Hi Michael, welcome to the list. Experimenting from home is a good thing. I've been doing it for years. I even started my first business (an ISP) up in the back of a house and sold it 4 years later when it because one of the largest in the North East US. I found this list while googling years ago and have been a member since. Professionally I am a network engineer with about 20 years of experience. I've worked all sorts of places and run my own businesses. Presently I work for Juniper Networks as a resident engineer for a very large customer of theirs. If I were you, I would either install linux on a dual NIC server for routing or use dedicated hardware but that's my take. You might pick up some networking hardware that's equally over kill to learn and use a home. As far as CentOS verses any others, I am a CentOS man myself although mainly do to it's ease and wide use. Many applications I use call for it directly. Before that I was a slackware user. THanks Scott On Mar 26, 2013, at 2:19 PM, Andrew Hodgson <andrew@hodgsonfamily.org> wrote:
Hi,
Hi and welcome to the list.
Regarding CentOS/Ubuntu, there are good points/bad points about both, I used RedHat/Suse a lot at work in the early days and used to like the RPM distributions. However when I went over to the Windows side, I started playing around with Debian a lot more and now appreciate the way that the package maintainers really care about the general stability of the system and long-term preservation/ease of backups etc that you get with the way their configuration files are organised.
Regarding the home network, that is how I started out on my job so you aren't doing anything unusual there. Not sure why you have to PFSense boxes though, you either could do this on the router box or build another Linux box to do those functions with a bit more configurability?
Not sure about media services, I use Microsoft Windows Server 2012 Essentials at home with the media services enabled so I can get streaming from a couple of home TV devices.
Andrew.
-----Original Message----- From: Blind-sysadmins [mailto:blind-sysadmins-bounces@lists.hodgsonfamily.org] On Behalf Of Michael Baldwin Sent: 26 March 2013 17:08 To: 'Blind sysadmins list' Subject: [Blind-sysadmins] Intro
Hello, I found this list while looking for some information on an automated install of CentOS. I am not a system admin by trade, but I have a strong interest in computers and such, and like to play around at home. I wanted to be a computer science major in college, but 18 years ago, my VR councilor told me I needed to go in to business because blind people could not use computers. It did not take me long to figure out he was just trying to push me in the direction he thought I should go, and not where I wanted to go. And now that I sit here unemployed, it is easy to see how well I have been served by a business degree.
I am interested in learning lots more, and maybe going back to school, or getting some formal training for system administration or the like. I did take a few classes with CAVI, but a home situation arose which made that completely difficult to continue with. Everything seems to be sorted out now, and I might check out their offers for next term.
Maybe one day I can be working on location or from home with computers in system admin, or the like. Until then I will just keep messing around with stuff at home. Working on my completely unnecessary home network setup.
I have messed with CentOS and Ubuntu, but for some reason I like CentOS over Ubuntu. I have my own vps I keep a few sites on, and I tried that with Ubuntu, and CentOS, and it seems to just work better on CentOS. Maybe it is my lack of experience and knowledge that make me think that. It seems Ubuntu has a bigger following in the blind community though. Really, I do not know enough to be real critical of any Linux flavor.
Here is what my home network will soon look like. ISP connection Router/firewall running PFSense. 24 port gigabit switch that can do LACP House wired with cat 5e or cat6, depending on pricing difference. Still not all that confident in wireless security, it can be broken. Another PFSense box that will act as DHCP, DNS, wireless access point, and other small tasks Media server to serve up of course, music videos and photos. NAS for only backups Second NAS for general file storage As of now, 4 HTPC's as the girls get older, I will probably need more. Various personal computers, pc and Mac both, iPads, iPhones, Androids, etc...
Like I said, over kill for a home network.
My interest in CentOS is for the media server. I am going to run Plex media server on it. Although Plex is not 100% accessible, it is not to bad. I like it because I can stream to almost any device you can think of and it does transcoding on the fly.
Well bored you all enough.
Michael
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