Why you need a home lab to keep your job IT professionals can't assume their employers want, or can afford to, train them in the latest technologies and should hone and acquire new skills at home in a self-built test lab. That's the opinion of Mike Laverick, VMware's senior cloud infrastructure evangelist. Laverick has operated a lab for over a decade, starting with …
Guess I'm lucky then that the company I'm at values progression and pays for training courses? Admittedly it's the first company I'm with who do it, previous three didn't, but still...
My "home lab" pales in comparison to the article's "lab", three desktops, one laptop, three switches, six screens, I guess the only one profiting from it is probably my electricity supplier :(
If you get a chance, check out "Synergy" (for Linux, Mac, Win, http://synergy-foss.org/), and Mouse Without Borders (by Microsoft Garage, Win only, http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/download/details.aspx?id=35460). Both programs allow you to share a single mouse and keyboard among several computers across a network. My home lab is so much more useful now that I can sit here and control 3 to 4 computers from one mouse and keyboard.
Input Director is what I use at work.
Windows only, though. And at the time I was using Synergy you couldn't share the clipboard (I see you can now).
Plus synergy's configuration was a bitch (easier to manually edit the config file) - look easier now.
home labs: mine has just died... and of course I have no support (obsolete, hand-me-down hardware from work) so I'm buggered.
> "Input Director is what I use at work."
For Windows machines, you might want to try Mouse Without Borders. The development seems to be more active than for Input Director, and it's got full support for Win8 now. I'm having real good success with it. One interesting thing about this program is that you MUST run the same version of the program on all machines. I had a devil of a time with it the one day until I realized I had installed a newer version on one of the new machines in the configuration.
Synergy has come a long way the past couple of years, and has a pretty full set of features. It's very nice to be able to jump from a Linux workstation directly into a Windows 7 laptop. Synergy tends to lose the connection a bit more frequently (maybe once every couple of hours), but that's to be expected in such a mixed environment. Synergy does have a GUI front-end for Linux, but it's just as easy to start from the terminal with the "synergys" or "synergyc" command, pointing it at the IP address of the other machine.
I used synergy in my last job, my desk had a Linux desktop on one monitor and an XP laptop driving the other monitor.
Keyboard, mouse and could cut/paste text between them. Very nice.
Windows GUI, Linux you have to set up a config file and use synergys/synergyc, but once setup it is a joy to use.
> Synergy tends to lose the connection a bit more frequently (maybe once every couple of hours)
I tunnel Synergy over an ssh connection (using Putty if a Windows machine is involved) and do not experience disconnects. It also gets around that pesky 'synergy sending plain keystrokes over the network' security issue.
"If you get a chance, check out "Synergy" "
I just did. And I think it will change my life.
I didn't even know this product existed. I installed it on mac/win/linux in minutes and immediately threw out two keyboards/mice. And I can copy/paste across machines! Genius!
Thanks, Andy Prough, you made an old man very happy.
> "What's wrong with a KVM? You may need a good one to drive a high res monitor (crap ones kill the signal) but it worked for me when I needed it."
Nothing wrong with KVM. However, Synergy and Mouse Without Borders are free, whereas a good KVM can run you $80 to $100 (cheaper for used or for less powerful devices). Plus, with the software solutions, you don't have to physically switch a button to go from one computer to the other - it's seamless. The KVM switches I've looked at all required some type of physical interaction with the box in order to switch computers.
I wouldn't cope without Synergy in the first place ;) (depending of course if I am trying other network stuff out, where ports may be closed for the time being of course).
One "disadvantage" over time is, I completely lose track where my mouse icon is, heh :)
Beer, from one synergy user to another.
@AchimR : Yes, consider.yourself lucky.
At the final interview my last employer promised me that they would allow me to maintain/improve my skill set. When push came to shove and I wanted to do a course that would help both them and me, they offered to pay my entry to a local computer expo.
Where's a BOFH icon when you want it?
I'm thinking along similar plans. Once I buy a house over time I want to switch electricity supply to solar panels and whatever else will be available for home renewable energy use (e.g. wind, depending on location).
Also planning to swap all regular bulbs to LED bulbs, 1/10th of the Wattage, same light. Light up full house for less W than previously just one room.
And that money saved could go into more lab tech (or into my motorbike...)
Beer, it's Friday, end of week (unless on on-call schedule, my thoughts are with you).
I used to live an hour away from work. The computers we had for our OLAP solution were so "powerful", that it was actually quicker to compress the export, copy it to USB, drive home, copy it onto my "home" PC, recalculate the datase, copy it onto USB and drive back to the office and copy it over the original database!
This is so true. I have been running a home lab of some kind since 1999. Mike actually trained me on VMware 3.5 :)
In addition to having a small home VMware 'production environment', I recently built a new desktop PC with 32GB of RAM. Using a couple of SSD's, I can easily lab many environments. Of course this was all at my own expense, but it will pay off in several ways over the longer term.
As a PAYE employee, training has always been very difficult to obtain, somehow employers seem to expect that you magically know everything about the next version of products before they are even released! If you are working in consultancy as I do, customers also (and rightly so) assume you should have top skills.
"“The days of being sent on training courses is gone,” he told the user groups. “The burden is now on you to get the skills and knowledge you need. It is assumed you will learn as you go."
Talk about open doors. I mean this has been an issue forever already which is also heavily depending on the company you work for and/or are involved with. The reason I consider this an open door is simple; most of the more skilled people I either know or have met have mostly gained their experience on their own. Sure; sometimes a training course can give you a good foundation to work on, but to really get into the subject you'll want to dive in on your own.
Hmm, could this be the reason why schools in the old days used to give us these tasks to do called "homework" ?
Naaah ;-)
There are all sorts of problems with having a home lab. The noise the damn things make is one of them, I used to have an HP N-Class at home, it wasn't so much noisy in other parts of the house, as it was quite noisy outside in the street when it was running. Fortunately someone took pity on me and lent me a spare corner in a data centre, so the rx7620, disk arrays, stack of other Itanium and ProLiant servers no longer have to live in the house. The 10 smaller Linux boxes still take up space.
I just wish the UPS didn't need a fan.
Please can we have a noise rating for all new systems tested :-)
You can rent a reasonably powerfully VPS for as little as 12 quid a month, and load it with the software of your choice.
It probably has a noisy fan, but as its in a sub basement in another city this should not bother 'we indoors. An added advantage is there are no cables for your significant other to trip over. It's so unfau when you get an ear bashing when they just crashed your system.
Nevermind this little thing called "real estate".
I live in a place where it's actually quite uncommon to have anything in your basement besides renters, because you can't afford the mortgage otherwise. And *that* is only if you have a detached house. Most people around these parts appear to be living in condos or townhouses. Put the rack in the living room? When pigs fly.
What would seem at a first glance as my 'living room' is actually half living room, half an unwalled space meant to be a third room. I have mostly used the latter space functionally as a "third room", and lo and behold, this is where all my IT gear lives. That includes my very first "home lab" which given that the hardware isn't top notch (and wasn't when I built it back in 2009) is now lagging. Though the 8Gb RAM helps.
These days, most of my "lab" resides in the 16Gb RAM, i5-powered MBP I take to work, which gives me the advantage of carrying my lab with me to work. For the stuff I use these days, VMs cover most of my needs.
When you boss makes you put some training (which he company will pay for) in your goals and said company keepy you far too busy to attend the training and thus gives your boss an opportunity to mark you down in your end of year review for 'not attending the training'.
Pah.
The other reason for keeping your home lab is that many companies lock everything down so tight these days that actually installing a bit of sofware is like getting a bill making hard drugs legal through parliament. With your home server you are you own sysadmin.
In my last job, the IT dept finally admitted that some of us know more about the system we develop for that they did and gave us (very reluctantly) local admin rights on our dev machines.
In my last job the IT dept gave me local admin rights for all the PCs on the factory floor because I could fix them when they couldn't. Technically I was a developer in a different dept. They used to phone me to suggest fixes for the office PCs too.
My current job is for a small company so I do a bit of everything and I decide who gets what access. :)
There are ways around it. Many NAS boxes are capable little servers. I have two HP boxes, a Mini running two debian VMs and a Mediasmart 495 (hardware hacked for decent chip and 8GB of RAM) running Windows Server 2012 with one extra 2012 VM for exchange and SQL.
These are quiet, quiet little boxes. Low-power, too. And the hot-swappable drives are a real bonus.
...the "Girlfriend impact" doesn't come into the equation ;)
Well the wife won't let me have a girl friend so that's not a problem.
She does get a bit hacked off about all the computers in the house.
But she gets far more hacked off when any of the keys ones aren't working so she can't work.
I would however suggest that for many of us, looking after work servers is much like having kids.
They are both expensive, keep you up late at night occasionally, have temper tantrums and require you to spend time with them after work and at weekends.
Seriously though, who hasn't got a bunch of equipment at home too play with? I wouldn't say I have a "home lab" but I do have a few bits of equipment that ended up coming home to play with instead of being binned.
Sexist for obvious reasons that he thinks only blokes would have such an interest, and idiot for choosing to splash 870 a month on what at that rate is no longer a home lab but a personal obsession. I've run servers at home since 1995 but don't think they've run me.
Mixed feelings about the sentiment he expresses though. Many in technology are in it out of interest anyway and enjoy the pace of change, so doing extra-curricula stuff outside of work is more hobby than intended for the somewhat single-minded reason of making oneself saleable.
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