Who am i
Everything you want to know about Brandon Anspach
Hello World! My name is Brandon Anspach. I wanted to take some time to show you who I really am and hopefully show you why you want me as a part of your team. Below I have several sections for you to browse at your leisure so you can skim and get to the bits YOU want to hear about!
After all, at the end of the day we are all unique individuals and we want to not only enjoy our professions. But we want to enjoy the people we spend a majority of our time with as well. I hope there is something that interests you here and I cant wait to hear from you and get the pleasure of meeting you and your team!
Home-Lab
Welcome to my home-lab. This started out as a much smaller dream and has evolved into so much more than I thought it ever would and it keeps growing with me. This is where I spend a good portion of my free time learning new skills or tinkering with anything new and exciting that I may find.
Let me take you on a tour of what I have and What services I am running:
- Dell PowerEdge R730 Server running VMware which currently hosts 4 VMs. Details below:
- VM 1 is my first domain controller running on windows server 2016.
- VM 2 is a Linux server I am using to setup a service called pterodactyl which will be able to host game servers for me and allow me to give access to friends without giving them direct access to the server itself.
- VM3 is currently hosting a Ark game server cluster for my friends.
- VM4 is used to run my security camera software so that it will save all of the footage to the file share.
- Dell Poweredge R510 which is running Windows server 2016 and is my backup domain controller as well as where I have my local file shares setup in a RAID 5.
- Dell PowerEdge R810 which is not setup yet as I just received it but I will be running VMware on this one as well.
- Cisco 2911 router which I currently am setting up so that I can seperate my home, domain, and guest networks using VLANs.
- 2x Cisco 2960 switches that will be supporting the VLANs.
- Netgear gigabit switch that is being used until the VLANs are setup and as a backup should something go wrong.
- a Belkin 16 port KVM switch to swap the display between any servers or other computers I my be running.
- 2 Cisco ASA devices which are currently not being used but I will be tinkering with just so I can learn how to in case I have a use for them.
I cannot tell you how happy I am to have a home-lab like this that I can use to further improve myself every day. The fact that I can configure things from scratch so that I know WHY they are set a specific way is extremely helpful to me. I have a lot of projects that I cannot wait to get to such as home automation, docker container projects, and other services I have found that I just wanted to try out.
Testimonials
I've been working with Brandon Anspach at Virginia Tile for nearly 2.5 years. It was my pleasure to work with him as he consistently meets and often even exceeds his job requirements.
Brandon is and enthusiastic, dedicated employee with reliable work habits. He often does not need guidance or supervision, but willingly accepts it when offered. He is consistently successful in improving his skills, and he works hard to do so.
Brandon is always willing to pitch in to help the team, and he gets the job done right the first time. He efficient in planning projects, punctual in meeting deadlines, and conscientiously adheres to company standards and guidelines.
You'd be hard pressed to find an employee more dedicated than Brandon and I recommend him as a rock-solid addition to your team. If you'd like to know more information, please feel free to reach out via email and/or phone.
Brian Schwartz, Infrastructure Manager,
Virginia Tile Company
Please accept this letter as a recommendation for Brandon Anspach. I was the CIO at Virginia Tile when Brandon was originally hired in December 2019 as an intern on the Help Desk, and then shortly thereafter was promoted to a full Help Desk Technician, until his layoff due to lack of work in August 2022.
I can attest to Brandon’s desire to get the right result for the customer and the company. He is a great listener who is genuinely concerned about the customer’s situation and was tenacious about finding a solution for every person who he assisted. He was not shy about getting guidance from management, and often did additional research about an issue in his off hours, as he consistently worked to improve himself. Brandon would also be willing to put in extra hours to make sure that assigned projects were completed properly.
I highly recommend Brandon Anspach, and I am more than willing to answer any further questions you may have.
Ann Vullo, Chief Information Officer,
Virginia Tile Company
How do I spend my freetime?
I have a wide variety of things that I am constantly doing. I feel the need to always keep my mind engaged at all times. If I cant be challenging myself in some way then I start looking to create a new challenge. This is where my Home-lab initially began, but I already covered enough on that!
Going to the gym
Before Covid I was almost religious about my gym habits. I was working out every day after work and on Saturdays I would go with friends to either help them out or work on something I felt I just didn’t get to hit that well that week. When Covid I fell off that habit because the gyms were closed. Now I am starting to rebuild that habit and cant wait to get back into the shape I was in before!
Gaming
I’m sure you would never expect that my drive to be the absolute best at everything I do would have originated from this hobby. But for me, video games really was the first thing that really pushed me to want to be the best. And now it is one of my favorite things about myself. I used to Play World of Warcraft a ton in my teen years and got to the second best player in the world on a specific boss fight for a short time. And that’s not the only time that I have gotten to that level of gameplay in a game. another example of this is more recently getting to the top 1% of players in ARAM on League of Legends.
Hunting
I am a hunter as well. This has really helped me with my ADHD over the years as it requires you to sit in one place and not move for hours at a time. Which is not easy when it is extremely cold and snow is building up on your clothes. It has actually become one of my favorite times of the year and a really great way for me to reset from my daily life. I have never missed an opening day of gun season with my dad and I started going with him when I was 13.
Cooking
I love to try cooking new things! My personal favorite styles of cooking to learn are anything on the grill or smoker, and I love trying Asian cooking techniques. This is great to combine with my gym habits as well because this is 70% of the results when it comes to keeping a healthy weight for myself.
Dog Training
Dog training is actually the thing I originally wanted to make a career for myself in. I have trained a few friends dogs to do a specific action or to stop doing something to me in under an hour multiple times now. I have a real passion for dogs and wanted to train service dogs for the blind. However I could not afford to do the volunteer work for the amount of time required without seeing a real paycheck to get into this field so I went to my second passion. Technology!
Pets
Future Projects
My plan for this section is simple. Keep an ever growing list of things I would like to learn, as well as giving you a window into my future projects you will see on this site! With that in mind what you see now is only the beginning and I hope you stick around enjoy all of these opportunities with me!
Heimdall is an application dashboard for your home-lab so that you can keep tabs on all of your services running. It is extremely customizable and looks amazing! It will definitely be a later project because I want to learn all of the systems involved with running this dashboard before setting it up. But I am excited either way!
Here is a link to where I first encountered it and how to set it up:
Guacamole is a remote access gateway application that will allow you to access your VMs from anywhere. You simply log into the site online and manage all of your services right there.
Here is a link to the video I was watching about it.
Originally I wanted to host this site from my own servers from the get go. However I felt I needed to get this up and running faster that I initially planned for so I am hosting this with someone else for now. I want to learn everything I need to know about hosting sites like this and all of the security configurations before I actually go through with it. But eventually this site will be hosted on my own servers in my home!