Sophie HaskinsInterview
Site reliability engineer (GitHub)
Adapted from Sophie Haskins's interview on Uses This, published 14 September 2018. The kit is drawn from their answers and each reason is an excerpt, lightly edited. Shared under CC BY-SA 4.0. Read the full interview ↗
Is this you? Claim this kit →Hardware
the literal toolbox - I have an iFixit Pro Tech Toolkit that has been invaluable.
the SCSI2SD "hard drive" - most of my workstations were built with SCSI disks in mind.
a TP-LINK N300 mini wifi router in "client mode" lets me connect pizzaboxes directly to my home network without needing to run a really long cable all the way to my Ethernet switch.
a USB-Serial adapter - none of my modern computers have built-in serial ports, so I use one of these handy numbers.
an Epiphan DVI2USB framegrabber lets me take video & screenshots without needing OS support for it on the pizzaboxes (or before such support would be loaded).
an old 4:3 monitor (mine is an NEC 1770NX - the framegrabber has a little bit too much lag to be comfortable to use directly as a screen - its much nicer to use a VGA monitor with the right aspect ratio with broad compatibility (this one supports most sync-on-green signals I've sent it).
a 12U Tripp Lite Rack that sits in the corner of my living room.
a QNAP TS-231P NAS - real talk I don't have that much data to back up, but having a designated "network storage" box is super helpful.
Notes
Microsoft OneNote for taking notes, collating research, and tracking progress on projects.
Coding & Development
I'm Sophie Haskins - I post hot takes on Twitter Dot Com, restore vintage workstations at pizzabox.computer, am a pink hair enthusiast, and work as an SRE at GitHub.
If "home lab" stuff is more your speed, I also spend a decent amount of time maintaining my home network and Kubernetes cluster that serves my websites (overbuilt much?
Terra Term for a serial console.
I use the built-in KVM-based uvtool for creating and managing VMs.
Other
I could tell you about my unsurprising work-from-home desktop setup (the only "surprising" thing is that I use a Windows PC - I had built it for playing four EVE Online sessions at once, so it just happens to be the most responsive/fastest computer in the house), but I suspect you'd all be more interested in the hardware I use with the Pizzabox Workstations.
Xming for setting up a remote X session from my desktop to pizzaboxes (in situations where I can't use the local console.)
The Internet Archive for archived software, manuals, and websites of long-gone hardware.
dd (in various incarnations) for taking an image of working drives, putting data on to the SCSI2SD, and setting up floppy disks.
Ubuntu 18.04 for the base OS on my NUCs as well as for most of the VMs that run on it.
cert-manager for setting up certificates in an automated fashion.