Quick note, mostly for my own reference down the track.

I have in the lab a MPC3E-NG FQ and a MIC3-100G-DWDM card. To those of you not Juniper ensconced, that’s a chassis-wide slot and a 100Gbit/s DWDM (tunable optic) card. Wowee, I hear you say. Anyway, the 100G DWDM card requires a fairly spicy new version of Junos, one with a new underlying FreeBSD core at the heart. My lab was running on Junos 14.1R5.5, an already pretty recent version - but for 100G across my lab I need to use the DWDM card, inconjunction with some Infinera DWDM kit for good measure.

As part of my dumb journey to self-host things (well, on a VPS I pay for), I fired up Apache and chucked a virtual host on it. The plan will be to move all my hosted sites to this server, but for now I’m starting with a fresh WordPress install for a family member’s B&B website.

I pay a good chunk of change to Dreamhost every year, I have done since I was old enough to have a credit card. It’s handy. They are a pretty chill hosting provider, by and large. I host about 8 or 9 WordPress sites. Some are mine, some for friends. As I get better at unix’y stuff, I’m becoming more of a cheapskate and am thinking that $140NZ or whatever Dreamhost costs per year is a bit steep for a shared hosting platform. I have trialled their more dedicated VPS offering and while it kills performance-wise, it’s too expensive for someone hosting sites on behalf of others for free…

Over at Packet Life, stretch has been talking about his/Digital Ocean’s cool new IPAM/DCIM. It’s open source, being developed like crazy and has some interesting features (for me, the ability to document my lab setup which is getting out of hand seems like a good place to start).

Why?!

I bought a Raspberry Pi 3 on the day it was announced, because I am easily excitable. When it arrived, I tried out a few things like compiling Synergy (much faster than a RPI2!) and the oblig. Quake 3. Once the fun wore off, I thought this might be a good time to finally sort out my cloud storage issues. The issues are as follows:

1) I am mildly concerned about having my data live on someone else’s computer
2) I really like and rely on Dropbox, but my 8GB isn’t enough anymore
3) I am a cheapskate