String Theory

I have been wanting to set up my own home lab for a very long time. Unfortunately home projects and such have always been higher on the priority list so I hadn’t much luck getting it started. Thankfully I have been able to build my home lab with many thanks to my wife for delaying some projects.

The purpose of my lab is really simple. I want the ability to simulate many different environments for whatever project I am working on. I don’t need to support full sized production environments, such small base environments to operate against. For example one of my first projects will be setting up a XenApp server to develop some scripts against.

The obvious choice for the environment is for it to go virtual. I had toyed with the idea of using XenServer for my hypervisor since that is what I work with at work, but honestly having to pay for the memory optimization took it out of consideration. Memory is probably going to be the limiting factor in my environment. Thin Provisioning for local disks was another huge factor in my decision.

So now it was on to the hardware. I thought about buying a premade system, but decided I could get more bang for my buck by building my own and honestly a whole lot more fun.  It started with the case and power supply which I found on NewEgg on sale. The rest of the components I purchased from Micro Center.  It was the 4th of July and once I got started I didn’t want to have to wait to get building.

I overlooked the NIC card and realized after building it that the onboard NIC card wasn’t supported by ESXi so I ordered one from NewEgg and completed my system.

Currently I have a DC/DNS/DHCP server, a SQL server, a WSUS server, and a file server which serves as my lab infrastructure.

If you are interested here is the list of components in my Lab server and pictures from the building.

I am a follower, or rather, I attempt to follow the GTD Methodology. The method is based on the principle that you need to take all the tasks that are floating around in your mind and record them in an external system. That way, your mind is free from the job of remembering everything that needs to be done. No more of the “I know I needed to do something, but I can’t remember what it was.”

Originally I was using Remember the Milk (RTM) to track all of my tasks. It is a great website and they have clients for everything. But there were a few things that I didn’t like. RTM didn’t support task statuses and the font used in the iPhone application was huge. Now that may not sound like a big deal, but when you are trying to go through your task list and can only see 5 or so tasks on one screen you have to do a lot of scrolling.

I did some searching and settled on a site called ToodleDo. Its a great site and has lots of features. I won’t go into them, but please take a look and see for yourself. After I got it all set up with all of my personalized folders and tags and other such settings I realized that they didn’t have any  PowerShell interfaces. They have plenty of other connections listed on their site including a couple of .NET libraries.

I almost always has a PowerShell window open on whatever computer I am on at the time so I thought a PowerShell module would be perfect. Especially since a lot of my tasks are related to PowerShell. And I wanted the experience and practice of creating a “production class’” modules that others would benefit from.

I started on this module and have been working on it for a couple of months off and on. When I got finished with the function to add a task to the system I decided it was ready enough for others to start looking at it and created a CodePlex project.

I am affectionately calling it “ToodlePosh” (I couldn’t come up with a better name) and it is located at http://toodleposh.codeplex.com/. Please feel free to take a look at it and play with it.