gatherer:~#

//Post 2: ESXi Home Server//

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21.11.04
ESXi, pfSense, Debian

Ahoy!

Today I'm going to tell a little story about the time I got pwnd. It's part of why we're here where we are today, reading/writing this blog! Taking things back to the long gone days of February 2020, I shuffled together my old PC parts leftover from the last upgrade, stuffed them into a spare case, hooked it up to my home router, and started installing Debian on it.

I'm making a web server 😎

This worked well for all of about 2 weeks. After this point I started having problems accessing various websites, including my college website. It was only later in the year when I returned to college classes after the summer that I looked to investigate the issue. After consulting with my ISP they informed me that I'd been firing out attacks from my IP for several months and so was blacklisted. Well well well. I've been pwnd!

Bringing it up with my lecturer, he suggested I secure the server behind a firewall. Which he suggested I virtualise. Which introduced me to ESXi. I didn't know it at the time, but this was going to change everything. As it turns out, we were to have a whole unit on Private Cloud Virtualisation that year, so I suspect he had an agenda...