Hello World! I am currently working on my homelab environment. Right now that involves making a default NixOS config from which I’ll base all my virtual machines.

Featured Blog Post:

---

title: baud rate date: 2026-04-01 04:56:25 layout: post —

Last year I bought a Cisco Catalyst 2960X switch from the MIT tech swapfest (really fun flea market hosted in a parking garage by the MIT radio club). That was in anticipation for setting up a homelab after I moved into my own apartment. After about a year of disuse I finally got to tinker with the switch now that I’ve used all the ethernet ports on my router.

Getting the switch operational was a bit of an undertaking. The catalyst is almost 10 years old, and its security definitely reflects that (Telnet support, TLS 1.0 on the web portal, RSA+SHA1 SSH cipher suites). Cisco offers updates on their website and I naively thought that upgrading would fix all my security issues. After updating, I found that none of the aforementioned issues were fixed. Most switches, this one included, use Broadcom integrated circuits which come with licensing fees that open source communities can’t pay. This means that flashing custom firmware onto the switch is out of the question. This was a bit disappointing.

Regardless, I got what I wanted out of this project. I configured my VLANs over the serial console port and was able to separate the LAN from my public facing virtual machines. Seeing the text appear in my terminal one character at a time from the serial connection was a funny experience I haven’t had before. It’s a stellar visual effect I’d like to use somewhere else.

I ended up reverting to a small unmanaged switch in the end. It suits my current needs much better. I like the reduced complexity and my wallet could use the break from another nasty electricity bill. Right now, the catalyst serves as a rack shelf and hold up a compact office PC.

---