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infra-interest agenda 2025-08-13

First meeting! We'll take the time to understand the variety of skill levels of participants, get to know eachother, and help everyone get acquainted with a homelab.

Attendance

Host: Rechner In-person: NIC, Geo,Scout,Christen,Bandit, BocumaTaters, twobitsorcerer Online: Earthshine, Georninja

Introductions. Name, background, goals or interests for the meeting.

  • Rechner (he/him): Pawprint CTO, infra engineer dayjob, electronics and ham radio nerd.
  • NIC (he/him): Sysadmin, many network and endpoint, talk to me about phones. my goal is four nines.
  • Earthshine : the document is bouncing up and down on my phone so I can't see what I'm typing. windows omg me toooo, refreshing helped
  • Bocuma (he/him): Raccoon, web dev, machinist, electronics hobbyist
  • Scout (He/They): Student at SJSU, also junior systems administrator at same place. I use arch btw.
  • Geo (he/him): I bamboozle electrified sand for a living
  • Georninja (He/Him): Also student at SJSU, former student assistant and teaching associate there as well, managed lab infrastructure for Department of Engineering Technology. Just graduated (well pending final report so technically a student until that goes through) in Network Engineering. I have a small homelab at home using UniFi and Meraki equipment. Master's Project was creating a homelab and IoT system using Home Assistant. Unemployed now, but I have interests in security systems, fire alarm systems, access conrol, and ham radio.
  • Bandit (He/Him): I am a big nerd for radios, and all things electronics, I like to play with access control and RFID things, along with regular old radios digital and analog. I have a pretty big homelab that I play with, and I like to make horrible networking monstrosities.
  • Taters (Any/All): Jack of all trades Aramdana (she/her)
  • Twobitsorcerer (he/him): worked on Azure cloud offerings at a previous job (and at cloud village)
  • Christen (any/all): Failed electrical engineer. First foray into infra was getting a laptop for college and immediately installing Slackware on it and never doing homework again. Been dabbling off and on. Trying to be more hands on and social since a possible autoimmune disease keeps me from sitting still by myself too long.

Lesson or demo

  • Getting your home lab started
  • Peek behind the pawprint infra curtain ☢️

Questions & discussion

OS recommendations:

  • Ubuntu (Get the LTS version)
  • Debian
  • Virtualization (Proxmox)

A note about PPP infrastructure

  • Be cautious about working in the PPP rack. There are mission-critical workloads that can affect access control if broken.
  • Ideally, get permission from system owners or maintainers before making changes.

Readings & exercises for future meetings