Happy New Year!

For the new year I will be shifting to a bi-weekly posting schedule. This allows me to document larger milestones in detail rather than smaller, fragmented updates. This post covers a major hardware pivot, a full cluster rebuild, and my plans to turn this site into a more comprehensive digital portfolio.

The 10G Backbone: Arista and Ceph

I have officially moved the lab backbone to 10G. After acquiring an Arista DCS-7050S-64-R (48x 10GB SFP+), I installed Mellanox ConnectX-3 cards and DAC cables across my Proxmox nodes.

Reinstalling the cluster was necessary to properly configure the networking stack for this bandwidth. The impact on Ceph has been immediate: storage operations are significantly more responsive, and I no longer see the latency spikes that occurred on the 1G Juniper links during heavy I/O. This provides a stable foundation for NeuroStore, where I’ll be fine-tuning storage for AI Vector Databases.

The New Lab Environment (Cyber Range)

With the clean Proxmox install, I’ve deployed a structured set of VMs designed for both development and security research:

  • Infrastructure: Ubuntu-based services for core networking and SDN testing.
  • Security & Monitoring: Security Onion for network traffic analysis and Kali Linux for internal penetration testing.
  • Legacy/Exploit Testing: I’ve provisioned Windows XP and Windows 7 instances specifically to test legacy exploits and vulnerability research.
  • Enterprise: Windows Server 2022 and Windows 11 for modern environment simulation.

Tolteca Systems & Branding

I am officially transitioning all my coding projects to the Tolteca Systems brand. This shift moves away from Sanskrit and aligns with my own heritage. While the Tolteca Systems site will eventually be the “friendly” face for my products (like FluxGPU and Project Itzli), this blog will remain the primary technical repository for my progress.

Svatantrata.net Site Revisions

I have several plans to upgrade the functionality of this portfolio to make it a true “command center” for my work:

  1. Network Mappings: Interactive diagrams of my SDN/VXLAN setups and physical lab topology.
  2. Media Integration: A dedicated gallery for photos and videos. I plan to use my Canon VIXIA HF R80 to capture a “2000s era” aesthetic for my lab vlogs.
  3. Timeline of Work: A visual history of my technical progression, from my first server to my current AAS IT degree milestones.
  4. Live Project To-Do: A real-time tracker showing the development status of my 5-year project list (e.g., NetBridge, PatchGuard, Lazarus).

Integrating these features will help bridge the gap between my IT infrastructure work and my software development side. More will be added once the next semester begins.