My name is Isaac Towns

Or if you prefer, my online alias Zelec. I’m a Canadian born in 1998, for most of my life I’ve been interested in computers.

Mostly due to videogames, It was my dream for the longest time to become a Video Game Developer. However I’m not a real creative type, so I never really knew what I wanted to do or create when it came to my own game. I had more fun setting up multiplayer servers for myself and my friends to play on vs coding or creating art.

Early Life

Both of my parents are in the IT Field, so there was no shortage on computers in the house to tinker with. Back in late 2010 when I was in Grade 7 I was still rocking Windows XP. At that point Windows 7 was out for a year or so and my XP machine was starting to slow down.

Rather than asking my Dad to fix the machine as I would have normally done, I asked for his Windows 7 install disk so I could try installing Windows 7 on my machine all on my own.

A really simple thing to do for most people that know their way around a BSOD, but after that experience I realized I had alot of fun tinkering with my dusty Pentium 4.

With that initial experience I started to experiment more with the spare machines in the house. At one point I had acquired an HP Proliant server that was going to be recycled that I then setup as my desktop. Oh boy was that noisy, but a fun machine to dip my hands into enterprise concepts like RAID.

Highschool

In Highschool I started to get into Virtualization and Linux. Mainly because of Kali Linux’s predecessor Backtrack, specifically Backtrack 5 R3.

Trying to be the “cool” kid by knowing how to “hack” is what got me into the linux community and the took me down the path I’m on today.

At first I tried setting up Backtrack in a Virtualbox VM, I wanted to crack the wifi password at my house if I recall correctly, This was back when data caps were still a thing on most internet plans in Canada.

My siblings and I would routinely bust over that cap a 3-4 times in a year and cause my parents to stress about internet cap overages. Due to this my Mom had changed the password on the wifi network, beefed up the network by replacing our consumer networking gear with some recycled enterprise gear, and installing monitoring software on all the PC’s in the house (It didn’t grab what we were looking at, or the data from the packets, it just kept track of what computers might have been going nuts with their internet downloads, or if anyone was potentially infected with a computer virus, but I digress).

So being a kid that was told you can’t know the wifi password anymore sorta incentivize me to try and find other ways to find out the password. After some frustrations with the tools, I realized I couldn’t share my wifi-card with the Linux VM I had created (PCI-e wifi cards weren’t sharable). So I tried the dual-boot option that was listed on the website.

After I started to use it more, I noticed how speedy and snappy Linux was (In the VM it felt about onpar or slightly faster than Windows 7 normally but not by much, Bare-Metal however felt like lightning in comparison) and I really liked it. Eventually I realized running a Penetration Distribution as a daily driver OS was silly, and opted for Ubuntu 12.10 Gnome Remix.

From there I got involved with Cluenet, and IRC group that focused on Tech & earning “Clue” points for correct english spelling (An incentive to combat the wave of early 2010 abbreviation & sentence shortening.)

After that I got into watching Spatry’s Cup of Linux and joined their Forum. After about half a year a Mumble server was started by Spatry for the community. (If you really want to hear 15 year old me talking on the Cup of Linux Lounge show, I can’t stop you. Just know I knew nothing about proper audio setup back then.)

College

After highschool I went to College for Information Technologies and I’ve been working as a Helpdesk Technician since.

I do more than just Helpdesk where I’m at (We do Business IT and Website Design), I manage the Linux systems we have for web hosting. But Helpdesk is my primary role.

Recently we have been working towards moving from our traditional deploy method to a DevOps one.

So I thought while learning how to use Docker with Gitlab-CI, it would be a good idea to try out Gitlab Pages and record my findings here.

Setup and Specs

There is going to be one guy out there that probably wants to know my computer setup.

Well, I actually have about 2 personal machines I swap between frequently.

T470p

• CPU: i7-7820HQ
• RAM: 32GB DDR4 2400Mhz
• Primary Storage: 1TB M.2 NVMe SSD
• Secondary Storage: 500 GB mSATA SSD
• Screen: 1080p

My old T440p was starting to show it’s age, so while I still have it around as a backup unit should I need it, I decided back in early 2023 to get one of the last models of Thinkpad to still have the dock connector on the bottom.

Originally I meant to get a standard T470 so it would have USB-C and the dock connector on the bottom, but I found this T470p on a good deal.

Thankfully since USB-C supports 100W charging affordably now, and there are USB-C to Thinkpad slimline adapters that allow 100W charging, I can pack a single 100W USB-C PD brick to charge most of the devices I carry with me now.

Custom Personal Rig

• CPU: Ryzen 9 3950x
• RAM: 64GB DDR4 3200Mhz
• Motherboard: Asrock x570 Taichi
• Storage:
  • 2x 1TB WD Blue M.2 SSD’s in RAID 1 for Boot Volumes
  • 1x 1TB WD Black M.2 SSD for Windows VM
  • 1x 500GB SATA III SSD
  • 2x 4TB 5400RPM HDD in RAID 1=
• GPU: AMD RX 580 8GB (Main)
• GPU: GeForce GTX 1060 6GB (VM Card)

This machine I built in early 2021, it’s quite the monster. Right now this machine is my remote gaming rig (Using Sunshine and Moonlight in a Windows VM) & VM Host for homelabbing.