What's the infrastructure Everett uses?

  • Two Dell R710’s – Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5620 @ 2.40GHz 8 cores with 16 threads and Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU X5650 @ 2.67GHz 12 cores with 24 threads. 
  • An HP ProLiant ML350e Gen8 Server with 16GB’s of RAM and a single Xeon E5-2420 v2.
  • 120GB of DDR3 ram running at 800Mhz and 32GB of DDR3 ram running at 1600Mhz.
  • My servers use ESXi as their hypervisors. I host vCenter to simplify the management of each server.
  • I use pfSense as my network backend. Traffic is split up into seperate VLANs. I use NTOPNG to monitor and understand the traffic moving across my network. IDS and IPS security is handled with the help of Suricata. I only allow IP connections from North America with the help of pfBlocker. 
  • Cloudflare is used as an SSL/TLS reverse proxy. Cloudflare helps protect my home network against most DDOS attacks. I use ACLs to restrict traffic to between myself and Cloudflare only.
  • My home wireless networks are provided via Ubiquiti AP’s. I host The Ubiquiti controller on my servers – giving me useful metrics and help with management.

The city of Victoria – the base of operations.

Recent pictures.

the home lab.

What's the point of a home lab?

My servers let me experience and learn about technology first hand.

I can immediately apply concepts learned from textbooks and teachers into a real-world testing environment. This helps prevent future issues and builds practical knowledge that would otherwise be impossible to gain. 

If you’re interested in starting a home lab I recommend visiting the home lab subreddit. A home lab can be as simple as an old laptop or a spare Raspberry Pi. 🙂

Here’s my current network diagram:

Not entirely up-to-date, for security reasons. 😉