 30 TB of bandwidth which is more than I need. Right now I use about 5 TB per month on plex, and less than 3 TB for hosting nextcloud, a single windows VM, NAS setup, and more. I’m also considering putting a few new Raspberry Pi with 4GB ram on top of one of the servers, for research of course.

I’m pretty happy with my current setup, I’m working towards fully making a HA setup so I can take a node offline without having to worry too much about it. The data center supplies me a /29. Then I tunnel myself a /24 from a friend with good transit provider upstreams, that I split into production VMs. Essentially, I built a virtual router for myself that does a site-to-site wireguard tunnel.

The other thing I’m always stoked about is, the data center I’m in is a local ISP, and as such the IPs assigned to me show up as residential allotment, which makes me watching any shows even easier because it doesn’t look like it’s a server in a data center.

Lab Diagram (July, 2019 - Outdated)