In constant learning mode

[ddaenen1]

Hello community, Dominique from Belgium here. I have always been fascinated by computers, network and everything connected to that. Started out in the 80's with a Commodore Vic20, evolved to a Commodore 128, doing some programming in assembler (ah...the days) and an Amiga 500. After that, it took some time before i got my hands on a 2nd hand PC which sparked my intrest again which has grown ever since. My "hobby" took another turn a couple years ago when i got fed up with the wifi issues with my Linksys consumer router at the time, which i replaced by an Asus AC router but still, it didn't prove to be very reliable so i made a decision to go for industry hardware, maybe not the latest generation to keep it affordable, but decent stuff. Now, i have a full-blown network on our house with a 19" rack housing a Mikrotik router, managed 24p switch, 2 supermicro servers (one running FreeNAS with Plex, one with Ubuntu, to play with), a synology rack NAS (for home administration docs and pictures) and 3 AC access points and last but not least, an APC UPS. My latest decision was to move away from my ReadyNAS that was exclusively used to run Plex to a more future-proof solution which lead me to FreeNAS.

I have learned a lot on networking infrastructure since then and still learning...always learning.

Cheers, Dominique

 

[Tigersharke]

Welcome!
I believe I arrived here by way of PC-BSD and more in relation to helping admin the forums as well as to work on its theme/styling. However, I also got frustrated with a Linksys router/firewall which lead me to pfsense on my own box and then when OPNsense was announced, I looked into it and jumped ship. I've enjoyed OPNsense from then on, minor hiccups at most, though the only recurring one is the vm.pmap.pti sysctl causing troubles for an AMD chip I use. I did setup FreeNAS on a box once, it worked fine until the "Voldemort" of FreeNAS came out which I transitioned to but only managed to leave my FreeNAS in an unworking state. I haven't truly tried to recover it yet, its been a number of years already (good grief!) but it has always been my intention. My earlier days involved Apple II (mine an Apple IIgs) and de-copy-protecting some games due to awful methods used (color match from screen to manual page for a red-green color confusion person?), a desire to program, so I had I learned BASIC, 6502 assembly, LOGO, and Pascal, and later C. I did a bit of programming-esque work for PC-BSD's documentation/manual wiki site by way of mediawiki markup in the templates. I have done some CSS/html over the years and presently mostly do themes and use stylus to improve some of the many sites i visit regularly. The only things i've done that are closer to programming are some shellscript for own local tools, porting software to FreeBSD (nothing complete, most effort spent on pyside), and I once contributed a fix for base in a FreeBSD release!