I've been laid off from work for a few months now, so I've had a lot of time on my hands recently. I've been in the alarm industry all my life so never had a big hand in messing with servers or more IT-oriented stuff but have always wanted to learn.

I have a workstation, with Truenas and the *arr suite of apps installed on it, that I got from a friend awhile ago and it works great. So much so that I wanted to mess around with alot more. I bought a Dell server and a storage array off marketplace and had an old computer sitting in a closet so I could play around with some things.

I took that old computer, bought a Cisco switch and a Ruckus access point then installed Opnsense. Tonight I finally got my network set up with a few different VLANs to separate all my devices. My next step is to install Proxmox so I can mess around with VMs and all the other self-hosted programs I've been wanting to try.

The picture of my setup is pretty much me trying to cobble together a server rack from scrap wood from finishing my deck, which I think turned out half-decent. Also my wife was tired of looking at everything so I had to move it all down to the far room in the basement (there's a toilet out of frame to the right, which is a plus I guess).

I have a long way to go but it's been a bit of a challenge and tons of fun so far.

-side question: With the ruckus access point I set up, can I reuse the TP-Link decos I have to support a single wifi network or should I just try to sell them?