I recently went back to college and got a network engineer degree then stumbled into a super chill Origami admin role. I swear it’s the middle management IT without actually managing anyone. I sit in meetings, reset passwords and occasionally make changes to the production database!
I just make sure to tinker on the side to keep myself sane and keep the skills sharp. I want to get more than a random old laptop running docker going (there’s some fun stuff I could do with routing in that I really want to play with sometime) but I’ve got grownup responsibilities to catch up with that I neglected while returning to college before I can do that
So with the way my house is laid out it and the difficulty in running network cables it would really make sense to put the server rack in the spider-filled basement, and a network switch on each floor. But while thinking about cost effective ways to achieve that (including use of the long distance stacking feature of the classic Brocade ICX switches or just running some of those Chinese 2.5G softrouter boxes) I keep coming back to this idea of instead setting up a BGP routed WAN or similar.
By running redundant cables I gain resilience against the chaos I live in (multiple kids and pets plus pretty frequently reorganizing furniture to get all of us to fit comfortably in our 1200 square foot starter house) plus by using a routing protocol like BGP it should do some amount of load balancing to allow more bandwidth between clients (I find peer to peer network technologies super neat so i love experimenting with them) but the thought also comes to use those Microtik router cards for even more bandwidth
Honestly it’s a lot of ideas I’ve been bouncing around while my family spends all of my hobby money on things like mini vacations that we can all enjoy