Be Prepared

There is a lesson all Boy Scouts are taught very early on: “Be Prepared”.

Often the lessons we are taught by our parents and teachers are often ignored or forgotten over time, until the day we learn the hard way. We go about life learning and discarding information we deem incorrect or unimportant. We each develop our own values and ideas and that is a good thing, as it fuels both our own personal growth in addition to fueling the further evolution of society. With all that being said, currently I am the person that is learning the hard way that some lessons are timeless and should be heeded.

I recently graduated from college and had to move back home. For most people this poses little to no problem, but for me I needed to find a place to keep my homelab. That ended up resting with me in my room, as I didn’t prepare ahead of time to have a prepared place to set it up. That isn’t the problem I am dealing with today, and was solved with some clever arrangement of furniture (as my sever is quieter than most common air conditioners). My issue is one that I could of prepared for but decided that it was unlikely at best and I would be perfectly fine ignoring, backup or redundant internet connections.

For the longest time my homelab was blessed to be running off the admittedly overkill internet connection at my university. They paid for high speed internet connections from two separate providers in case one ever was down. I never noticed a time when there were outages as they often switched over with little fanfare. The only time I can recall ever learning about this was when there was a major outage and they had trouble switching over some access points for the student dorms. Regardless redundancy in a setup that multiple people use should be a given.

That leads me to my current issue. Through a combination of trying to save money until I find employment and lack of planning, I have been relying my my father’s internet at the house I am currently staying at. Our ISP has, over the past month alone, had at least 2 outages lasting hours if not days, with even more over the course of my stay here. I cannot afford to set up a secondary connection, so at the moment I have to live without.

Remember folks, even if you think something is unlikely, always do your best to “Be Prepared”.