Since I've been born I've been interested in computers from playing games and finding fixes for glitches in their software, in 2016 I got my first pc for Christmas, it was a prebuilt as I didn't have much pc building experience, after about I year I had gained enough knowledge to know what parts fit what so I bought all the parts to build another computer and brought them into a shop to build it as I just didn't feel confident especially with the cost of all the parts, after it was built I kept upgrading it myself, I changed the CPU cooler from a hyper 212 to a corsair h110i all in one cooler, I also added a vertical GPU mount which was hard because I had to cut the pc case, the last upgrade I did on my pc was at the end of 2017, in April of 2023 my friend was telling me that he had a motherboard and CPU that he didn't use and offered to sell it to me for a good price, after I bought it and seen the increase in performance this flipped a switch and I wanted to upgrade my pc, I went a little overkill for my needs but now my pc will last me for another 5 years, I bought a new motherboard, CPU, GPU and more ram, I did all these upgrades myself as I'm a lot more confident in working with pcs than I was when I done my first big upgrade, I upgraded the motherboard to a MSI B570S tomahawk and the CPU to a Ryzen 7 5800x, then because i had more ram slots I more trident z royal ram now I have 32gb, then for the GPU I bought an RTX 4070 ventus 3x

After a few years of playing games I realized I should have an ethernet plugging my computer into the router, after I done It i then  wanted everything in my room plugged in by ethernet so I bought some very basic switches and plugged everything in this is what sparked my interest in networking

For some reason about a year ago YouTube recommended me a YouTube video of a youtuber called TechnoTim showing his servers and what he runs on them, this got me addicted to watching videos about servers or homelabs, I started looking on facebook for servers and bought a cheap dell server, I ran proxmox on this server and had a few vms on it, but it was very old and quickly became too slow

After seeing all these youtubers with big servers with hundreds of gigabytes of ram and hundreds of cores, I jumped in on the deep end and bought a Dell R710 this was a big decision but I was really interested in them, by this time I had a very basic network so I bought bigger switches, started making my own ethernet cables and doing a bit more cable management, I also wanted a data cabinet so I could keep all my network equipment all in one place, I started looking at selling pages on Facebook and found a data cabinet it was up for £40 pound which was really good, once I got there I noticed it had switches and cables coming out the back which came with it, this was amazing, it came with switches patch panels and more