https://thescott.net/2025-11-06T14:50:00+00:002025-11-06T14:50:00+00:002025-11-06T14:50:00+00:00Joseph Scotttag:thescott.net,2025-11-06:/about-me.html<h1>About Me</h1> <p>I'm Joseph Scott. An IT Technical Consultant from West Yorkshire in the UK.</p> <p>Download my <a href="https://thescott.net/files/Joseph Scott - CV.pdf">latest CV</a>.</p>2025-11-06T11:15:00+00:002025-11-06T11:15:00+00:00Joseph Scotttag:thescott.net,2025-11-06:/projects.html

<h1>Project 1: hAIstory - A Wordpress Plugin</h1> <p>Skills Development: working with PHP and MySQL, GitHub CMS: Wordpress</p> <h1>Project 2: Specialist Technologies for Private Cloud</h1> <p>During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic there was a notable shift towards utilisation of public clouds. This was driven by the sudden impact of closing workplaces …</p>

<h1>Project 1: hAIstory - A Wordpress Plugin</h1> <p>Skills Development: working with PHP and MySQL, GitHub CMS: Wordpress</p> <h1>Project 2: Specialist Technologies for Private Cloud</h1> <p>During the course of the COVID-19 pandemic there was a notable shift towards utilisation of public clouds. This was driven by the sudden impact of closing workplaces and the requirement to keep organisations running by working from home practices. The combined effect of working from home and the general disruption of the pandemic led to the 2020-23 global semiconductor shortage. This meant that the supply of servers, replacement components and even end-user devices became constrained. The use of the cloud's elastically available resources helped to ensure some level of business continuity during the global crisis.</p> <p>Forwarding on to 2025 the sudden shift to public clouds has now required significant rethinking. Particular attention should be drawn to the weakness of "lift and shift" methodology. Running persistent workloads in public clouds is expensive. This especially becomes an concern where workloads are not re-architected for clouds or pay-as-you-go pricing structures are used.</p> <p>In my own line of work with my former employer the use of public cloud was accelerated by the end of support of Windows Server 2012 and 2012 R2. IT departments found they could move systems to Microsoft Azure and enjoy extended support from Microsoft. Unfortunately this only served to move the problem further down the timeline.</p> <p>In response to this the concept of "cloud repatriation" has increasingly become a subject in the IT community.</p> <p>In addition to the technical and financial concerns of using hyperscalers there are a number of issues surrounding ethics including but not limited to: environmental impact, tax evasion, human rights abuses, and worker rights.</p> <p>With these issues in mind this project was an effort to implement a private cloud for my home office environment. Connected by a 900Mbps symmetrical fibre internet connection.</p> <p>I used two video courses created by a MikroTik certified trainer. First was equivalent to the MTCNA basic course and the second was in IPv6. For the IPv6 course this was a subject area I'd struggled to work with in the past and having a general lesson on the core concepts in addition to working with it in RouterOS has helped me in that area tremendously.</p> <h2>List of Hardware and Software Used</h2> <h3>Hardware</h3> <p>Rack: <a href="https://deskpi.com/products/deskpi-rackmate-t1-rackmount-10-inch-4u-server-cabinet-for-network-servers-audio-and-video-equipment">DeskPi RackMate T0</a><br> UPS: <a href="https://www.se.com/uk/en/product/BE850G2-UK/apc-backups-850va-520w-floor-wall-mount-230v-8x-british-bs1363a-outlets-usb-type-a+c-ports-user-replaceable-battery/">APC 850VA BE850G2-UK Back-UPS</a><br> Router: <a href="https://mikrotik.com/product/rb5009upr_s_in">MikroTik RB5009UPr+S+IN</a><br> Switch: <a href="https://mikrotik.com/product/css318_16g_2s_in">MikroTik CSS318-16G-2S+IN</a><br> Access Point: <a href="https://mikrotik.com/product/wap_ax">MikroTik wAP ax</a><br> Miniserver: <a href="https://starlabs.systems/pages/byte">StarLabs Byte MK II</a> </p> <h3>Software</h3> <p>Proxmox VE: <a href="https://www.proxmox.com/en/proxmox-ve">Proxmox VE</a></p> <p>Skills Networking: IPv4 and IPv6, VLANS, MikroTik, Proxmox</p> <h1>Note on Product and Service Mentions</h1> <p>There are various product and service mentions along with links in this article. These are not to be taken as recommendations and (unless otherwise stated) I am not receiving any commission or supplier support for their mention.</p>