The Official Home Lab Thread

ex4200 is used as a top or rack switch (although its quite a beefy machine). Used for testing any physical stuff (802.1x etc) that I might need as well as testing vendor neutral things with the cisco kit.

Fortigate is used as a firewall, web filter, remote access and general mess around device

3560 switch is actually hardly ever used since I do everything virtually now

GNS3 is my old lab simulation app that emulates cisco routers, firewalls, juniper devices etc

untelab is the greatest thing i have. Emulates multiple vendors for testing

ISE is my identity services engine. Used to test new features for NAC, posturization etc. Basically identity based device.
WLC is the wireless lan controller, no longer used that much unless i need to test a feature

All this was used for studying for my CCIE, still used for my second CCIE, CCDE and JNCIE. Although I use unetlab for almost everything now as it integrates nicely
Thanks. ISE looks interesting, think I'll investigate further...

OP, in your box you only have 2 NICS, if both are WAN (which I'm assuming are connected directly from the modem to the NIC) how exactly does the LAN work? I see how it can in PfSense with virtual interfaces but I don't understand how your wired devices connect.

Excuse the n00bness :D
One NIC is connected directly to a modem while the other NIC is connected to a switch, and the switch is connected to the second modem and the LAN.
So pfSense has 3 virtual NICs - vNIC1 (WAN1) is on NIC1 while vNIC2 (WAN2) and vNIC3 (LAN) are on NIC2.

I'm a noob myself so you're right at home :D.
 
You guys must have insane electricity bills! No wonder we need load shedding...
 
You guys must have insane electricity bills! No wonder we need load shedding...


You'd be surprised how energy efficient hardware can be. And consolidating all these machines into virtual instances you can get a whole lot out of a single physical box.
 
What kind of geek site is this with no home lab thread? :p

Thought it would be cool to showcase and discuss our various setups.

So, what about you?

Pretty nice setup.

I have:

1 X Cisco 3750G Gigabit 48 Port POE Switch
1 X Cisco 887va with a 10mb ADSL (Waiting for VDSL as router is capable)
1 X Cisco 887vag for 3G backup with automatic GLBP failover in case of ADSL failure
2 X Cisco Aironet 1252G dual band AP's
1 X HP Proliant N40L running Ubuntu Server, functioning as media (Plex), file share, internal DNS, monitoring and NAS box, it also Rsyncs from the below mentioned dedicated server over a VPN tunnel. Currently running RAID 5 with 5 X 2TB disks.

Everything except the AP's is mounted in a 42U cabinet, with Legrand patch and brush panels, but still needs to be terminated and completed.

The ADSL account is a business package from Axxess with a static IP.
There is a dedicated server in France, and a VPS in Texas, with L2TP/IPsec tunnels to both. The VM in Texas NAT's behind its public IP for Netflix access, and acts as a secondary DNS server for my domains. The Ubuntu server in France runs public websites, mail server, deluge, jabber, DNS etc.
From external, the home network is also accessible once connected via L2TP/IPsec.

Before this the internet traffic used to be split over the same line, with 4 concurrent ADSL accounts. One for gaming, another for browsing, another for downloads and a free 1GB account for testing. This became a mission to maintain, and prices of business ADSL dropped enough to warrant moving over to one single account, with QoS.

Next on the list is to retire the current gaming PC and build it into a generic 4u rack mountable server case I have, and moving the NAS and media services from the N40L over to it. After that I would like to get a fibre line installed, I have a Cisco 1921 available for that. ;)
 
Pretty nice setup.

I have:

1 X Cisco 3750G Gigabit 48 Port POE Switch
1 X Cisco 887va with a 10mb ADSL (Waiting for VDSL as router is capable)
1 X Cisco 887vag for 3G backup with automatic GLBP failover in case of ADSL failure
2 X Cisco Aironet 1252G dual band AP's
1 X HP Proliant N40L running Ubuntu Server, functioning as media (Plex), file share, internal DNS, monitoring and NAS box, it also Rsyncs from the below mentioned dedicated server over a VPN tunnel. Currently running RAID 5 with 5 X 2TB disks.

Everything except the AP's is mounted in a 42U cabinet, with Legrand patch and brush panels, but still needs to be terminated and completed.

The ADSL account is a business package from Axxess with a static IP.
There is a dedicated server in France, and a VPS in Texas, with L2TP/IPsec tunnels to both. The VM in Texas NAT's behind its public IP for Netflix access, and acts as a secondary DNS server for my domains. The Ubuntu server in France runs public websites, mail server, deluge, jabber, DNS etc.
From external, the home network is also accessible once connected via L2TP/IPsec.

Before this the internet traffic used to be split over the same line, with 4 concurrent ADSL accounts. One for gaming, another for browsing, another for downloads and a free 1GB account for testing. This became a mission to maintain, and prices of business ADSL dropped enough to warrant moving over to one single account, with QoS.

Next on the list is to retire the current gaming PC and build it into a generic 4u rack mountable server case I have, and moving the NAS and media services from the N40L over to it. After that I would like to get a fibre line installed, I have a Cisco 1921 available for that. ;)

Nice setup, thanks for sharing.

This weekend I plan on adding 3G backup since it looks like my exchange doesn't have power backup anymore.

Fiber would really be a fun addition but I doubt that'll be available for me anytime soon unless I move.
 
2 x Cisco 2950 Switches
1 x Ubuntu server running Cisco IOU
1 x Checkpoint firewall with dmz for wireless
2 x Netgear AP's with openwrt
1 x Win 10 desktop
1 x OpenSuse web, mysql, dns, dhcp server
1 x OpenSuse backup server
2 x FreeNas servers (docs, music, movies, series) - around 15TB across both.
4 x R-Pi's (sabnzbd, osmc, weather station, dev, monitor)
 
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