Phantomski

IT in general and networking especially is not my job, just a hobby, albeit a big one. When it still was a job, I was just making a company's worth of transition from 10BASE2 cheapernet and Novell's IPX/SPX on DOS into the world of Windows NT, TCP/IP and 10BASE-T. Those were the days. First real rack mount switch, the SBS company server I've built myself, SCSI RAID and all...

My first remotely sent bits were a chat tool I've built using RS-232 via DB-25 connected cable that ran between two flats in our apartments block. ARPAnet vibes when the characters first appeared on the other side. My first "online" was a BBS via USRobotics COURIER 2400 modem. My first "real internet" in the company was using 56k USRobotics modem. My first WiFi was a pineapple metal can home built antenna sticking out of open window in the freezing winter connected by about 1.5cm thick low loss cable and a pigtail. I've managed almost a 1km link with that thing and only 20% packet loss. 10% when the leaves fell off in November. Bliss.

I've missed almost 2 decades of the greatest progress since, but the possibilities these days are so exciting I couldn't resist to dig deep again. I mean we used to buy paper books to learn something and if it didn't work, there was no one to help. And OpenSource? What OpenSource...

These days I concentrate most of my efforts into building, running and maintaining a HomeLab, which is a fancy description of a heap of (mini) computers, networking devices and cables / radio waves of multiple standards, disputable quality and performance, that's running plethora of VMs and Docker containers magically brought up together to serve some sort of painless Home Automation / Personal Cloud / R&D setup to my unsuspecting family and my nerd hobbies. I mean it's pretty neat and does a lot of complex stuff pretty darn well, it's all kinda modern and fancy in all fairness and completely OTT even for a small company, but it involved more googling and trial/error than anything else. And a bill I don't want to talk about. That's the way I like it though.