How I got my start - Part 4

With a new project in mind, I set about learning how I might get additional network connections downstairs. There was no possibility of getting physical cables down. After talking with my usual crowd of nerds, the topic of bridging wifi came into play. I would get another WRT-54G and install custom firmware (dd-wrt), which in turn would let me have more functionality from the wireless router. This allowed me to connect the second router to the first router's wifi signal and bridge the local wired ports onto that wifi connection.

As always, there was some playing around that needed to happen to get the configuration correct, but before I knew it, I had additional wired connections in the downstairs office. I ended up installing dd-wrt on my main wifi router as well, as it was nice having some of the extra features versus the default factory firmware.

I have to give a ton of credit to the trio that I talked to often - I got a lot of help and inspiration from them. But at the same time, I did not want to be them at all. It felt like talking tech was the only thing they talked about. It felt like they only ever spent their free time at home working on stuff like this.

Again, I had already come a long way by this point, but this was already pretty much three years worth of time and effort. If I dedicated all of my free time during those years, I would likely be much further along than I was. But I wanted a life outside of that.

In the years since I've had these thoughts, I like to think I've found more balance to all of that. To an extent, you have to commit some time to learning. Even if it's an hour a week, having time that you take your axe to the grinder truly builds up. I never got to the point that I swung so far into pouring all of my free time into computing (I've definitely strayed that way a couple of times), but I finally started taking it more seriously later in life.

But back to where I was - I was still having fun and still learning. I ended up getting another hand-me-down ReadyNAS from my father (he upgraded his setup) and now I had a 4 Drive Bay with 1TB drives. I joked (by wasn't really incorrect) that I had more storage at my house than Mary Baldwin did for the entire college now.

As far as work was concerned, I was learning a ton. Being a systems administrator threw me into a ton of projects, especially with an IT department that small. Active Directory was now something I worked directly on. VMWare is now where I provisioned and managed all of my servers. Sharepoint, MS SQL, Group Policy, DHCP/DNS (still very limited in my knowledge of DNS), SCCM. I worked on backups of our data. I wrote some scripts to help provision AD accounts and pull data from VMWare. I also started some side programming for fun - very basic game development (text-based games). I learned about SVN (think early Github) and collaborated a tiny with a colleague on some of the game programming.

Near the end of my time at Mary Baldwin, I finally started taking work more seriously. I stopped wearing t-shirts and Broncos jerseys to work and started wearing dress shirts. I started properly writing things down (still just text files and whatnot) and reading even more. My RSS feeds had grown quite a bit and I was starting to keep up with technology news.

I finally got an upgrade to my gaming computer - a Dell XPS 410. The XPS 210 become my new secondary computer. My second desk was upstairs in my bedroom, but I reworked my corner desk to get a second monitor on the desk itself. I connected the 210 and was able to have both machines right there from my main desk (much better than looking over at an entirely different desk to see a screen).

Everything changed in Fall of 2010. Among my many RSS feeds, I also followed a few web comics, including Penny Arcade. On September 17th, they posted part one of a two part comic set on a new game called Minecraft. At this point in time, YouTube was starting to become more popular, so I looked up what this Minecraft thing was all about and bought a copy not long afterwards.

I shutter to think how many hours I played those first few days. I can't fathom how many hours I've played over the course of my life.

My housemate quickly got hooked as well and we decided to set up a Minecraft server to play together. My XPS 210 was the perfect candidate - I could run the Minecraft server from that and still have the ability to watch shows. Now Minecraft was still in full Alpha at this point, but more content was finally starting to show up on the internet. It didn't take a lot of time to find a tutorial on setting up a server and off we went.

This was the point in time that I started learning more Linux tricks. I would run the server from a terminal window, but that would then not let me use that terminal screen anymore. Closing it prematurely would sometimes mess with the server and I wanted to be able to swap around more easily. After some Googling, I learned about screen, which would let me start tasks in a virtual screen and recall them when needed. I started spending more time in the command line and started playing a bit more with using Putty to SSH into the server.

Initially, the only people that played lived at the house itself, but eventually a couple of friends wanted to join in. I had loosely learned about port forwarding before, but had only still done limited amounts of it. This was the first time I had more of a real purpose for doing so. I got Minecraft port forwarded to the whole world and all was good (I have no clue how much I was getting hit from the rest of the world at this point, but nothing ever properly got hacked that I'm aware of). I very briefly port forwarded SSH, to try connecting from work, but didn't trust myself enough to let that be open and closed it down later.

But I was starting to learn more things like external IP addresses in a NAT environment (in order to get other folks to connect to our server) and learning a bit more about SSH letting me be on the command line without needing a monitor. I'm pretty sure somewhere in this period is where I moved the second monitor to my main computer and finally installed Ubuntu Server fully - I didn't need access if I could SSH in and the gift of a Netflix subscription in December of 2010 darn near eliminated my media server project entirely. There were still a few things that Netflix didn't have that I did off my file server, but as a whole Netflix started to become the only thing I'd need to watch anymore (oh how those days have changed).

My dad's home network continued to grow during this period, as well. He bought a Windows Home Server and had two ReadyNAS devices by this point. He wanted better control over the computers at the house and wanted to be able to have some DNS functionality. At this point in time, I had the hammer that was Active Directory and Window DNS Server. And when you have a hammer like that, everything looks like a nail. It was far too complex a setup than what was needed. All the computers were joined to a domain - DNS was setup, but not pretty poorly. His network became my true lab, in some ways. I had to Google a ton of stuff and ran into more dead ends than anything else.

I definitely regret not trying more of this out at my own house, but I didn't have any easy access to Windows Server outside of work and didn't have any additional hardware to run it on, even if I did. The limitations of hardware can be a killer for people hoping to learn - this can be quite an expensive hobby. Still, I like to think that it was a learning experience and no harm was ultimately done. Having a project given to me, rather than one I came up with on my own, was also a cool new experience.

I'd soon take my learning journey to a whole new level, as in 2011, my time at Mary Baldwin was coming to a close...