The (Mis)Adventures of a Systems Admin, Part 1: Home Labbing

One computer running Windows for Workgroups. Thirty years later it’s a Proxmox cluster, a pile of virtual machines, VLANs that mostly behave, and enough blinking lights to qualify as a small data center. Nobody plans that — it happens one “I wonder if…” at a time. Join Romano Woodfolk for the next installment of The (Mis)Adventures of a Systems Admin, retracing the route from Windows networking and NT to Linux, VMware ESXi, and today’s Proxmox VE.

We’ll cover what homelabbing is, why people sink their weekends into it, and what it’s good for: virtualization, self-hosted services, networking you can break without getting fired, and home automation that keeps running when the vendor goes out of business. Expect the wins, the failures, and at least one honest “What was I thinking?” No experience or expensive hardware required — that ten-year-old laptop in your closet is a server waiting for an operating system that respects it.

Speaker Bio
Romano Woodfolk has spent more than thirty years keeping other people’s systems running. He’s a High Performance Computing systems administrator at VCU, managing the Linux servers and storage behind the university’s research computing, after eight years as Server Manager for the VCU School of Medicine and nearly nine running infrastructure and virtualization for the School of Pharmacy. Earlier stops include Anthem’s network operations center and the Virginia Department of Emergency Management. He’s a longtime free and open source software advocate, partial to Ubuntu and the Debian family — and he administers systems all day, then goes home and does it for fun.

We meet the second Saturday of every month.
Please park in front of the ECPI building.
We head to brunch nearby afterwards, and everyone is welcome.
We're always looking for speakers and we're flexible on topics. Talk to an organizer at the meeting or message us here.