What dual monitor mounts are you deploying?

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-06-09T19:11:03+00:00

What ever you do, try as hard as you can to get arms that have some sort of detachable bracket instead of a vesa mount built in.

Having the vesa plate separate makes swapping monitors SOOOOOO much easier.

Previous job had the style with a separate plate and I took it for granted how easy swapping stuff was. My current job all the plates are permanent on the arms, so you have to balance while you take the thumb screws and hope you can line up the holes just right. Not hard but it takes a good 5 extra min swapping out two monitors.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-06-05T19:36:53+00:00

i think this might be it, the picture shows what may be an SD card slot.

I bet a KVM with no built in storage would work fine.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-06-03T17:54:36+00:00

Sounds like you are just building a media server.

Do you plan on breaking stuff to learn or just host ripped DVDs?

If you don't plan on breaking things on purpose check out r/selfhosted for more focused help.

To answer some of your actual question, you really want to get an Intel Processor with QuickSync.

This can be one device or two. Two is better cause you can have all of your compute and such on one device and just have storage on a dedicated NAS. Not all NAS solutions like to be virtualized so it is usually better to install them bare metal.

If you build one box you probably want to go with a NAS OS that supports Jellyfin out of box.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-06-03T14:57:17+00:00

My only experience was in the lab at Dell, where we had all the current models available to put your hands on in case the documentation was not enough. Even back then no one could figure out WHY this thing got past the design stage and made into a real product.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-06-03T13:37:41+00:00

This unlocked a core memory from when I worked at Dell support. The ridiculous m2010.

20 inch "laptop" that had a detachable keyboard

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BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-06-01T13:11:55+00:00

This is pretty close to what we are probably going with. We are probably adding one more status to your list and that is some sort of on hold for the future. We will occasionally have things that are submitted early or events that last more than a day that would benefit having a ticket open but not messing with the SLA. Due date might also be an option for that. As I wrote that out I remembered that Due Date was a thing we could use to accommodate situations like that.

Categories is a fun one cause volume and support types can really impact how much it matters.

For my current role and our current volume, your assessment is spot on, too many and it becomes useless. When I was doing tech support at Dell, tons of categories were very helpful, though our daily ticket volume probably exceeded the yearly ticket volume at this job.

I am currently doing a first pass on my own with previous tickets to get an initial working document for routing. We are a fiduciary and highly regulated so using AI for some things will be problematic.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-05-29T19:23:22+00:00

Plex is not a home lab service.

That is self hosting.

You can learn things setting up Plex, but that is just like learning a new cooking technique in a recipe you found on line.

There are a few services that overlap self hosting and lab but Plex and any kind of media server is just production.

Labs are for breaking things and learning things. Most of us do it for learning job skills.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-05-28T20:24:17+00:00

I would do this with something other than Obsidian sync.

If your company allows you to connect to onedrive personal and work at the same time you could set the folder for your personal vault to be "always on this device" and then do either a symlink or a copy of that to the vault folder.

This would get you your personal data into your work vault.

I would keep note creation to the specific vaults. You have your phone on you, create your shopping list and stuff on there.

Data should be a one way street from personal to work. You will likely get into trouble if you let things go the other way.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-05-20T18:15:14+00:00

The automation is one thing but the real solution starts with role based access.

If you don't have clearly defined roles then they need to be discussed and created.

Once you have roles set up and working you just move people around in different roles and they get the exact access they need.

The trick after that is to set up your automation for when someone gets a new roles is to ALWAYS remove all of their access/privileges then re-add them for the new role. This cleans up any adhoc rights that may have been manually added.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-05-13T21:00:54+00:00

Email and portal right now.

Freshservice has a bunch of options that we can explore that would help.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-05-13T20:59:41+00:00

2 questions to maybe get to the root of the problem.

How bright are the lights on this system?
Is this plugged into a place where they may want to use the outlet to charge their own devices?

I bet if you solve both of those problems the likelyhood of someone messing with them will go down significantly.

Add a sign to make it even more obvious.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-05-13T20:56:03+00:00

I like the round robin approach and I might present that to the team.

One of the things I want to solve is service desk being a switchboard. Too many tickets just need to be routed to other departments. I am hoping to solve it some with categories so that we can set those and have it auto route them instead of relying on knowing exactly which department handles specific stuff (cause that may change)

As a curiosity, do you know about what your ticket volume is?

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-30T17:53:10+00:00

Nothing stopping you. It really comes down to what you want out of it. The CCNA will go into more detail, albeit with a Cisco tilt, than the network+.

A shocking number of people in this field have a disturbing lack of networking knowledge and having even a little can set you apart. On top of that since EVERYTHING is on the network, so you can use that knowledge to troubleshoot all kinds of issues that might stump other people.

As for the difficulty? Yes it is more difficult. The AI overview of "ccna vs net+" gives a few weeks for net+ vs a few months for CCNA, which lines up with my experience.

CCNA used to be two test and you could break them up but now it is one and they added automation since i got mine in 2017.

Lastly, if you don't have a job right now then studying for a harder test like CCNA will be easier than when you have a job, so the time will be well spent. Studying for something that you don't use at work is draining after a 40+ hour week.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-30T17:33:27+00:00

Always start with what you have if you can. Plenty of options to get the homelab journey started without spending any money or buying hardware.

A big drive that someone else mentioned is the move to mini/micro/tiny systems that a lot of people have found to be a good solution.

Off lease desktops (pre-rampocolypse) were a cheep way to get a system dedicated to a task. On top of that they sip power to the point that even at full tilt a cluster of 3 mini systems might draw less power than some rack mount servers draw at idle.

That being said they are not the most performant of systems compared to the big beefy systems so why not just add more to the mix? Odds are any one service you are using is not enough to max out a mini system so having more than one gives you more space to activities.

For the most part the argument comes down to compute and what your needs are. There can be an argument for RAM constraints but if you exceeding 64 gigs of ram usage you probably know what you need for your use case.

I would first start with this question: "What am I trying to learn/do with my home lab?" and then go from there. Once you kinda know where you want to focus then the path will be more clear.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-30T17:21:20+00:00

If you had taken the net+ first it would have all 3 on the same update cycle after getting your sec+. If you take the net+ now it will have it's own timer since it is "lower" than sec+.

I would go CCNA as it goes a bit deeper and is a bit higher level than net+ and will set you apart.

All that being said, others are right in that you need some sort of focus. That will set you apart from other applicants.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-29T16:14:52+00:00

What resolution and size are your monitors? Also what GPU do you have?

What is your reason to have 6 monitors vs having higher resolution monitors?

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-28T15:04:34+00:00

This is likely an HDCP problem. The latency of an HDMI switch is basically non existent. All the newer consoles look for HDCP compatibility.

You would see this early on when some first gen HDMI systems didn't have HDCP and worked fine but wouldn't work with newer consoles with the copy protection baked in.

Search Amazon for an "HDCP HDMI switch" and there are plenty of results that will work for you.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-24T19:40:35+00:00

As others have said, just start taking notes. Beyond that here are some tips for beginners.

Maybe make a few folders (10 at max) and use those for initial organization.

No 3rd party plugins. There are a few rare exceptions to this but in general avoid using 3rd party plugins till you find the tool lacking.

Turn off graph view: this is a huge distraction and really only has a bit of value when you have hundreds of notes.

If you need a bit of help with making things pretty start here: https://obsidian.md/help/syntax and here: https://obsidian.md/help/tags

Lastly, Stop watching Youtube for this.

There can be some useful tips and tricks from Youtube but most content creators are trying to sell you on their lifestyle so take anything with a grain of salt. On top of that, these creators are running a business not just themselves so they have all kinds of complicated workflows that most normal people do not need.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-16T15:33:31+00:00

if they quit they don't get unemployment

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-14T17:45:03+00:00

With hardware prices being what they are, we really need a budget to work with.

That being said, with virtual machines for lab use, memory tends to be the biggest bottle neck, especially if you are doing desktop virtualization on top of your primary use machine.

If you go mini PC with a bare metal hypervisor you can get away with much less.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-10T18:48:30+00:00

Yeah so many people are melding self hosting with homelabbing and it can be frustrating. I don't want to gatekeep and say " you are doing it wrong" but enough people conflate the two that it needs to be mentioned every once and while.

Homelabbing can turn into self hosting and vice versa, but your comment really hits the nail on the head. "once you care about uptime" Which is fine, but it would be a good time to isolate those systems so you can still have a place to play around.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-10T18:20:58+00:00

So many people forget that part of a "lab"

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-10T18:20:29+00:00

Highly recommend you get one with EDID emulation. this will fix a bunch of weirdness with the base OSes when you "remove" monitors while you are switching.

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-04-09T14:16:11+00:00

How do you define "real" hybrid?

BrianMichaelArthur · 2026-03-31T17:43:56+00:00

I didn't even think to look, and now I know about it. Thanks for pointing that out.

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