Well, it's certainly been a while since I updated on my lab.  To be honest, there haven't been many major changes.  My senior project finished well, although it was only 80% complete.  My advisor said that's to be expected and it happens a lot, so I ended up passing the class.  I'm not entirely certain if I'll finish it out or not, but I think it could be interesting.  Also, I'm away from my home network for the summer while I'm working at my internship so making changes has been difficult for the past month and a half.

I have done a couple of programming projects, a Discord chat bot (found here) which is in a stable state, and a basic chat client and server (found here).  The bot is written in Lua, which is a language I've always found to be interesting, and the chat application is written in C.  I adopted the chat project from an old school assignment, so the client is mostly working.  The server isn't ready for multiple connections and I'm actually trying to modify it to make it more efficient with the Linux `select()` command.

As for my lab, mainly what I've done is plan, so here's what I'm looking to do:

• Move my website to a static site generator, probably Pelican.  Even though I don't get many page hits, there's no reason for me to be using WordPress when I don't use any of its features.
• Move my site to AWS and set up a load balancer.  This is less because of site load and more because I want to learn how to set up a load-balanced resource, and AWS is growing enough that I need to learn to use it.
• Re-create a VPN for my home network.  I never was able to connect to my Raspberry Pi running OpenVPN, which is why I can't make network config changes or spin up new services.
• Set up DNS on my Liva X2.  I might try to find some basic IPAM software to use as well, but with only a Celeron and 2 GB of RAM I don't want to push it too much.
• Set up Nagios monitoring with a Raspberry Pi.  I bought a Pi 3B+ last week (just 2 days before the Pi 4 came out, of course), most likely it will be put to use here.
• Set up a NAS so I can provision storage for VMs.  This will also allow me to force read-only filesystems for my Raspberry Pis, which will help prevent SD card corruption.

As you can see, I have quite the list.  The first two items are possible anywhere I have a remote connection, and I'm probably going to do them at the same time.  I already have a single AWS node created already and a second should be pretty easy to create.  Then I just have to export my WordPress content and use a conversion tool for whatever SSG I choose to try.

Hopefully next update will look a LOT different, and I'll be ready to try out new projects!