This is starting to feel like a pattern, and I guess I'm okay with it. Another 6 months between posts, another "not much" to show for it. However, just because the lab has stagnated doesn't mean that everything else has.

First things first - I got a new job! I never ended up getting any certs, as I never got approval for the RHCSA test from my job and I didn't want to fork over the cash myself. However, that ended up not mattering. Once I opened up my profile on LinkedIn, I was getting messages from recruiters left and right. After only two weeks of this, I found a position at a local company who needed another "Network Engineer", although it turns out there's more systems work than network work. I'm not complaining, I just think that the advertised position was misleading. I got the offer the same day that I interviewed - this was due to some internal funding shenanigans, as I found out later - and started two weeks later. There's definitely more Windows work than I expected, and I can't say that I'm entirely happy about that, but the rest of the job is an incredible step up from my last one, and I'll take that any day. Besides, they're slowly getting into the cloud, so who knows?

For the rest of everything else, there hasn't been much progress. PXE Boot will have to wait until I move my lab to a new vLAN, something I've been hesitating to do. I think I have a good architecture figured out, I just know that it's going to be a bit of a pain to work with the lab once I make the jump. The reason for the PXE boot delay is because I need to be able to set the location of the PXE server in DHCP - I assumed that it would just broadcast and work that way, but apparently not. Oh well, more learning for me!

On the plus side, I've made progress on the NAS build. I purchased my friend's old i5 and the motherboard that came with it, and I was able to confirm that it works. I have 4 of the drives I need, and the other 4 are arriving on Friday (tomorrow!). After that, I just need SATA cables and I can hook everything up and start playing with TrueNAS! Once that's done I can start provisioning more storage to my VMs, which should expand what I'm able to do with them. I've hesitated on a couple of applications just because of storage use (like git) and the NAS will be the perfect solution to that problem! I might take the time to set up vLANs simultaneously, but I'm not 100% sure on that yet.

An additional positive is that I have a working nginx proxy based on subdomains. I have a few different projects that have web-based interfaces, so I wanted to make sure that they're accessible without messing with ports. Right now it's really just a proxy for Nextcloud, but eventually I'll have more going, like a git frontend or maybe even Apache guacamole!

So yeah... I have plans, I've had plans, I just suck at putting them into action. Still, I might as well take the opportunity to learn what I can and put that to use, even if it's not immediately relevant for my job.

Also I should mention - Pelican is being weird about themes and generating content, so who knows when this is actually going to get published. I might have to jump to another static site generator if this persists.

Edit 2022-10-14: Turns out that I forgot to install the markdown package, which Pelican needs to read in markdown files.