This is not my beautiful house!

This is not my beautiful Wifi!

So, after finishing my degree and getting some other stuff done I figure I should probably do a full re-do of my capstone project, which was a team project building a “corporate network” using the hardware racks at SPSCC. At some point I want to write up a post-mortem overview of the project as I remember it and my part in it, but for now I want to get moving on a replacement project as well as dealing with a few “I want/need/should do [X] project” for [Y] reasons that I’ve had on my list for a long while. But that doesn’t answer the real question asked of any ambitious penguin: But why?

Well the answer is quite simple: the capstone project was ultimately not a huge amount of work spread over 18 or so students. The biggest constraint on our time (and why we couldn’t finish as much as we wanted) was the simple reality that many of us were working or otherwise busy with other classes. The second reason comes about due to the first: I only got to work on a narrow set of tasks in setting up network infrastructure: that being VLAN setup on our layer-3 switches. And pretty much just that aside from troubleshooting connectivity with the VMs that were used to act as the departments. There fore the conclusion is clear: I should do my own version of the project, purely on my own.

Additionally This will give me a chance to build out that personal server and homelab setup I’ve been putting off. YAY!

And with that: Blandbox Logistics company is born into this hypothetical world!

This (by name at least) will be Blandbox Logistics, a shipping company that develops its own logistics management software and hardware.

The project will grow over time as I build things out but first is the server build for my hypervisor and planning the initial network as well as working out a good way to simulate network hardware in VMs.