Lab director

Personnel file

Trained electronics technician (microelectronics), at home with technology for more than 15 years and a self-confessed tech nerd: new tools, new gadgets, new software. Some of it is funny, some of it makes life easier, and some of it exists only because it can. At work and at home it is about the same things: Linux servers, build pipelines and anything that can be automated, so it stops calling at night.

How it all began

• Aged sevenThe first PC, built by himself together with his father, who has always run his own PC and software company. They have been soldering and programming ever since. An early work: a Tupperware box with a telephone rotary dial as a combination lock. Dial the right number and a motor unlocks the lid.
• Flea marketThe first computer of his own: an old Commodore PC with Windows 3.0, Paint and floppy disks that felt as big as plates.
• After thatGraphics cards, games, the internet, MSN and ICQ. Flight simulators with a joystick and every accessory. And modded PC cases with lights and home-made panels that green LEDs shone through.
• SchoolA technical college with boarding school, and the realisation: pure theory is not for him. So an apprenticeship as a microelectronics technician. Learning to build hardware there and to program at home, so that in the end everything can be built by hand.
• Flat in ViennaShared with his best friend. The PC got a home-made combination lock with a relay that really cut the 230 volts. Just because it could be done. Plus custom controllers and circuit boards for LED strips. And the old nirus.at: a mammoth project over many years, a social network by day and a browser game with werewolves and vampires by night.

How the facility began

In Pressbaum the PC was hooked up to the TV through a ten-metre HDMI cable and a USB hub, with a hole drilled right through the wall. Then his wife bought him a WD media box, an external hard drive and the cables with her first holiday money. And it worked. That was the official start of the lab, around 2016.

The move to Eisenstadt brought a house of their own, and in it a basement of almost 50 square metres just for the facility. Cat 6A cable everywhere, a server cabinet with switch, patch panel and router, three Wi-Fi access points on a PoE switch. A year later the NAS arrived: storage, Docker, virtual machines around the clock. Then a 10-gigabit network and a router of his own. When the NAS ran out of memory, Raspberry Pis joined for testing. The tests became production systems. Yes, not ideal.

In between, new projects all the time. The door: four versions, about three years of development, three times the price of a bought solution, and it works, but it is still being developed further. The mirror: spotted in a YouTube video, followed by the thought: cool, that is the next project. Time from the sky, because GPS time was always cool, after a year of building.

Next on the plan was a rack of its own under the stairs and one big server for everything. Then the AI boom sent memory and hard drive prices through the roof, and the plan was dead. Beggars can’t be choosers: the old gaming laptop became the Proxmox node until prices come down again. The same AI, on the other hand, helps finish projects in weeks that would otherwise have taken months. This site, for example, since the old one had not been updated since 2018.

Today more than 25 containers and virtual machines run here on a NAS, a laptop and six Raspberry Pis, linked by a 10-gigabit network with separate zones. If the fibre fails, Starlink takes over. Everything is written down well enough to rebuild it after a total loss.

The lab director’s office

The same basement, photographed all the way round twice: in 2017, shortly after moving in, and in 2026 with a workbench, shelves and a lot more cables. Look around with the mouse or a finger.

Ryzom, since 2004

• 2004His father found the demo CD for the open beta of Ryzom in a games magazine, installed it himself and showed it to him with the words: “Look, you can make your character’s breasts bigger.” The rest is history.
• ToolsThe first program for Ryzom: ryzom-bosses.com, still in use and maintained today. Then a map on which teams can draw together and swap markers with the game.
• The RingBuilding his own worlds and scenarios with the Ring editor. That turned into the wish to design levels.
• ApplyingThe first application was turned down. A year or two later came the second, and a place in the event team. A week later he was nearly thrown out again: too curious, too quick, rules broken.
• ARKProgramming suited him better than playing events. He wrote almost all the scripts in the event system ARK and became head of the ARK team: Christmas, Halloween, Easter, Summer Games, plus internal tools such as a teleport interface.
• TodayIn Winch Gate’s internal team, officially a developer: core developer and system administrator, with server and client in C/C++, builds for Linux, Windows and macOS, and live events. More in test chamber 09.

Lab rules

1. 01
   Self-hosted. My data, my responsibility. Calendar and contacts? Nextcloud does that too.
2. 02
   Open instead of subscriptions. The big companies keep getting greedier: higher prices, fewer features, and what you have used for years suddenly costs 20 euros a month. Pay or leave. Here, people leave, for open software.
3. 03
   Linux. For almost a year the workstation has been running CachyOS. Windows only sits on another drive for emergencies and has not been used since. Ryzom tools that do not run on Linux simply get rewritten.
4. 04
   Home-built. It cannot compete with a company of a hundred people, and it does not have to: it works, and it is home-built. DIY rather than perfect. And if 1000 euros and four years go into it? You have to do something with your free time.
5. 05
   Curiosity. It often starts with a YouTube video. I know that problem, there is a solution for it, and it is even open source.

Lab staff

The facility also includes his wife, five cats and a dog. Every now and then abandoned kittens move in as foster children until they find a home. When there is time, there is a trip once a year, preferably back to Japan. Add anime and manga, old and new, and a growing collection of figures.

Outside the lab

• Nirus LANOrganised four LAN parties with up to 48 players, including sign-up and game servers. The very first one already had sponsors. What is left of them is in the archive.
• AniManga AustriaHead of the Gold Area (VIP) since 2024.
• Repair CaféVolunteer: fixing everyday things, from bicycles to laptops.

Toolbox

• SystemsLinux (CachyOS, Debian, Ubuntu), Proxmox, Docker
• NetworkUniFi, VLANs, own DNS, Caddy, WireGuard
• CodePython, Bash, PHP, Lua, C/C++, SQL
• WorkflowGitLab CI, documentation as code (Typst)
• HardwareElectronics, Raspberry Pi, 3D printing

Contact

By email to office@nirus.at. The code of the projects is open on GitLab.