What got this dark woofing and barking at servers
So you’re still confused as to what the purpose of this whole site is. Well let me try to maybe explain it a bit.
Frist, hi! I’m Maddi. I am a total nerd when it comes to computers and technology as a whole. I have such an immense fascination with it that I have spent a majority of my life learning as much as I can about how things work.
If you wanna skip to the “what is this site for” bit you can click here.
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Trucks (keep reading, you’ll understand)
It all started when I was 7 and I installed my first application on a computer. This was something I for some reason recall very vividly. If you’re curious, it was Tonka Construction 2. Silly I know but hey it was fun and I remember sinking hours into that game when I was younger.
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Where the trouble started
I first knew I had a passion for technology when I got access to a laptop for the first time and was allowed to (with very heavy restrictions, mind you) play around with it. I’d often rent PC games from the library and install them. I started to learn that some games would require the original disk in order to run. When I mentioned that to my step dad he introduced me to Virtual Clone Drive. This allowed me to duplicate the disks of games I rented and then mount them as desired to play whatever game I had borrowed. Obviously there are some questionable ethics related to that, but we don’t worry about that now. I was young and the fact that I could get around the requirement of having the disk to play a game was cool to me. The fact that computers could do something like that was a new discovery for me.
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Cat’s claws
The next major milestone for me was wanting to learn to make games. I had no place to start but I started searching for software that would let you make games to play. The first thing I was introduced to (I can’t recall if I found this on my own or if someone introduced me to it), was Scratch. I would use Scratch to create various animations as well as some very basic games. While I probably didn’t come anywhere near utilizing Scratch to it’s fullest potential, it gave me an amazing foundation for starting to understand how code works. Even if to this day, my code is a complete mess sometimes
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Game Maker
Over time, I kept looking for more advanced things I could use to create games because I had a fascination with having the ability to control what is displayed on a screen. That’s when I discovered GameMaker. Specifically Game Maker 7. It definitely took me a bit, but I started to translate Scratch code blocks to their Game Maker equivalent. Before long I was doing some very simple games but nothing of note. I honestly don’t even think I still have the files for anything I made from that era.
I started to realize there were restrictions to the free ot “Lite” version of Game Maker. It was also around the time Game Maker 8 was coming out. As soon as I was able to get my hands on the “Lite” version of that, I also noticed a lot of the same restrictions as GM7. I was often frustrated with them because I knew back then my parents would never let me purchase a full copy of the software. Thus started my piracy era (for the first time).
After digging for a good period of time, I found a crack for GM7 which I promptly downloaded and started using. I kept digging and digging and eventually there was a full crack, with installer for Game Maker 8. I was thrilled! I installed it and validated it worked and sure enough it did! Was it clean of viruses? I have zero clue, but I didn’t care, I could use the full version of the latest version of Game Maker. It was an exciting time.
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Silly little blocks
It was around that time that I also go introduced to Minecraft and gaming for the first time. This was a huge step for me, and to be entirely honest, set me on a path I never expected. I started playing with a friend of mine at the time as his house. It was fun but frustrating because I didn’t fully understand how it all worked and didn’t understand the first thing about gaming. The controls (WASD + Mouse) was so strange and didn’t feel right. Up until that point, I had only played a lot of games that require only point and click and I hadn’t build up the muscle memory my friend had.
I remember getting very frustrated with the controls as well as the, what I thought at the time, was a “stupid” crafting system. But never the less I kept trying to play it and installed the ‘free’ trial version when I got home on my laptop which at the time was Minecraft Version 1.4.2. I did slowly start learning the game and playing in survival mode. It wasn’t until I had that same friend introduce me to Hypixel. This was eye opening the crazy and wild things you could do in Minecraft. Different mini games all within a little little survival game.
I became obsessed and started playing the game daily but I started wondering… Could I host a Minecraft server?
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The real fun begins
Now in this section I’m going to probably mention a piece of software you haven’t heard the name of in over a decade… but I’ll get there.
the answer to the question above was “yes”. I could host my own Minecraft server which got me excited. I downloaded the vanilla server files and started tinkering around with various settings (a rather novel thing to me at the time). I started learning about all of the strange things that I could about how to change the way I could interact with the game world (yes this included command blocks, but I won’t go into all the silliness I got myself up to with those because I frankly don’t remember it all, I just know it was dumb).
As I got more familiar, I wanted to start playing with friends but my parents, specifically my step dad was VERY strict stating that I was not going to be allowed to port forward anything. Well like every aspiring server host would, I started looking for solutions. Mine came in the infamous form of LogMeIn Hamachi.
This was awesome! My friends got to play on the server with me and it started my foray into playing games online with friends at the same time. This also came with the use (as permitted by my parents) of Skype. We had group chats and would often get into voice calls to play Minecraft.
But I wasn’t done with Minecraft… not yet. I started asking if it was possible to recreate some of the games in Hypixel since I enjoyed them so much I thought it would be fun to have it on a server that my friends and I could play on (Spoiler alert: It’s not as fun with only 4-6 individuals playing as compared to 12+).
But this led me to doing a ton of research into what all I could do with Minecraft servers. I discovered the Bukkit server software which expanded my capabilities immensely with the use of plugins which led me down even more rabbit holes as there would be addons for plugins and having to learn how to use those plugins. All of which fascinated me and excited me every time I could get something new working. I did get spleef, paintball, and a whole host of other games that Hypixel ran functioning. But as stated above, playing with less individuals than was recommended was often boring so we stuck to Hypixel. Though, I never stopped experimenting with what I could do.
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The new ‘kid’ on the block
As my friends shifted and changed, so did the games I played with them. The next one was ARK: Survival Evolved. This game was cool! Survival style game with dinosaurs? It had my attention. Even more so when I learned you could host a server for it as well!
Now somewhere between this and the start of my Minecraft era, I did build my first custom PC. It had an old AMD FX-8350, 16GB of I wanna say 1600Mhz DDR3, a 120GB SSD that I paid $1 per GB for (yeah that shit was that expensive back then), and a 1TB HDD with a GTX 970 as the GPU. Nifty stuff. That machine had so many issues that I fought over the years of owning it 😂 I also used this machine to experiment with VMs on and off. Trying linux (hating it because it had no UI… cute lil me. So innocent and dumb). So most of the VMs were just windows. But it did teach me about virtualization and some cool stuff there. The software I started with doing VMs was VMware Workstation. Eventually I did move into using VirtualBox… Which I’m realizing just now as I’m writing this why it was called Virtual box…. A box often referencing your physical machine… virtual… god dammit. I can’t believe it took that long to figure that out 🤦♀️
I wanted to hots a server for this game but it required me to learn something that was a relitively new thing for me which was working more explicitly in the command line due to the need of Steam CMD. I quickly learned that running that server as well as playing the game on my machine was… Let’s just say not ideal.
This was when I asked my step dad who had on a few occasions gotten retired IT gear from work. Old Dell DL380 Gen 4s. God those things were monsters. And loud as hell too. I asked him if I could use one of them to run a ARK server. I don’t recall if he gave me access to a full machine or a VM but I do recall him asking me what specs I needed to run the server and I explained it was at minimum 8GB of memory with 4 CPU cores. Whatever deal was struck, he permitted me to use one of the servers to run the game. I also, after begging and pleading, was able to convince him to crack open the ports for the game to allow friends to connect in and play. The catch was, he didn’t want our public IP exposed. so it was time for me to start exploring options to meet that requirement.
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Update to this section after writing it….
It was a VM. I remember because I knew there was an era at home where I was using VMware ESXi and got familiar with the basics of how to create VMs on a server and all that fun stuff. Anyways. Moving on.
My research didn’t take long with No-IP being the solution I stumbled upon. Keep in mind, I didn’t know truly how DNS worked. I had a vauge idea and knew it was the ‘phone book of the internet’ but that was about all so the how of it’s functions were relatively a mystery since all I cared about was being able to get the game server open to my friends.
After proposing my solution and him looking it over, he gave me the thumbs up and was able to host the ARK server for my friends. Now I won’t bore you with the details but let’s just say, that software was MISERABLE to run. It was so unstable, constant crashes, hangs, data loss (though this could have been different issues with the hardware it was running on, but I don’t know to be honest). It was terrible. I’d have friends asking me to fix the server almost constantly, which while I loved the challenge, it was tiring. Now that wasn’t helped by the fact that I was using Windows Sever 2008, if I remember correctly, to run the server. This was less than ideal for a few reasons but I hadn’t hit my Linux arc yet so cut me some slack.
But anywho, as time went on, friends slowly lost interest in playing and I eventually stopped running the server. That was the last time I hosted a server out of my parents house while living with them because I learned that asking for things from either my step dad or my mom was usually futile because my mother hated computers and hated that I spent a lot of time on them and my step dad… for lack of a better term, was kept on a very short leash and while I’m sure he had things he wanted to do, my mother forced him constantly into the ‘man of the house’ role which I often got to see the frustrations from him and the fights it would cause between my mother and him because he wasn’t doing the things she wanted him to do and was trying to enjoy a little bit of time doing stuff with me, one of them was playing WoW… boy she hated that. I recall numerous times that she’d catch us playing and we’d have only been on for 30 minutes and she’d come in screaming at both of us. Not fun. So no more asking for things like that at home.
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The cloud ☁️
As hosting things at home wasn’t really an option, I started learning about services that would host Minecraft servers for you. I fiddled with this on and off several times but while mixing my experimenting with the important thing in this section… VPSes. The idea that you could rent a VM from a company and run your own software on it. Plus having a dedicated IPv4 that you could use was also really nifty to me at the time.
This stayed this way for a good couple of years where I would run Minecraft servers for friends and play on them, but rarely experimenting with things as insane as mini game plugins. I did often add a bunch of quality of life improvements to the servers through plugins to make moderation easier which would come in handy as time went on as well since there was a point where I ran the Minecraft server for a streamer which taught me a lot of lessons about ensuring you kept thing safe.
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The time has come
I don’t recall exactly when I purchased my first server (damn you eBay for not keeping purchase history), but it was some time in 2019. I was moved out of my parents house though I do know that. I used that to start running Minecraft servers, Factorio servers, and a whole host of other things. It was about this time I got introduced to Docker and Portainer (also at the time of writing… wtaf is that rebrand? I didn’t order Fortnite with my container manager… tbf at this point, I haven’t used Portainer in a hot minute).
I started also leaning how to write compose files during this time. I know I bumped my head more than a few times and had to learn some things the hard way (like not running docker…. as sudo…. Don’t judge lol). This opened the door for me to start exploring hosting more services. I honestly don’t recall first set of containers I was running. It was probably something like LinkStack and Red Discord Bot. But that was my starting point and it unlocked a whole world of possibilities.
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Where I am now
Over the last several years the home lab and changed and shifted so much. I kept that old gen 7 DL360 around for a good while until I upgraded to a Cisco UCS C240 M4. I kept that as my main server for a good couple of years. It’s actually still running in my lab to this day but it’s used for more of a test bed. About a year or so ago, a friend of mine gave me a Dell M630 VRTX chassis. This also triggered the addition of 2x 240V 20A circuits in my house to power the damn thing.
Then, in mid 2025 I took probably one of the largest leaps when it came to home labbing and deployed 3x Dell R640s in an actual data center location. Those are where my main production stack run which allow me to have all the cool things that I do today! If you wanna see the stack you can view it on the Home Lab page…. though… not sure you can really call it a Home Lab any more especially since I have, if you count my house, PoPs in 4 cities across the US.
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So what is the point of all of this?
The point of this “home lab” is honestly for me to learn, grow and develop my skills in a whole host of various aspects of planning, creating, executing and maintaining enterprise infrastructure. Learning more about hardware, software and everything in between that I can. I genuinely love doing this and I get a huge amount of enjoyment out of seeing it all come together. The skills I’ve built with my set up are skills that I would probably have never been able to build without asking “How does this work?” and “Can I do this myself?”. Being naturally curious I am always asking why or how. This often got me in trouble as a kid but today it allows me to have a very unique skill set and by continuing to ask these questions, it gives me a hobby and has been the catalyst to jump starting my career to where it is now (which in turn allows me to fund this insanity even more).
The other part of this is privacy. Look, we can’t ever own or control 100% of our own data. That is effectively impossible with data brokers selling your information and tech corporations using it to put ads across the web to get you to spend more money on dumb shit you don’t need that you will completely forget about in a month. Also there are some things that I just don’t want to have to trust a company to handle or store. Personal documents, private photos or videos and more. Granted, some of that can’t be avoided. I do have accounts on many popular websites and I fully acknowledge that my data is out there and will forever be out there. But what happens if those sites vanish tomorrow. What if the companies running them go belly up. What happens to my data? It’ll most likely vanish with them which is why I want to control the vital things that I need to run my life so I’m not dependant on any one company for a service that could either be paywalled or outright removed entirely.
I want to clarify, I am not afraid of my data being out there. I am not afraid of data brokers selling my information. You have to in this day and age unless you intend to live entirely off grid isolated from the world, never using technology again. Which if we’re being honest… that’s a really stupid and I feel wasteful way to live your life. Why inconvenience yourself when technology exists to make your life easier? Just learn to shift some of that control back into your hands.
At least that’s the way I look at it. I’ll get off my soap box now.
Beyond that, I also hope that this site can be a place to share, not only my home lab adventures, but also adventures in life and other fun things about me. It’s meant to be a place for me to talk about the things that interest me. Don’t get me wrong, a good portion of this will be talking about the home lab since it’s probably one of my largest hobbies. But There is a whole more to me than meets the eye and I hope to be able to share it with you!
Thanks for reading and welcome to my kennel!