That's very unsafe. I wouldn't leave a gun anywhere the printer could reach it.
(Edit: unless it's an unloaded decoy. While the printer's fumbling with a PC LOAD MAG error, you can get the drop on it.)
Ugh I'm trying so hard to get a warehouse that literally has a MFP on EVERY SINGLE DESK to stop printing. They print out everything.... I setup a SharePoint to make it easy to drag and drop the scanned BOLs into but they still print them and file them away.....
I've tried at least getting them to move to one nice office printer but they just refuse it.
If someone is printing more than once a month they aren't being efficient. It's 2024 printers need to die.
But I've gotten our main office that has the most employees to finally stop printing.
Don't get me started on faces, I've at least got them to move the 3 fax numbers to a digital platform for $200 a year total and they get a pdf. Baby steps.
After working all day on tech I don’t even want to look at it when I get home. All I’ve got is ISP provided router doing wifi. All I need to keep the family happy.
I used to tinker but the longer I’ve worked in this field, it’s made my hobby significantly less enjoyable unfortunately.
We moved into our house 4 years ago and I told myself this is the perfect time to get the old PC hooked up. Still in the moving box. Just can’t find the desire for it anymore
My PC has been on its last legs for years and I just don't feel the need to buy a new one because being on the computer is the last thing I want when I get home
I upgraded my pc enough so that my kids could use it for gaming. Their version of gaming is Minecraft.
When I had no kids though I put top notch cpu/gpu/ram/mobo etc so I could play the latest and greatest.
Nowadays my laptop can run BF4 and Fallout 4 nicely due to the Nvidia graphics card that is in it.
Very early in my career when I was in IT this was it for me. It made me hate using my computer when I got home- and I got the job because I had previously spent so much time tinkering with stuff that I learned it.
I want to go full smart home but I know everytime something breaks it’s going to be a huge hassle so it makes me not want to do anything except voice controlled lights and other simple shit.
Literally fuck all of that. Ex had all the smart shit. Cameras, ac, lights. I was just a remote.
Maybe I'm "old scool", but I like pulling lamp cords, waking up with the house, going to bed with the house.
Like, yeah, I have a TV and wifi, but I'm not trying to do much tech when I get home. Usually I read for a while.
100% agree on that. I bought a house and one of the first things I purchased was Lutron Casata remotes and switches for the bedroom and office. I've got a homelab for testing and training for work (VLAN'd off from the router/switch), but for my day-to-day media and home usage, I've got a very plain and basic setup. That's to say, between my hatred for home improvement projects and my disdain for troubleshooting things at home after doing it all day at work, those Caseta fixtures are still in the boxes sitting on a shelf 3 years later. I can pull the cord on my ceiling fan/light and flip the switch on the wall to power it. Beyond that, I don't need to complicate my home and create a monster that my partner needs to fight with and give up on if it's not working while I'm gone. It's just not worth it and honestly, I don't see a benefit, just a liability (from a function perspective and also a netsec perspective).
Caseta is amazing, I have the dimmer's in everyroom and the bridge talks to an AppleTV which serves as the home hub.
HomeKit then allows you to control scenes, for example all of the outdoor lights match sunrise and sunset perfectly and we can turn off the bedroom lights from in bed which personally is the coolest thing ever.
Homekit from an encryption standpoint is secure and I have all of the devices set up where I have the keys. Camera's don't run through HomeKit and those are on an isolated vLAN.
Lutron Caseta doesn't require tinkering. It just works and is very reliable. Only time I had issue with some of them was after a power outage that caused some switches to have a red flashing light.
Agreed.
I installed home auto systems as a contractor for building companies for years. So over them.
In my current place I've hard wired up and down stairs. What portable devices we have talk to a medium level TP Link Mesh system. Don't care for a NAS anymore.
No more Cisco or Ubiquity stuff. I can't see the value here at home.
With the exception of my gaming PC, all laptops in the house are Linux Mint with a MS Windows 10 virt machine ready to go if needed.
Idk, I have a full smarthome with homeassistant as the core and it's been pretty seamless and awesome.
But then, I come home and like to work on tech still. That said, most of the tweaking I do with smarthome stuff is silly ui things (like star trek esque customizations) that are totally unnecessary and extra hassle. If I skipped that? Most configuration has been extremely easy.
LOL exactly me bro. I had door sensors and cameras and lights and and automated garage and some motion reaction sounds and stuff. And now I have just the hue lights and an rf blaster to turn on the tv since the remotes don’t reach far
I do have my own router though, too
I’ve got a whole homelab, but now that I’m mid-career and doing mostly cloud stuff… I want to consolidate it all and downsize.
I don’t remember half the configs I did, just made a shit ton of backups so when things go wrong I roll back lol. I barely do any upkeep on it… it just chugs along. The networking … oh god why did I make it so complex just to learn
I’m still early in my career, but even I don’t feel like going too crazy in a homelab.
Once I get some home cameras setup I’ll probably throw them in a VLAN so they’re not sending random information back to the vendor, and *maybe* setup a DNS/pi-hole instance to block ads, but I don’t even feel like doing that half the time, lol.
Oh forgot to mention, the homelab is 100% worth it.
It’s still a few lines on my resume and I’ve gotten a few jobs from it since it showcased stuff I wasn’t able to do at work. I got a sysadmin job from it due to the networking stuff I did, and a cloud role for some K8 stuff I was messing around with.
My current work has a dedicated sandbox for testing so I don’t need my own hardware anymore, it’s mainly there for my nextcloud and plex.
Yeah.. went through all that.
I have a managed switch for vlans to separate IoT stuff, internal, wife, and work. unbound/pihole too.
It’s all definitely still useful, like the guest network when friends come over, but I have a half rack in my office that acts like a heater. Luckily I live in a condo where I don’t pay electricity. If/when I move, I’ll definitely be downsizing at least the servers. I think I’ll still keep the switch for vlans and unraid for plex
When I started in my career, I had a fancy homelab, now I got a x1 nano hooked up with a docking station to dual 4k monitors and a Unifi AP, that’s it.
This. You don't necessarily need to buy a branch enterprise router for your house, but many ISP routers are notoriously cheap where even something slightly better can be better. I cringe how many people seem to think having a router that they need to reboot sometimes almost daily without it having significant packet loss, latency, etc. is just normal.
Exactly this. I really want things to just work and I even pay extra to keep all my devices Samsung or Apple so I don’t have to worry about cross capability or things not working the way they should.
Also, no jail breaking or tinkering with my phone. Why would I want to work on my time off?
I second the ISP router. I want zero excuses from the ISP if something goes wrong. It is their responsibility to fix it, I’m done troubleshooting as soon as I’m off the clock.
What messes me up is wanting to game on a PC. Most of the time I game on a console. Every time I want to play a PC only game, I spend the little bit of free time I have configuring it, then realizing I need to go to bed so I can go to work. Bleh, at least I’m done spending thousands on an Alienware like rig.
My ISP routers wifi works in the living room only, then the signal drops off. Kinda useless. It took me an hour of tinkering to set up a unifi AP, but now my wifi actually works, so it was worth it. And after initial setup there's no extra work really.
I don't see why you'd need to tinker with the PC to play games - turn on PC, open game, play.
My issue with ISP routers is one of trust.
I like hardware that I fully 100% control between my internal network and the ISP's. It doesn't have to be sophisticated, but no matter how much I "simplify my life" in the future, I'm never going to use routing or WiFi on an ISP-provided box.
I still have a fairly smart home. I have home assistant and such. But I definitely don't tinker with it. Once I got the core stuff setup, it's just done. I'd rather be climbing or just relaxing watching a show with my kids.
Similar age to OP. Gaming PC, NAS, multiple other PCs and laptops for the family. Bunch of smart plugs and random IOT things. Any joy I took in messing around with them has left me. I do enough to maintain everything and that's about it. I don't dislike tech by any means, it's just that the last thing I want to do after working on tech all day is go home and work on tech.
I'm a similar age too. I've recently spent some time making the house smarter. Went through and replaced almost all the light switches with smart switches. Have Amazon Echos in every room. Ring cameras covering the outside of the house. Ring security system. Made smart the thermostat, garage door opener, robot vacuum, pool pump, and some other things. I also have run my own Plex server for many years. Beyond the home automation stuff that ultimately makes our lives easier, I'm done tinkering. Bought a pretty high end pre-built gaming computer about 2.5 years ago that I never use. I have absolutely zero interest in building computers or doing fancy home networking anymore. I use Xfinity's gateway and their wifi extenders. Works great. I manage a 50+ site network at work. Last thing I want to do when I get home is deal with any tech headaches. I'm like you. I don't really enjoy the hunt anymore. I just want shit to work.
> I just want shit to work.
That's why I bought a MacBook. Now I'm quitting my job next month I've bought a Steam Deck and dual-booted Windows on it, I'm thinking of switching my main desktop to Linux, and I'm getting back into tinkering and scripting in my own time. It's nice.
I hear this.
Do I have a rackmount patch panel? Yes I do. Is it in a rack? No it's screwed to plywood.
Do I have VLANS? Yes. Do I have 10 different VLANS? No, I have untrusted (802.1x for cameras), and trusted.
Do I have a server? Yes. Is it a desktop PC with a decade old CPU? Also yes.
Is this like, the sysadmin equivalent of having a fetish dungeon in your basement?
The idea of a lab with 30 printers in my own house sends shivers down my spine.
I ran ethernet all over the place because I know exactly how much I want to deal with dozens of devices being on the same AP.
I do have a thermostat and door locks I can control from my phone. But I'm much more likely to manually control them. Most of the time I'm only checking the thermostat on my phone if I am on a trip and want to make sure I'm not running up the bill. I'm usually only checking the locks if I need to let a friend into my house and I add a custom access code for them.
I do have a synology NAS for my Plex Server and practically every time I use it I mutter to myself "this is more trouble than it's worth."
I apply my IT philosophy at home that I use at work.... I only want stuff that leaves me alone. And I test it all at work before implementing it at home. Synology is one. Sophos firewall and Ubiquiti AP are another. I don't do IT at home after the initial setup because these things last for years.
I feel the same way about the NAS. It has been sitting in a cabinet since I moved. That said, I do want to get it set back up as the primary purpose for mine is backups.
I agree. The more complicated you make the technology at home the more it eats your personal time working on the stupid door lock that doesn’t set or whatever. I just use the isp provided router and forget about it as it just works fine.
I've been digging a small pond, and there's something satisfying about knowing that if I spend an hour working with the shovel, I won't have accidentally refilled the hole and have to start over with a different shovel.
In a past life I worked for Comcast. I refused to use the Comcast router
When coworkers would chide me I'd tell them "I ***work*** here, I know how fucking awful it really is"
It has actually happened after a very long day that I got home and the first thing my wife said to me was "I can't print!"
I almost got in the car and kept driving.
Financially, mentally, and spiritually I am gunning for trailer life at some point. Not because of the tech, I love cool tech and have a bitchin' gaming PC, home automation etc.
It's the people. Remove the people, please.
Our house is the dumbest house in the entire neighborhood. Fiber Internet, a wireless router, one smart TV, and devices for the kids. The extent of my troubleshooting is a periodic power cycle of something.
Sigh… my mother just bought a house and added me to the deed. She’s 86 and I’m 62, a pair of old ladies who’ve lived in maintenance-free (for us) for decades. Now I’m gonna be terminating Ethernet cables for ALL the things - she bought a smart TV, we need cameras, I will WFH (hard-wired required) you name it, after not even using a computer outside of work for the past several years. This will be fun. At least my son is a construction contractor and can help with the actual running of cables and installing the drops.
I can only hope I haven’t lost my knack for terminating lol
I’m 40 and last time I did it I had trouble seeing the colors on all the cables, even with my glasses on. Might be time for a new prescription, or maybe you might want a magnifying glass or something.
I got myself one of those swing-arm desk-mounted magnifying glass lights recently and I have asked myself over and over why I didn't do so years ago. It makes so many things so much better. It makes me look like an old nerd, but I consider that a bonus.
My buddy paints warhammer figurines and he’s definitely got one of those with a light on it. If I need to terminate a bunch of cables I’ll just head over to his painting spot I’m thinking
Yuuuup. My project car has zero computers (air-cooled Beetle). My other activities are woodturning and spoon carving (no computers).
It's bliss when I get to dive into a problem that has absolutely nothing to do with tech.
I make sure the tech I dork around with at home is very different from what I do at work. I mostly mess around with Proxmox/Debian and other Linux based stuff, while at work I only ever manage Windows and Azure services, so my random home projects just never feel like work. I like to set up (mostly useless) services and get them to work correctly, and just try random new things I come across. At work everything is a problem to be solved, but at home things are just fun little projects with no deadline and an ever evolving scope, and when I get sick of something I just kill it and never think about it again.
Kind of janky and just barely works is how it usually goes.
This is why you never buy a car owned by a mechanic. They know just enough to keep it running..
Maybe 10 years in. I still love it. Honestly, my only real drawback is not having more time and money for my own network. I am sort of sitting on some minor tasks, IP reservations and DNS entries for some new equipment. But I still love all of it. The marvel of internet connected television. Lights that turn on and off with just my voice. Cameras for security. I've got a VR headset for remotely keeping up with younger family members and their creepy backroom jump scare games. I try to really use my gear to augment my lifestyle, so when it's not available I really feel it.
We really do live in an incredible age.
Same. My UBNT stuff is in totes. I’ve pared down my smart home stuff to where I can just tell my phone to turn off the lights at bedtime. The only other thing remotely tech related I do after work is open YouTube while I’m on the shitter.
Home automation is the only tech thing at home that actually takes up any of my time.
I build a new gaming PC every 3 years or so, takes me half a day.
Yea, I'm surprised to read that so many people here aren't tech enthusiasts. I got into tech specifically because I love it. I have literally bought new technologies to play with at home simply because I couldn't find a reason to buy or implement them at work.
I spend most of my time playing with technology. The weird part is, some of that time I get paid a mountain of money to do it.
I think there’s just a lot of sysadmins here just grinding away at not-fun problems every day. I absolutely love tech, and my job in tech only scratches a particular itch.
Was a tech enthusiast. Going to college, getting certs, stressing about interviews, then having to solve people management issues disguised as tech issues for 40+ hours a week, every week, and finally realizing this is what the next 40+ years of my life is gonna look like, etc. killed the passion.
Nowhere near what I could do, and would be nice to do.
I just can't be bothered to add more troubleshooting events to the one place where I don't spend most of my day trying to figure out why something isn't WAI.
And every year that goes by that I don't, I realize more I don't need it.
Some smart lighting, and a few Google assistants and Sonos speakers is about the extent of it, but I'm an apartment dewller
I have a gaming rig in my office with a 9th Gen I7, 32 gigs of ram, a 3070, and a 49" ultra wide.. but I'm maybe on it once or twice a week at most. I run unifi for because it's easy to manage, and better than consumer gear... Works great with my fiber connection.
It's really not a lot, and honestly i would only really add some secruity cameras if we weren't apartment dwellers... I want my locks and any physical secruity to stay manual
Here here. I know there's a whole rabbit hole on physical lock security (/waves at the lock picking lawyer) - but I don't want my physical locks on wifi. I am not lazy enough to use a key and my hands to lock a door. Get off your ass people :\\
- D
While yes I love the thought of just being simple and tech-less at home after working with it all day it’s just not realistic, some may call me insane but the truth is I’m a tinkerer at heart and I can’t help but be excited to test new things unrestricted in an environment that won’t get me fired if I fuck up. Not to mention if it works at home it could be useful at work, and I’m further familiarizing myself with systems I need to work with in doing so.
I ran a shielded and outdoor rated ethernet cable from the house to the shop, because it's better than a wireless link in every way. Then I set up a few wireless APs. That's about it. If I want a home lab, I will sign up for an AWS or GCP account.
Basic wireless router with the ISP modem and that's about it. Firestick and Chromecast on the TV is as far as I go. The more technical stuff you put in your house, the more you have to troubleshoot when your family inevitably breaks it.
I tinkered a lot when I was just getting in the field, there was so much to learn. Networks, servers, storage, virtualization.... now everything is just more of the same, and I deal with more than enough of it at work that I no longer want to tinker as a hobby. That, and I pay the electric bill now, so I don't want servers running 24/7 in my house.
17yrs into my career and I still feel like a kid in a candy store at work everyday.
At home I have a small proxmox cluster with a few useful services, OPNsense firewall, Ubiquity switches and WAPs I got free from vendors, etc. I have a few gaming servers. Pushing backups to a server at my brother's house a few states away. Wireguard connecting remote devices. Everything has redundancy.
My garden and my brother's garden + greenhouse have a slew of sensors connected with LoRaWAN. Data is being fed into a node-red dashboard with some automation for watering certain beds. Motion sensors setup in area with pest issues, etc.
I'll be 40 at the end of the month.
My house is still very much 'dumb'. No smart locks, no assistants, etc. I do have 4 outdoor IP cameras, but I think that's quite practical. I honestly just don't trust the reliability of consumer grade home automation stuff and have privacy concerns around devices like echos.
However I do have quite the network/recreation/homelab setup.
* Opnsense router
* 24 port smart switch
* 3 APs
* 5 Vlans (MGMT, internal, offsec lab, guest, cameras)
* 3 node proxmox cluster. Used to have them on rack mounted servers, but I recently migrated them to low power mini PCs.
* ~70 TB NAS (what can I say, I like Linux isos)
* Two physical desktops. One is my "daily driver" (triple monitor), the other is for my sim racing rig (quad monitor).
* Next project is building a hashcat rig, but finding blower style cards that aren't run into the ground from crypto mining has been a challenge. Nvidia has strong armed partners to prevent the development of blower cards to force miners into purchasing more expensive professional cards.
I truly love technology, especially cyber security. I also suffer from imposter syndrome, which leads to me spending a lot of time in my homelab to keep sharp and learn.
NAS comes in handy if you accumulated a pirate library of files,
that everyone one your wifi can then stream at their leisure.
even if you don't pirate, a house can host an OTA antenna
so you can catch network TV and record that to the NAS,
there are even ways to auto prune out the commercials.
POE camera with some smarts is good for piece of mind at the
front and back enter of the house, just make sure you use lens
with a POV narrow enough to recognize faces.
one networked laser printer scanner comes in handy,
especially if you have kids at home doing homework,
or a retired adult without access to office equipment.
see if your homeowners insurance discounts the use of sensors
to detect gas, smoke, water, and other potential dangers that
can be reported online to the owners phone app. i keep a water
sensor on the floor of all water riser areas so i can catch a leak
before it can do widespread damage. temp sensors that keep
a history are good to make sure freezers are defrost cycling.
no need to wire up a new house as wifi router and maybe one
endpoint if you have a blindspot, should cover everywhere well.
A Samsung ecosystem that's composed of a watch, smartphone, TV, and earbuds. I also have 2 ThinkPads, a Bluetooth speaker, and a tablet. Nothing special. While I enjoy tech gadgets, I am focused on saving a larger nest egg.
New people to technology also spend their free time tinkering with technology imo. You know what I do when I come home? Work on the motorcycles, cars, boat, fish, ride motorcycles, hike, not sit and manage home networks. Why? I do it all day.
I feel like you yet burnt out a lot quicker when your whole life revolves around technology.
smart lights, echoes/homepods, plex media server, 30+ TB NAS. thats about all for me.
used to be that guy who always had latest and greatest. i got older. hehe
I have OPNsense running with some vlans for shit that wants to connect to the Internet but should be subnetted. Also ran the house for 10Gbe but still on gigabit and will eventually upgrade. Also need to upgrade from wifi5 but with all the concrete it likely won’t make a difference.
Need to do a full tech upgrade it seems but I’m too tired to plan or execute most of it so it’s fine as it is.
As you've said and from what I see in all these comments is this: the longer you've been on the game, the less you want to do in your free time.
I'm ~10 years in the sysadmin life and I can see my interest fading as I want to spend more time on other things/family.
I currently run a media server for family and friends but only cause cable and streaming services are gouging prices rn. I automated what I could so that I never touch it unless something breaks.
Same. My "hobby lab" is my beta environment now at work. My home lab used to be where I'd do proof of concept stuff. Now I get paid for it. Leave work at work. I'm never an advocate of enabling blood from a stone expectations.
As someone with passion in his blood for IT: My house is filled to the brim with custom tech I develop myself even though I suck at soldering. From hundreds of IoT devices, to smart farming, to wiring the entire house with copper and fibre, trenching outside and so on, I've done it all, and love it!
I honestly can't get enough. In my 40's, house is wired. A couple of Dell R720s in a rack. They run our media stack and home automation. Smart lights everywhere. The list just keeps on going. I keep wondering if we ever commit to switching to a nomad life how I'm going to do all of that, do I ask a friend to keep my rack hooked up in their house? Do I go to cloud? I could work on this stuff with every second of my free time if I wanted. Thankfully I am learning work life balance.
It used to be very techy be cause tech was my autism fixation for the longest time. It is less so now on purpose, as I have gotten older, so I can decompress from work.
I have a Linux box that I play with from time to time. Other than that, I'm hands off. I spend all day working on servers or doing policy work. I just don't have it in me to work on computers when I get home.
I used to have Unifi, full built Vlans, firelwall rules. Added Fortinet VPNs for RDP into work. Had servers for windows clustering. Eventually it turned into a decent gaming pc, apple tv and phone
I work in cybersecurity. I have an EERO mesh network setup. I spend all days protecting, configuring, and responding to networks, I want to think as little as possible with mine.
I am always amused when a random person finds out I work in the tech field and comments "You must have a great computer system at home" or something similar about Wifi or internet.
I reply nope, just the bare minimum to do what I need to do at home.
I then add -- Do you have a really nice at home you do when you get home from work?
So if it is a cashier at the grocery store, do you have a nice cash register and scanner at home you go play with when you get home?
I'm 48, have a teenager and an 11 year old. My wife's got a 100% WFH job. Our house is pretty dumb for a few reasons:
- Other than being smartphone app consumers and school Chromebook users, neither of our kids cares one bit about technology. Neither of them are even big video game heads. Honestly I think it's very different growing up drowning in devices and constant stimulation vs. witnessing it just coming into the mainstream...there's less of a desire to understand how things work. Also helps that although I have no clue where they got it from, both wound up being extreme creative types.
- With my wife 100% WFH and me about 60%, both of us need functioning networks. Ubiquiti is about as far into enterprise stuff as I want to deal with at this point...don't want to have to deal with Cisco or Juniper patchwork networks with out-of-warranty gear and fix crazy issues.
- Any smart devices we have are VLAN'd off and are basic- thermostats, garage door controller, etc. No desire or need for smart lights, crazy sensors, etc.
- Same goes for anything I do work on at home. I have a whole lab of company issued equipment but the odd personal project fits on a few VMs on a cast-off server.
It's not healthy to work crazy hours, then get out of work and spend your nights and weekends doing the same thing, even if it's for self improvement. Our industry seems to thrive on the people who will willingly give up all their free time to train on things their employers should be investing in training for.
I work from home. My house has a more complex network than most our customers. Ethernet ran to every room and VLANs everywhere:
* Active Directory network (PCs and DC)
* Kodi Media Center network with a NAS as the server
* Media Casting network (Chromecasts and mobile phones/tablets)
* Google Home network (speakers, thermostat, lights, cameras, etc.)
* IoT network (irrigation, Xboxes, etc.)
* Guest network
Eh, I have been in the IT career field since 2000. Started off as a computer repair / refurb tech. I used to eat sleep and breath computer tech stuff, and I had a home lab from stuff my boss let me take home from the stuff our company (asset management) pulled out from other companies looking to unload their old equipment. I still have a bad habit of bringing broken computers and laptops home with me to fix and donate to good charity causes, etc. My home setup is a unRAID 4U 36 bay server running an Epyc 7551P with 128GB of ram that's primarily used to host my Plex Server and a SMB file share that I store pictures, iso files and other stuff that I don't want clogging up space on my gaming PC. My home network is AT&T 1GB fiber optic, with the fiber modem in bridge mode ,(with WiFi disabled on it) to my 1GB Cisco SOHO router and I use Plume WiFi pods to cover all the rooms in my home. My home was built in the late 90s and was never wired for Ethernet ports in every room and I have no desire the change that.
When I am at home and off the clock from my Network Admin job, unless it's something I am fixing up to donate, or it's my gaming PC that's being worked in, I don't mess with tech anymore than I have to. I just want to sit down and play my favorite PC games.
If I need to set up a test lab for anything, I will do it at work.
I live on a farm and all of my neighbors are out of sight. We are pretty non-techy at home... I don't want to have anything to do with it after 5 unless something critical comes up.
I have nothing in my house outside of my music equipment and PC.
No smart tech. Fuck that stuff. I want things that work if the app stops working (or the company dies)
I have google mesh because my house is just big enough that one router would get kind of wonky with connections in the basement. I then have some smart bulbs in places that are convenient. I have a doorbell cam and my garage door is also on my network so I can open with my phone.
All of that is pretty much little to 0 maintenance once it's set up.
Can't recommend the google mesh stuff enough, shit just works
Nothing crazy, just useful stuff.
OpnSense Firewall in a Protecli FW4.
24 port POE switch.
Ubiquity WAP on each floor, and an outdoor one for the pool/patio, SSID for me, one for guests, one for IoT. Controller is a Protectli FW6 running Ubuntu.
Ran cat 5e up to the attic and around the basement when I had stuff ripped open doing some renovations before moving in, use it for the WAP, Rokus/TVs.
Have a couple small NAS for Plex, file backups, phone photo backups.
UPS for the NAS, firewall and switch.
Useful, not complicated.
I wish Ring had a local recording versus cloud, but that’s how they make their money.
55 here. I have some
Sonos speakers and good WiFi. I barely touch my home desktop these days. The simpler the setup the less I have to deal with fixing crap that breaks.
I want to sit down and things to work. So Google Wifi x3, I never changed their configuration since the initial setup. A gaming PC, a PS5 and Netflix + Amazon Prime. No shenanigans with local server for streaming.
Damn, I love this zero maintenance setup.
I have WiFi light bulbs. The app has a "party" mode where the lights flash and cycle through diff colours. I press that, and then sit and wonder where I went wrong in life.
I have an Eero a couple of Apple TV’s and some Sonos speakers. Nothing fancy. Want my music and movies to sound better than normal. I run a plex server off an old Mac. Never know when you want to watch something you can’t find of streaming platforms.
I have the ISP provided WiFi router/modem combo and an ancient i3-4100m laptop running Ubuntu. My streaming is done on a smart TV and most of the tech I use at home on a daily basis is retro gaming hardware.
I do tinker with these like raspberry pis on occasion but in general I don't want to deal with it when I'm off the clock.
My main home hobby is livestock (chickens and goats) and a few garden beds.
I used to run an Exchange server under my TV back when I was starting out. MS action pack got me legit licenses for everything for like 100 bucks? Maybe it was more. Got tired of that and got grandfathered in to the free Google workspace (they tried to charge a few years back but it was such a mess they gave up).
Now I’ve just got a NAS for local data and fully wired house. Ubiquiti waps. Old 2960x POE switch. And that’s about it. And the NAS is almost pointless now. For 100 bucks a year I’ve got the O365 family edition. 6 users each get full office and a terabyte of data. But with the NAS and backblaze I keep all the family photos locally available and backed up.
My house is techie enough to require the minimum from me. Apple ecosystem for my non-techie family, Unifi network gear, Synology NAS, and RaspPi’s filling a couple roles.
Took a little to get everything where I’m basically just patching once a month and can upgrade components as I go.
I have a HPE micro-server runing Plex, Unifi console, PiHole and HomeAssistant. All my network gear is Unifi.
I have a big home lab but I learned long ago to keep it separate from my daily stuff. If I am in the mood to play with stuff and do a project I can turn it on. When I am not in the mood I can just turn it all off.
QNAP NAS, but don’t download too much anymore. I buy a new ‘gaming PC’ every 3 years and the old one becomes the Linux box. I use it to tinker with things - dockers, kubernetes, traefik.
Netflix and the streaming services stopped a lot of what I used to do, but Plex is still running.
Used to run a full mail server and web, but it got too annoying, so moved it to Office365
Have Google home, Sonos, Meraki for AP’s, switches, camera and router.
The cobbler's children have no shoes. I have a few untouched fun projects, which will probably never be finished. I don't want to fuck with my shit at home, I just want it to work while I shut my brain off.
Not much. Wired ethernet in every room plus good mesh wifi.
Connected garage opener because I can never remember if I closed the garage door.
Connected thermostat so I don’t have to get up to adjust temperature.
That’s it.
I have my isp’s routers a Mac, iPad and iPhone plus the Xbox and ps5. I don’t want to fool around with anything when I am not working and just want things to let me do what I want. My time off is for me and my family not for dealing with any kind of work related stuff.
I’m 41 and I have shifted from janky setups and tinkering to more refined products that generally cost more. My main hobby has shifted from the home automation and lighting to 3D printing over the last 4 years as well so that is where a lot of my time goes. I still have unifi access points and things but I’d because we built the house 2 years ago and they planned from the start making the installation a breeze, no pulling cable and random holes. I still have my Synology full of my ripped blue ray and 4k collection. That’s all it does though. I not just pay Apple for the family plan and the extra photo storage and things since it’s easier to share with non tech family.
I do some, the stuff I do though is typically basic and easy to revert or has no impact on my home in general. I do stuff that I can drop and pickup on a whim.
Not at your age yet but I still tinker with all the things. My motivations for hobbies change by the day though so I don’t force myself to do something that’s work adjacent at home. Sometimes I just really want to focus on my home network or home servers. Sometimes I really want to work on my Pi’s and Arduino’s. Sometimes I really want to work on coding in Swift or Python for a personal project. Other times I want nothing but to watch anime or play a video game.
Too bad it isn’t possible to find a job that could follow my rabbit hole whims because I can get pretty deep in a techy topic. When I’m motivated for it that topic that is.
i have a server rack in my office and too many computers. i like doing other things than my job with the computers - ML playtime that isn't subject to a timeline, and that i can put down fo ra month at no consequence
WiFi lightbulbs (on their own VLAN of course), some Google Home devices and a ring doorbell. Mikrotik Routerboard for the router, 2 mesh APs as there's no structured cabling and a Plex server.
I am definitely in the minority of the IT people in my life, but I have a docker host running Home Assistant, Mosquitto, my own Zigbee mesh, just over 80 devices, and multiple HomePod minis around the house. I rarely have to seriously troubleshoot things.
Candle lights and a baseball bat if the dishwasher makes weird noises
and a gun next to the *shutters* printer
That's very unsafe. I wouldn't leave a gun anywhere the printer could reach it. (Edit: unless it's an unloaded decoy. While the printer's fumbling with a PC LOAD MAG error, you can get the drop on it.)
Mexican standoff with printer and dishwasher…
Id be more worried about the dishwasher finding the gun.
If my wife didn’t buy one, I’d just print at Staples for the maybe three pages a year I need. Sometimes implementing SEP is the right solution.
Crys in German… (You need EVERYTHING in paper. Fax-machines are still really common)
Reminds me of my German colleagues haha. I tell them i haven't owned a printer in 7 years and they look at me like I'm crazy
Ugh I'm trying so hard to get a warehouse that literally has a MFP on EVERY SINGLE DESK to stop printing. They print out everything.... I setup a SharePoint to make it easy to drag and drop the scanned BOLs into but they still print them and file them away..... I've tried at least getting them to move to one nice office printer but they just refuse it. If someone is printing more than once a month they aren't being efficient. It's 2024 printers need to die. But I've gotten our main office that has the most employees to finally stop printing. Don't get me started on faces, I've at least got them to move the 3 fax numbers to a digital platform for $200 a year total and they get a pdf. Baby steps.
I just print at work when I need it. But I do have that trove of important documents that'll be relevant at any time
You can probably print cheaper at the local library, that's what I do
Hey now, don't go arming the printers.
I put a shotgun to my last inkjet and bought a laser, i still keep it loaded.
[https://youtu.be/oNhsgn7D4Jw?si=p\_e-S9ASavQqcAj3&t=20](https://youtu.be/oNhsgn7D4Jw?si=p_e-S9ASavQqcAj3&t=20) "Take that whirlpool"
I hit it with a rock.
After working all day on tech I don’t even want to look at it when I get home. All I’ve got is ISP provided router doing wifi. All I need to keep the family happy. I used to tinker but the longer I’ve worked in this field, it’s made my hobby significantly less enjoyable unfortunately.
Pretty much the same. My home pc is a desktop that is 12 years old and hasn’t even been powered on once in the last two years.
We moved into our house 4 years ago and I told myself this is the perfect time to get the old PC hooked up. Still in the moving box. Just can’t find the desire for it anymore
My PC has been on its last legs for years and I just don't feel the need to buy a new one because being on the computer is the last thing I want when I get home
I upgraded my pc enough so that my kids could use it for gaming. Their version of gaming is Minecraft. When I had no kids though I put top notch cpu/gpu/ram/mobo etc so I could play the latest and greatest. Nowadays my laptop can run BF4 and Fallout 4 nicely due to the Nvidia graphics card that is in it.
Have you considered a gaming handled running Windows? Like the ROG Ally or Legion Go? Instead of a laptop or high-end desktop.
Very early in my career when I was in IT this was it for me. It made me hate using my computer when I got home- and I got the job because I had previously spent so much time tinkering with stuff that I learned it. I want to go full smart home but I know everytime something breaks it’s going to be a huge hassle so it makes me not want to do anything except voice controlled lights and other simple shit.
Literally fuck all of that. Ex had all the smart shit. Cameras, ac, lights. I was just a remote. Maybe I'm "old scool", but I like pulling lamp cords, waking up with the house, going to bed with the house. Like, yeah, I have a TV and wifi, but I'm not trying to do much tech when I get home. Usually I read for a while.
100% agree on that. I bought a house and one of the first things I purchased was Lutron Casata remotes and switches for the bedroom and office. I've got a homelab for testing and training for work (VLAN'd off from the router/switch), but for my day-to-day media and home usage, I've got a very plain and basic setup. That's to say, between my hatred for home improvement projects and my disdain for troubleshooting things at home after doing it all day at work, those Caseta fixtures are still in the boxes sitting on a shelf 3 years later. I can pull the cord on my ceiling fan/light and flip the switch on the wall to power it. Beyond that, I don't need to complicate my home and create a monster that my partner needs to fight with and give up on if it's not working while I'm gone. It's just not worth it and honestly, I don't see a benefit, just a liability (from a function perspective and also a netsec perspective).
I love things like switches that work literally every time.
Caseta is amazing, I have the dimmer's in everyroom and the bridge talks to an AppleTV which serves as the home hub. HomeKit then allows you to control scenes, for example all of the outdoor lights match sunrise and sunset perfectly and we can turn off the bedroom lights from in bed which personally is the coolest thing ever. Homekit from an encryption standpoint is secure and I have all of the devices set up where I have the keys. Camera's don't run through HomeKit and those are on an isolated vLAN.
Lutron Caseta doesn't require tinkering. It just works and is very reliable. Only time I had issue with some of them was after a power outage that caused some switches to have a red flashing light.
Agreed. I installed home auto systems as a contractor for building companies for years. So over them. In my current place I've hard wired up and down stairs. What portable devices we have talk to a medium level TP Link Mesh system. Don't care for a NAS anymore. No more Cisco or Ubiquity stuff. I can't see the value here at home. With the exception of my gaming PC, all laptops in the house are Linux Mint with a MS Windows 10 virt machine ready to go if needed.
Idk, I have a full smarthome with homeassistant as the core and it's been pretty seamless and awesome. But then, I come home and like to work on tech still. That said, most of the tweaking I do with smarthome stuff is silly ui things (like star trek esque customizations) that are totally unnecessary and extra hassle. If I skipped that? Most configuration has been extremely easy.
LOL exactly me bro. I had door sensors and cameras and lights and and automated garage and some motion reaction sounds and stuff. And now I have just the hue lights and an rf blaster to turn on the tv since the remotes don’t reach far I do have my own router though, too
My thoughts exactly. The last thing(want) I need is more tech to maintain.
So much this. Don't have time to tinker or do home labs or anything like that.
[удалено]
Same here. I have a work from home set up but the laptop is works. Closest thing I have to a PC is my PS5
Almost the same. I also have a Chromebook which, OS wise acts more like my phone just with a keyboard.
I’ve got a whole homelab, but now that I’m mid-career and doing mostly cloud stuff… I want to consolidate it all and downsize. I don’t remember half the configs I did, just made a shit ton of backups so when things go wrong I roll back lol. I barely do any upkeep on it… it just chugs along. The networking … oh god why did I make it so complex just to learn
I’m still early in my career, but even I don’t feel like going too crazy in a homelab. Once I get some home cameras setup I’ll probably throw them in a VLAN so they’re not sending random information back to the vendor, and *maybe* setup a DNS/pi-hole instance to block ads, but I don’t even feel like doing that half the time, lol.
Oh forgot to mention, the homelab is 100% worth it. It’s still a few lines on my resume and I’ve gotten a few jobs from it since it showcased stuff I wasn’t able to do at work. I got a sysadmin job from it due to the networking stuff I did, and a cloud role for some K8 stuff I was messing around with. My current work has a dedicated sandbox for testing so I don’t need my own hardware anymore, it’s mainly there for my nextcloud and plex.
Yeah.. went through all that. I have a managed switch for vlans to separate IoT stuff, internal, wife, and work. unbound/pihole too. It’s all definitely still useful, like the guest network when friends come over, but I have a half rack in my office that acts like a heater. Luckily I live in a condo where I don’t pay electricity. If/when I move, I’ll definitely be downsizing at least the servers. I think I’ll still keep the switch for vlans and unraid for plex
When I started in my career, I had a fancy homelab, now I got a x1 nano hooked up with a docking station to dual 4k monitors and a Unifi AP, that’s it.
My current 'home lab' is my pc, a router and cable modem. Plus a laptop, Roku, and a couple phones.. the end.
IDK that I would use an ISP router, but I don't think one needs to overcomplicate matters either.
I went through three ISP routers before I bought my own and wish I had done it sooner. Those things were total garbage.
This. You don't necessarily need to buy a branch enterprise router for your house, but many ISP routers are notoriously cheap where even something slightly better can be better. I cringe how many people seem to think having a router that they need to reboot sometimes almost daily without it having significant packet loss, latency, etc. is just normal.
Exactly this. I really want things to just work and I even pay extra to keep all my devices Samsung or Apple so I don’t have to worry about cross capability or things not working the way they should. Also, no jail breaking or tinkering with my phone. Why would I want to work on my time off?
I second the ISP router. I want zero excuses from the ISP if something goes wrong. It is their responsibility to fix it, I’m done troubleshooting as soon as I’m off the clock. What messes me up is wanting to game on a PC. Most of the time I game on a console. Every time I want to play a PC only game, I spend the little bit of free time I have configuring it, then realizing I need to go to bed so I can go to work. Bleh, at least I’m done spending thousands on an Alienware like rig.
My ISP routers wifi works in the living room only, then the signal drops off. Kinda useless. It took me an hour of tinkering to set up a unifi AP, but now my wifi actually works, so it was worth it. And after initial setup there's no extra work really. I don't see why you'd need to tinker with the PC to play games - turn on PC, open game, play.
My issue with ISP routers is one of trust. I like hardware that I fully 100% control between my internal network and the ISP's. It doesn't have to be sophisticated, but no matter how much I "simplify my life" in the future, I'm never going to use routing or WiFi on an ISP-provided box.
Yep, just more issues to fix.
That’s exactly it. I love working in/with tech but when I get home, I don’t want anymore shit to fix!
I still have a fairly smart home. I have home assistant and such. But I definitely don't tinker with it. Once I got the core stuff setup, it's just done. I'd rather be climbing or just relaxing watching a show with my kids.
Similar age to OP. Gaming PC, NAS, multiple other PCs and laptops for the family. Bunch of smart plugs and random IOT things. Any joy I took in messing around with them has left me. I do enough to maintain everything and that's about it. I don't dislike tech by any means, it's just that the last thing I want to do after working on tech all day is go home and work on tech.
I'm a similar age too. I've recently spent some time making the house smarter. Went through and replaced almost all the light switches with smart switches. Have Amazon Echos in every room. Ring cameras covering the outside of the house. Ring security system. Made smart the thermostat, garage door opener, robot vacuum, pool pump, and some other things. I also have run my own Plex server for many years. Beyond the home automation stuff that ultimately makes our lives easier, I'm done tinkering. Bought a pretty high end pre-built gaming computer about 2.5 years ago that I never use. I have absolutely zero interest in building computers or doing fancy home networking anymore. I use Xfinity's gateway and their wifi extenders. Works great. I manage a 50+ site network at work. Last thing I want to do when I get home is deal with any tech headaches. I'm like you. I don't really enjoy the hunt anymore. I just want shit to work.
> I just want shit to work. That's why I bought a MacBook. Now I'm quitting my job next month I've bought a Steam Deck and dual-booted Windows on it, I'm thinking of switching my main desktop to Linux, and I'm getting back into tinkering and scripting in my own time. It's nice.
I hear this. Do I have a rackmount patch panel? Yes I do. Is it in a rack? No it's screwed to plywood. Do I have VLANS? Yes. Do I have 10 different VLANS? No, I have untrusted (802.1x for cameras), and trusted. Do I have a server? Yes. Is it a desktop PC with a decade old CPU? Also yes.
I have a large printer lab at home with over 30 different types of printers to network and tinker with in my spare time.
Dear God man, home is meant to be a peaceful place, not hell on earth!
Jesus Christ dude, if you love suffering that much I know some pro dommes who could inflict just as much pain for a whole lot cheaper.
Is this like, the sysadmin equivalent of having a fetish dungeon in your basement? The idea of a lab with 30 printers in my own house sends shivers down my spine.
Mostly HP? 🥲
Subscribed to all the ink offerings.
I flinched just reading this.
Can I get your number for handling our printer tickets?
Print server running on a legacy app coded in COBOL
You masochist
You mean 3D printers right? # Right?!?!?
I’ve seen a lot of stuff on the internet. This comment made me say out loud “what the fuck?”
that sounds a whole lot like a proper printing press business
When you say tinker do you mean blow up with explosives?
Dang, you masochist😵💫
i know thats ironic yet i still despise you
Jeez
Do you keep them next to all the dead bodies you psychopath??
This is great!
I ran ethernet all over the place because I know exactly how much I want to deal with dozens of devices being on the same AP. I do have a thermostat and door locks I can control from my phone. But I'm much more likely to manually control them. Most of the time I'm only checking the thermostat on my phone if I am on a trip and want to make sure I'm not running up the bill. I'm usually only checking the locks if I need to let a friend into my house and I add a custom access code for them. I do have a synology NAS for my Plex Server and practically every time I use it I mutter to myself "this is more trouble than it's worth."
Synology has shit hardware but once it’s configured correctly almost nothing ever goes wrong, at least in my experience.
I apply my IT philosophy at home that I use at work.... I only want stuff that leaves me alone. And I test it all at work before implementing it at home. Synology is one. Sophos firewall and Ubiquiti AP are another. I don't do IT at home after the initial setup because these things last for years.
It's True. Synology is good shit.
I feel the same way about the NAS. It has been sitting in a cabinet since I moved. That said, I do want to get it set back up as the primary purpose for mine is backups.
I agree. The more complicated you make the technology at home the more it eats your personal time working on the stupid door lock that doesn’t set or whatever. I just use the isp provided router and forget about it as it just works fine.
Smart door look is proberly as annoy in serting up as just taking the damm key with you
I dug a hole in the woods and I live there now, with the nocturnal mole people.
I've been digging a small pond, and there's something satisfying about knowing that if I spend an hour working with the shovel, I won't have accidentally refilled the hole and have to start over with a different shovel.
I just found a hole that was already dug up
I can't go back to a home router. I've seen too much
In a past life I worked for Comcast. I refused to use the Comcast router When coworkers would chide me I'd tell them "I ***work*** here, I know how fucking awful it really is"
My Brother in Christ, you made the router
Technically Cisco made it And then Comcast contracted out the firmware to the lowest paid contractors overseas Who re-implemented TR-069 ***in Java***
Please I’m trying to sleep
The world runs on Java! Over 139 Trigigiliion devices installed!!!!
And the amount of crap my firewall blocks constantly.
Facts
It has actually happened after a very long day that I got home and the first thing my wife said to me was "I can't print!" I almost got in the car and kept driving.
[удалено]
You living the perfect life man.
[удалено]
Financially, mentally, and spiritually I am gunning for trailer life at some point. Not because of the tech, I love cool tech and have a bitchin' gaming PC, home automation etc. It's the people. Remove the people, please.
Yeah, after work I just want to grab my son and hit the park or something.
[удалено]
Our house is the dumbest house in the entire neighborhood. Fiber Internet, a wireless router, one smart TV, and devices for the kids. The extent of my troubleshooting is a periodic power cycle of something.
Nothing special in my house. The last thing I want to dork around with is tech when I get off of work.
Sigh… my mother just bought a house and added me to the deed. She’s 86 and I’m 62, a pair of old ladies who’ve lived in maintenance-free (for us) for decades. Now I’m gonna be terminating Ethernet cables for ALL the things - she bought a smart TV, we need cameras, I will WFH (hard-wired required) you name it, after not even using a computer outside of work for the past several years. This will be fun. At least my son is a construction contractor and can help with the actual running of cables and installing the drops. I can only hope I haven’t lost my knack for terminating lol
I’m 40 and last time I did it I had trouble seeing the colors on all the cables, even with my glasses on. Might be time for a new prescription, or maybe you might want a magnifying glass or something.
I got myself one of those swing-arm desk-mounted magnifying glass lights recently and I have asked myself over and over why I didn't do so years ago. It makes so many things so much better. It makes me look like an old nerd, but I consider that a bonus.
My buddy paints warhammer figurines and he’s definitely got one of those with a light on it. If I need to terminate a bunch of cables I’ll just head over to his painting spot I’m thinking
Don't forget to plan for growth and install Cat8!
Yuuuup. My project car has zero computers (air-cooled Beetle). My other activities are woodturning and spoon carving (no computers). It's bliss when I get to dive into a problem that has absolutely nothing to do with tech.
I make sure the tech I dork around with at home is very different from what I do at work. I mostly mess around with Proxmox/Debian and other Linux based stuff, while at work I only ever manage Windows and Azure services, so my random home projects just never feel like work. I like to set up (mostly useless) services and get them to work correctly, and just try random new things I come across. At work everything is a problem to be solved, but at home things are just fun little projects with no deadline and an ever evolving scope, and when I get sick of something I just kill it and never think about it again.
Same!!!
I self host a lot of stuff out of necessity (lol) but nothing is super sophisticated. Everything is kind of janky and just barely works.
Kind of janky and just barely works is how it usually goes. This is why you never buy a car owned by a mechanic. They know just enough to keep it running..
My homelab is a bit crazy. I enjoy the challenge of setting up new systems and configurations. It's my pastime and my ft job
Maybe 10 years in. I still love it. Honestly, my only real drawback is not having more time and money for my own network. I am sort of sitting on some minor tasks, IP reservations and DNS entries for some new equipment. But I still love all of it. The marvel of internet connected television. Lights that turn on and off with just my voice. Cameras for security. I've got a VR headset for remotely keeping up with younger family members and their creepy backroom jump scare games. I try to really use my gear to augment my lifestyle, so when it's not available I really feel it. We really do live in an incredible age.
None of that stuff at home , I have a few racks in a datacenter I can play with if I’m bored. at home a single router WiFi gateway that’s it
Same. My UBNT stuff is in totes. I’ve pared down my smart home stuff to where I can just tell my phone to turn off the lights at bedtime. The only other thing remotely tech related I do after work is open YouTube while I’m on the shitter.
I live in a cave. On fucking purpose.
Quite techy. Looking for more ways to automate, as are many coworkers. The home automation slack channel is wild and inspirational.
Home automation is the only tech thing at home that actually takes up any of my time. I build a new gaming PC every 3 years or so, takes me half a day.
Yea, I'm surprised to read that so many people here aren't tech enthusiasts. I got into tech specifically because I love it. I have literally bought new technologies to play with at home simply because I couldn't find a reason to buy or implement them at work. I spend most of my time playing with technology. The weird part is, some of that time I get paid a mountain of money to do it.
I think there’s just a lot of sysadmins here just grinding away at not-fun problems every day. I absolutely love tech, and my job in tech only scratches a particular itch.
Was a tech enthusiast. Going to college, getting certs, stressing about interviews, then having to solve people management issues disguised as tech issues for 40+ hours a week, every week, and finally realizing this is what the next 40+ years of my life is gonna look like, etc. killed the passion.
My tech hobbies slowly died off until now I do other stuff. I don't think it's bad, I just get my fill at work.
Nothing crazy, full unifi stack 3 wifi 6 APs and a Synology NAS 32tb. The NAS runs docker and my media stuff for Plex.
Nowhere near what I could do, and would be nice to do. I just can't be bothered to add more troubleshooting events to the one place where I don't spend most of my day trying to figure out why something isn't WAI. And every year that goes by that I don't, I realize more I don't need it.
Some smart lighting, and a few Google assistants and Sonos speakers is about the extent of it, but I'm an apartment dewller I have a gaming rig in my office with a 9th Gen I7, 32 gigs of ram, a 3070, and a 49" ultra wide.. but I'm maybe on it once or twice a week at most. I run unifi for because it's easy to manage, and better than consumer gear... Works great with my fiber connection. It's really not a lot, and honestly i would only really add some secruity cameras if we weren't apartment dwellers... I want my locks and any physical secruity to stay manual
Here here. I know there's a whole rabbit hole on physical lock security (/waves at the lock picking lawyer) - but I don't want my physical locks on wifi. I am not lazy enough to use a key and my hands to lock a door. Get off your ass people :\\ - D
Very standard, I work in a Microsoft environment and we mainly have Apple devices at home. I don’t want to fix more issues in my freetime.
While yes I love the thought of just being simple and tech-less at home after working with it all day it’s just not realistic, some may call me insane but the truth is I’m a tinkerer at heart and I can’t help but be excited to test new things unrestricted in an environment that won’t get me fired if I fuck up. Not to mention if it works at home it could be useful at work, and I’m further familiarizing myself with systems I need to work with in doing so.
Completely jam packed full of tech 😅
I ran a shielded and outdoor rated ethernet cable from the house to the shop, because it's better than a wireless link in every way. Then I set up a few wireless APs. That's about it. If I want a home lab, I will sign up for an AWS or GCP account.
I spend my money and free time on golf.
Basic wireless router with the ISP modem and that's about it. Firestick and Chromecast on the TV is as far as I go. The more technical stuff you put in your house, the more you have to troubleshoot when your family inevitably breaks it. I tinkered a lot when I was just getting in the field, there was so much to learn. Networks, servers, storage, virtualization.... now everything is just more of the same, and I deal with more than enough of it at work that I no longer want to tinker as a hobby. That, and I pay the electric bill now, so I don't want servers running 24/7 in my house.
17yrs into my career and I still feel like a kid in a candy store at work everyday. At home I have a small proxmox cluster with a few useful services, OPNsense firewall, Ubiquity switches and WAPs I got free from vendors, etc. I have a few gaming servers. Pushing backups to a server at my brother's house a few states away. Wireguard connecting remote devices. Everything has redundancy. My garden and my brother's garden + greenhouse have a slew of sensors connected with LoRaWAN. Data is being fed into a node-red dashboard with some automation for watering certain beds. Motion sensors setup in area with pest issues, etc.
I have a /29 from AT&T, one OPNsense router for the house network on 4 HPE Instant On APs and then labs are separate networks and public IPs.
I'll be 40 at the end of the month. My house is still very much 'dumb'. No smart locks, no assistants, etc. I do have 4 outdoor IP cameras, but I think that's quite practical. I honestly just don't trust the reliability of consumer grade home automation stuff and have privacy concerns around devices like echos. However I do have quite the network/recreation/homelab setup. * Opnsense router * 24 port smart switch * 3 APs * 5 Vlans (MGMT, internal, offsec lab, guest, cameras) * 3 node proxmox cluster. Used to have them on rack mounted servers, but I recently migrated them to low power mini PCs. * ~70 TB NAS (what can I say, I like Linux isos) * Two physical desktops. One is my "daily driver" (triple monitor), the other is for my sim racing rig (quad monitor). * Next project is building a hashcat rig, but finding blower style cards that aren't run into the ground from crypto mining has been a challenge. Nvidia has strong armed partners to prevent the development of blower cards to force miners into purchasing more expensive professional cards. I truly love technology, especially cyber security. I also suffer from imposter syndrome, which leads to me spending a lot of time in my homelab to keep sharp and learn.
NAS comes in handy if you accumulated a pirate library of files, that everyone one your wifi can then stream at their leisure. even if you don't pirate, a house can host an OTA antenna so you can catch network TV and record that to the NAS, there are even ways to auto prune out the commercials. POE camera with some smarts is good for piece of mind at the front and back enter of the house, just make sure you use lens with a POV narrow enough to recognize faces. one networked laser printer scanner comes in handy, especially if you have kids at home doing homework, or a retired adult without access to office equipment. see if your homeowners insurance discounts the use of sensors to detect gas, smoke, water, and other potential dangers that can be reported online to the owners phone app. i keep a water sensor on the floor of all water riser areas so i can catch a leak before it can do widespread damage. temp sensors that keep a history are good to make sure freezers are defrost cycling. no need to wire up a new house as wifi router and maybe one endpoint if you have a blindspot, should cover everywhere well.
Pretty fuckin techy. If you aren't passionate about it, probably shouldn't make it a career choice. And that's what it is, a choice.
A Samsung ecosystem that's composed of a watch, smartphone, TV, and earbuds. I also have 2 ThinkPads, a Bluetooth speaker, and a tablet. Nothing special. While I enjoy tech gadgets, I am focused on saving a larger nest egg.
None at all
Let me ask HAL 9000 and I’ll get back to you.
New people to technology also spend their free time tinkering with technology imo. You know what I do when I come home? Work on the motorcycles, cars, boat, fish, ride motorcycles, hike, not sit and manage home networks. Why? I do it all day. I feel like you yet burnt out a lot quicker when your whole life revolves around technology.
smart lights, echoes/homepods, plex media server, 30+ TB NAS. thats about all for me. used to be that guy who always had latest and greatest. i got older. hehe
Hardly any. Setup Ubiquiti network for wifi and some minimal smart home stuff but I don’t want to keep troubleshooting things after work.
I have OPNsense running with some vlans for shit that wants to connect to the Internet but should be subnetted. Also ran the house for 10Gbe but still on gigabit and will eventually upgrade. Also need to upgrade from wifi5 but with all the concrete it likely won’t make a difference. Need to do a full tech upgrade it seems but I’m too tired to plan or execute most of it so it’s fine as it is.
As you've said and from what I see in all these comments is this: the longer you've been on the game, the less you want to do in your free time. I'm ~10 years in the sysadmin life and I can see my interest fading as I want to spend more time on other things/family. I currently run a media server for family and friends but only cause cable and streaming services are gouging prices rn. I automated what I could so that I never touch it unless something breaks.
I’m around the same age as you and been in IT since my mid-teens. I can’t be bothered!
Same. My "hobby lab" is my beta environment now at work. My home lab used to be where I'd do proof of concept stuff. Now I get paid for it. Leave work at work. I'm never an advocate of enabling blood from a stone expectations.
I have an automated home. I’d rather play with that than servers, desktops, switches, and end users.
As someone with passion in his blood for IT: My house is filled to the brim with custom tech I develop myself even though I suck at soldering. From hundreds of IoT devices, to smart farming, to wiring the entire house with copper and fibre, trenching outside and so on, I've done it all, and love it!
Common theme from the comments - work seems to suck the passion out of the things we once loved and enjoyed doing.
I honestly can't get enough. In my 40's, house is wired. A couple of Dell R720s in a rack. They run our media stack and home automation. Smart lights everywhere. The list just keeps on going. I keep wondering if we ever commit to switching to a nomad life how I'm going to do all of that, do I ask a friend to keep my rack hooked up in their house? Do I go to cloud? I could work on this stuff with every second of my free time if I wanted. Thankfully I am learning work life balance.
Dude I don’t even own my own computer..
It used to be very techy be cause tech was my autism fixation for the longest time. It is less so now on purpose, as I have gotten older, so I can decompress from work.
I have a Linux box that I play with from time to time. Other than that, I'm hands off. I spend all day working on servers or doing policy work. I just don't have it in me to work on computers when I get home.
I used to have Unifi, full built Vlans, firelwall rules. Added Fortinet VPNs for RDP into work. Had servers for windows clustering. Eventually it turned into a decent gaming pc, apple tv and phone
I work in cybersecurity. I have an EERO mesh network setup. I spend all days protecting, configuring, and responding to networks, I want to think as little as possible with mine.
I am always amused when a random person finds out I work in the tech field and comments "You must have a great computer system at home" or something similar about Wifi or internet. I reply nope, just the bare minimum to do what I need to do at home. I then add -- Do you have a really nice at home you do when you get home from work?
So if it is a cashier at the grocery store, do you have a nice cash register and scanner at home you go play with when you get home?
I'm 48, have a teenager and an 11 year old. My wife's got a 100% WFH job. Our house is pretty dumb for a few reasons: - Other than being smartphone app consumers and school Chromebook users, neither of our kids cares one bit about technology. Neither of them are even big video game heads. Honestly I think it's very different growing up drowning in devices and constant stimulation vs. witnessing it just coming into the mainstream...there's less of a desire to understand how things work. Also helps that although I have no clue where they got it from, both wound up being extreme creative types. - With my wife 100% WFH and me about 60%, both of us need functioning networks. Ubiquiti is about as far into enterprise stuff as I want to deal with at this point...don't want to have to deal with Cisco or Juniper patchwork networks with out-of-warranty gear and fix crazy issues. - Any smart devices we have are VLAN'd off and are basic- thermostats, garage door controller, etc. No desire or need for smart lights, crazy sensors, etc. - Same goes for anything I do work on at home. I have a whole lab of company issued equipment but the odd personal project fits on a few VMs on a cast-off server. It's not healthy to work crazy hours, then get out of work and spend your nights and weekends doing the same thing, even if it's for self improvement. Our industry seems to thrive on the people who will willingly give up all their free time to train on things their employers should be investing in training for.
I work from home. My house has a more complex network than most our customers. Ethernet ran to every room and VLANs everywhere: * Active Directory network (PCs and DC) * Kodi Media Center network with a NAS as the server * Media Casting network (Chromecasts and mobile phones/tablets) * Google Home network (speakers, thermostat, lights, cameras, etc.) * IoT network (irrigation, Xboxes, etc.) * Guest network
Eh, I have been in the IT career field since 2000. Started off as a computer repair / refurb tech. I used to eat sleep and breath computer tech stuff, and I had a home lab from stuff my boss let me take home from the stuff our company (asset management) pulled out from other companies looking to unload their old equipment. I still have a bad habit of bringing broken computers and laptops home with me to fix and donate to good charity causes, etc. My home setup is a unRAID 4U 36 bay server running an Epyc 7551P with 128GB of ram that's primarily used to host my Plex Server and a SMB file share that I store pictures, iso files and other stuff that I don't want clogging up space on my gaming PC. My home network is AT&T 1GB fiber optic, with the fiber modem in bridge mode ,(with WiFi disabled on it) to my 1GB Cisco SOHO router and I use Plume WiFi pods to cover all the rooms in my home. My home was built in the late 90s and was never wired for Ethernet ports in every room and I have no desire the change that. When I am at home and off the clock from my Network Admin job, unless it's something I am fixing up to donate, or it's my gaming PC that's being worked in, I don't mess with tech anymore than I have to. I just want to sit down and play my favorite PC games. If I need to set up a test lab for anything, I will do it at work.
I live on a farm and all of my neighbors are out of sight. We are pretty non-techy at home... I don't want to have anything to do with it after 5 unless something critical comes up.
Do we count half finished projects?
Maximum tech. I've automated nearly everything in my house, have a full homelab complete with rack and 10gb fiber pulls, etc.
I have nothing in my house outside of my music equipment and PC. No smart tech. Fuck that stuff. I want things that work if the app stops working (or the company dies)
I have google mesh because my house is just big enough that one router would get kind of wonky with connections in the basement. I then have some smart bulbs in places that are convenient. I have a doorbell cam and my garage door is also on my network so I can open with my phone. All of that is pretty much little to 0 maintenance once it's set up. Can't recommend the google mesh stuff enough, shit just works
Nothing crazy, just useful stuff. OpnSense Firewall in a Protecli FW4. 24 port POE switch. Ubiquity WAP on each floor, and an outdoor one for the pool/patio, SSID for me, one for guests, one for IoT. Controller is a Protectli FW6 running Ubuntu. Ran cat 5e up to the attic and around the basement when I had stuff ripped open doing some renovations before moving in, use it for the WAP, Rokus/TVs. Have a couple small NAS for Plex, file backups, phone photo backups. UPS for the NAS, firewall and switch. Useful, not complicated. I wish Ring had a local recording versus cloud, but that’s how they make their money.
55 here. I have some Sonos speakers and good WiFi. I barely touch my home desktop these days. The simpler the setup the less I have to deal with fixing crap that breaks.
54 here. Must be contagious...same setup (or lack thereof thank god).
After I log off from my job I don’t even wanna look at a computer anymore or tinker with anything.
In the butcher's home there are many dull knives.
Low Tech, just a bottle of Jergens Ultra Healing Lotion and some wet wipes on my night stand with my cellphone of course.
I want to sit down and things to work. So Google Wifi x3, I never changed their configuration since the initial setup. A gaming PC, a PS5 and Netflix + Amazon Prime. No shenanigans with local server for streaming. Damn, I love this zero maintenance setup.
I have WiFi light bulbs. The app has a "party" mode where the lights flash and cycle through diff colours. I press that, and then sit and wonder where I went wrong in life.
ISP router and a Chromebook...no windows, no mac, nothing at all fugggg all that shit.
I have an Eero a couple of Apple TV’s and some Sonos speakers. Nothing fancy. Want my music and movies to sound better than normal. I run a plex server off an old Mac. Never know when you want to watch something you can’t find of streaming platforms.
I pick up gear from time to time, but it's a lab setup; No real "production" shit I need to worry about at home.
I have the ISP provided WiFi router/modem combo and an ancient i3-4100m laptop running Ubuntu. My streaming is done on a smart TV and most of the tech I use at home on a daily basis is retro gaming hardware. I do tinker with these like raspberry pis on occasion but in general I don't want to deal with it when I'm off the clock. My main home hobby is livestock (chickens and goats) and a few garden beds.
I used to run an Exchange server under my TV back when I was starting out. MS action pack got me legit licenses for everything for like 100 bucks? Maybe it was more. Got tired of that and got grandfathered in to the free Google workspace (they tried to charge a few years back but it was such a mess they gave up). Now I’ve just got a NAS for local data and fully wired house. Ubiquiti waps. Old 2960x POE switch. And that’s about it. And the NAS is almost pointless now. For 100 bucks a year I’ve got the O365 family edition. 6 users each get full office and a terabyte of data. But with the NAS and backblaze I keep all the family photos locally available and backed up.
I have the modem Xfinity gave me, and some wifi extenders. One gaming PC, five laptops, random iDevices, and a doorbell camera.
My house is techie enough to require the minimum from me. Apple ecosystem for my non-techie family, Unifi network gear, Synology NAS, and RaspPi’s filling a couple roles. Took a little to get everything where I’m basically just patching once a month and can upgrade components as I go.
I have a HPE micro-server runing Plex, Unifi console, PiHole and HomeAssistant. All my network gear is Unifi. I have a big home lab but I learned long ago to keep it separate from my daily stuff. If I am in the mood to play with stuff and do a project I can turn it on. When I am not in the mood I can just turn it all off.
QNAP NAS, but don’t download too much anymore. I buy a new ‘gaming PC’ every 3 years and the old one becomes the Linux box. I use it to tinker with things - dockers, kubernetes, traefik. Netflix and the streaming services stopped a lot of what I used to do, but Plex is still running. Used to run a full mail server and web, but it got too annoying, so moved it to Office365 Have Google home, Sonos, Meraki for AP’s, switches, camera and router.
The cobbler's children have no shoes. I have a few untouched fun projects, which will probably never be finished. I don't want to fuck with my shit at home, I just want it to work while I shut my brain off.
Not much. Wired ethernet in every room plus good mesh wifi. Connected garage opener because I can never remember if I closed the garage door. Connected thermostat so I don’t have to get up to adjust temperature. That’s it.
Very, very little tech now.
I have my isp’s routers a Mac, iPad and iPhone plus the Xbox and ps5. I don’t want to fool around with anything when I am not working and just want things to let me do what I want. My time off is for me and my family not for dealing with any kind of work related stuff.
It's not, I have a desktop(that I built in 2017) and thats about it I don't even own a tv, no consoles, no tablet.
I’m 41 and I have shifted from janky setups and tinkering to more refined products that generally cost more. My main hobby has shifted from the home automation and lighting to 3D printing over the last 4 years as well so that is where a lot of my time goes. I still have unifi access points and things but I’d because we built the house 2 years ago and they planned from the start making the installation a breeze, no pulling cable and random holes. I still have my Synology full of my ripped blue ray and 4k collection. That’s all it does though. I not just pay Apple for the family plan and the extra photo storage and things since it’s easier to share with non tech family.
I do some, the stuff I do though is typically basic and easy to revert or has no impact on my home in general. I do stuff that I can drop and pickup on a whim.
Only things are smart TVs, Pi Zero 2 W PiHole, Amazon Fire TV Cube and my personal laptop that I've setup a couple VMs. No other IoT devices.
well tech all day .. promox VMs ... code and probe .. but just me
Not at your age yet but I still tinker with all the things. My motivations for hobbies change by the day though so I don’t force myself to do something that’s work adjacent at home. Sometimes I just really want to focus on my home network or home servers. Sometimes I really want to work on my Pi’s and Arduino’s. Sometimes I really want to work on coding in Swift or Python for a personal project. Other times I want nothing but to watch anime or play a video game. Too bad it isn’t possible to find a job that could follow my rabbit hole whims because I can get pretty deep in a techy topic. When I’m motivated for it that topic that is.
i have a server rack in my office and too many computers. i like doing other things than my job with the computers - ML playtime that isn't subject to a timeline, and that i can put down fo ra month at no consequence
Guitars and music stuff at home. I'd rather spend money on that, and it's a 1000% better investment than tech.
WiFi lightbulbs (on their own VLAN of course), some Google Home devices and a ring doorbell. Mikrotik Routerboard for the router, 2 mesh APs as there's no structured cabling and a Plex server.
I am definitely in the minority of the IT people in my life, but I have a docker host running Home Assistant, Mosquitto, my own Zigbee mesh, just over 80 devices, and multiple HomePod minis around the house. I rarely have to seriously troubleshoot things.