I am Lars Wittebrood. I live and work in the Netherlands and have FreeBSD as a hobby!
I got introduced to Slackware back in 1994 through a school project. Then a few years later, around 1998, I got introduced to FreeBSD by a friend. He had set it up as a dialup router and firewall for his home internet connection. These were still the dial up modem days. I found it very interesting, so we setup the same at my place! My love for FreeBSD was born!
In 1996 I started my professional life at a Dutch IT company. I got training for the Microsoft MCSE certification for free and after passing all exams I got to choose were to work in the company as a Microsoft system engineer. Soon Unix and Linux knowledge was needed as well. Luckily I already started that at home in my spare time. And through the professional ask I got more and more into Unix, which I liked. Soon I managed Linux, Solaris, AIX and even SCO Unix systems professionally.
In 2001 I registered my own DNS zone on the internet for private
use: socruel.nu. This got me to do even more stuff with FreeBSD!
The other new technology which lifted my home lab time was
virtualization.
I started a new job as pre sales technical infrastructure architect in 2004 (and am still doing this today with ‘the cloud’ added into the mix). This move finished my professional engineer days, but I kept my love for FreeBSD. More and more functionalities were added to it, so I could use it for even more stuff! I could i.e. get rid of my Linux based hypervisors! My FreeBSD hobby still supports my professional life today!
Today I have 3 FreeBSD physical servers running at home with bhyve and ZFS. These servers run approximately 20 VMs, also all running FreeBSD. My home lab also includes a physical pfSense appliance. And then I have some FreeBSD based VMs running at 2 VPS providers.
Functionalities running on this infrastructure are:
A FreeNAS box is still missing in this picture. But it is on the roadmap and hopefully I will have one later this year!
You can follow me online through Twitter, LinkedIn, the web.
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