The past month has been both disappointingly unproductive and surprisingly fruitful at the same time.  For the unproductive half, my senior project has returned to square one (maybe square two now?), but I got more work on my home lab than I expected to finish.

Starting with the bad, my project working with Rocks has been scrapped entirely.  I spoke with my project advisor, and we agreed that since Rocks is an entire distribution and it hasn't had an official release in over a year, it will be hard to work with.  As an alternative, I will be working on helping automate the setup of OpenHPC on Raspberry Pi platforms, preferably with a web-based GUI.  The idea behind this is that someone who isn't as computer savvy can simply run a script that is provided, then access a locally hosted website to complete the setup.  Right now the plan is probably going to be for me to create a Bash script similar to pivpn's install/setup script.  The script will be used to download and  install the .rpm package to install the OpenHPC repository, plus a basic web server serving a fairly static webpage and Python + Flask to handle data input.  Of course, all of this means that I have to be familiar enough with setting up OpenHPC to be able to script it, so I am back to the research phase of the project.

At home, my lab is leaps and bounds ahead of where it was previously.  I got Proxmox installed onto my Optiplex, so now I can spin up VMs when needed.  I found out that the Asus VivoPC with only 4 GB of RAM isn't enough to handle a FeedTheBeast Minecraft server, so that will have to be hosted in a VM.  Currently it is only running a creative Minecraft server for friends to build on which is running in a Debian 9 VM.  I would like to transition that to a LXC to preserve resources, even though Debian minimal is very lightweight I could probably benefit from stripping down service guests as much as possible.  I still have the Liva X2 running Nextcloud, but I think that eventually I'll back up the data on the mirrored disks and change to a simple Samba or NFS server.   Last, I got my VPN server set back up, but it is currently untested.  Tonight I'll be setting up a profile for my Thinkpad which I will test tomorrow while I'm at work.  It's currently Spring Break, so I have more time for both personal projects and school projects, plus some gaming.

One last note:  I will be interning in Kansas City once again, at the same company as last summer.  Unfortunately, the housing they provide won't allow me to do most of the internal networking that I'm used to having, so that means no port forwarding or static IP addresses.  With that in mind, I'm starting to investigate what I can do about having an internal airgapped network with all of my services on that, plus a proxy server or a reverse ssh tunnel so I can connect even without direct internet access.  My Pi VPN server may come in handy here, but I have no way to be absolutely certain.  Again, it's something to look into.  At least I'll have gigabit internet again!