Recently a close friend and I became fascinated with the rendering possibilities of self hosting AI.

I started researching self hosting AI-image-generator solutions and found Stability Matrix and ComfyUI.

These tools are really good at rendering high quality images.

You can download the models and use different models based on your use case.

With the simple workflow below, you must enter in a positive prompt for what you want and a negative prompt for what you don't want.

The other settings such as weight and denoise can be adjusted for how different you would like the output image to be.

Recently I wanted to expiriment more with Linux and wanted to build something as an engaging way to learn.

So far I have 4 debian Linux devices in the lab.

• 1 to be used as a RADIUS server so network devices must authenticate with it to sign in
• 1 to be used as a DNS server to resolve names of network devices
• 1 to be used as a DHCP server for address assignment for vPCs
• 1 Kali Linux device to test and verify services in the network.

I decided to begin building the GNS3 lab and then integrate services once the network is stable.

• The network has an HQ site connected to 2 branch sites.
• All sites are connected to each other via the ISP router
• Each site has a Cisco ASA firewall at the core, a Cisco IOSxe router, and a layer 3 switch.

The ISP router connects each site's firewall with eBGP - both IPv4 and IPv6,

• The firewall connects to the internal router with iBGP,
• and the routers connect to the internal switches with OSPF.
• Traffic is redistributed at each internal router.

Traffic is translated at the firewalls, and traffic is translated again at g0/3 on the ISP router.

• Interface g0/3 on the ISP router gives the whole network real internet.
• RFC 1918 traffic is filtered in eBGP.

The sites communicate with each other through a site-to-site IPSEC tunnel - aes256 encryption and sha256 hashing.

• Site to Site traffic is encrypted in eBGP.
• I still need to set up the servers in this lab and I need to set up more security in the lab.