Network+ class at Bellevue University was super informative. I think what really made the learning that much more valuable for me was bumping the homelab/network along side of the class. Implementing what I learned in class to modifying and upgrading the home network really streamlined a lot of the hosting I had been doing and opened up justifying more bandwidth from my ISP to go from 1Gbps up to 5Gbps. (I’m still at 1Gbps 100Mbps to the home network and all the wireless devices and 900Mbps to the hosting.) This was done by setting up VLAN’s at the Gateway. Having past experiences knowing that I do not need more than 35Mbps upload and 250Mbps download for a 20 person LAN center in my garage I opt’d with the 100Mbps to the home network. Enabling RSTP over the 10Gbps network free’d up a lot of traffic to allow games to run more smoothly.
Taking a whole week to jump ahead 2 weeks in class the supporting communities I’m working with said it was okay for me to rebuild everything to follow a “best practice” approach of network setup for hosting game servers. This turned out to be pretty cool because after this semester I am going to be rebuilding it again to include Azure for backup systems to ensure everything stays online.
Having a homelab/network while at school is 100% advisable and I‘ll be setting up a page in TekBits on ways to do it for everyone. Getting a community or a few involved is even more awesome as the pressure gets applied to not screw up but make your modifications as necessary. You might also learn something that you can’t initially utilize but in later chapters be able to with a change that you might want to make or could make. The pressure is really a positive thing. Yes you’re off the clock but having a multitude of gamers mad at you for not keeping their worlds intact or content creators losing connection with hundreds if not thousands of viewers and additional players looking on is also a big thing. It can get uncomfortable when those communities share their opinions of you and they aren’t afraid to do it either.
Integrating virtual technologies in a basic fashion was pretty cool for some reason I never thought about isolating networks within the hypervisor and am not looking for quad NIC’s at 1Gbps instead of 10Gbps as the individual networks branching off the main 10Gbps network do not need that much backplane. This will make it a lot more secure as I’ll be able to add many virtual firewalls before each server within the host.
This semester is over and it has been a super exciting one! I’m looking forward to the next 3 semesters to graduation of my Bachelor’s and then looking into moving forward to a Masters. I think in my off time I’m going to learn a few languages or work on some integrations with API’s. I do need to get an SQL server running on its own and a multisite WordPress server for websites to build for my supportive communities then build out Zeemew! This class has been instrumental in moving forward with these projects. Can’t wait to see what the future brings!
