ZFS Building a ZFS on Linux Fileserver After my recent migration back to ZFS on Linux, I decided to roll my own GUI for server reporting/management. Unfortunately, as referenced in the above linked post, I recently picked up some
ZFS The ZFS walk-of-shame with Seagate and OmniOS CE. This is a bit of a long one, so I’ll put this first. The TL;DR Opinion #1: OmniOS and Napp-IT are nice, but there’s a good chance it’s not
RouterOS RouterOS and Switching, finally managed I think anybody that's ever used a Mikrotik and RouterOS can probably agree. That tiny company from Latvia does things a bit... different. Since October of 2017, I've been fighting with RouterOS and
ZFS Building a Disk Tower, for all pain and no profit In my lab, more than anything, quiet and power-sipping are the two factors that matter most to me. That means most of my servers are towers instead of rack-mount gear. So when a
HomeLab Monitoring Home Power Consumption for less than $25 On almost a daily basis, I am bombarded with ads on Facebook for the Sense. This device allows you to monitor whole-home power consumption. I could probably find room for such a device
Fully embracing Docker For years, I've used a variety of services on my home server. Much of it revolved around managing media. Only recently have I adopted Docker, and now I wonder why I have not
ZFS Abusing the QNAP TS-831x with ZFS Lately for my business, I've been recommending the QNAP TS-831x to clients. As I have a few of them sitting around my lab now, I decided to abuse them a little. In the
Migrating the lab BACK to ESXi after a Proxmox Experiment A few months ago I migrated my home lab to Proxmox. After fighting with a few things, it's time to move back to ESXi. It must have been about two months ago that
nucnucnuc Proxmox and Ceph for the NucNucNuc In the latest incarnation of the NucNucNuc, I get Proxmox and Ceph installed The idea of Ceph is very attractive. Distributed storage eliminates a huge concern of mine, which is being forced to
pfsense VPN Routing and pfSense, piecemeal style While VPNs are nice for hiding your Internet browsing habits, they do have some downsides. They can introduce latency into your connections and when you have a Gigabit Fiber connection, they can severely
nucnucnuc The NucNucNuc gets XenServered In this post, I explore putting XenServer on these NUCs. While XenServer is firmly in the "traditional full-blown hypervisor" category, it would be a potential alternative to expensive VMWare licenses. XenServer
Completed the Xeon D Lab with a Router After my previous fun with assembling a server from scratch, you'd think I wouldn't be too excited to do it again. But I did it anyway... With only one non-Xeon D item remaining
nucnucnuc The NucNucNuc is born In the next year, I will be forced to replace about $200,000 of aging hardware due to end-of-life. I am not excited about this prospect. My mission in this is to replace
Whiteboxing a 1U - completing the rage With all the previous problems from this build, it's not surprising that this server continued to torment me. After researching and testing, I determined that my up-and-down power consumption problems were due to
HomeLab Whiteboxing a 1U - the rage continues Once the rest of my parts arrived, it's safe to say the problems, and the rage, continued to build. It took over a week, but the rest of the parts for this 1U
HomeLab Whiteboxing a 1U Much like dial, rewind, and hang up, a whitebox is a bit of an antiquated term that's still in use. It's a computer that someone has assembled from parts, instead of buying a
HomeLab Growing from Baby to Giant Once I decided to Frankenbox my SYS-E300-8D into a new form factor, the hunt was on. The central item of this build: Fractal Design R5 - I loved the modular design of this
A Baby File Server Evolves Over the years, it's safe to say my storage needs have evolved. What started off as a handful of Western Digital USB drives has evolved into a multiple multi-Terabyte ZFS arrays with numerous
mediaserver One Media Server to Rule Them All - Part 2 FreeNAS WOAH! It was around the time my head was exploding from carrying around USB hard drives that my brother introduced me to FreeNAS. MIND BLOWN All I could say at the time
SysAdmin De-virtualizing and migrating FreeNAS Since I began my HomeLab journey, I've virtualized and de-virtualized FreeNAS a few times. FreeNAS has backup and restore functionality, so it should be easy right? Where it was highly discouraged before, virtualized
HomeLab The HomeLab Mutation I would be lying if I said that when I got interested in something, I don't take it to the extreme. I've always had computers at home. And for at least the last
SysAdmin From media to Home Lab For years, I've been running a Media server, outlined here. Over time, it's evolved from a strict XBMC machine, to an Ubuntu server running Plex, sabnzbd, SickBeard, CouchPotato and more. I had some
mediaserver One Media Server to Rule Them All - Part 1 After The Burning, it's really not that difficult to understand why I wanted to take control of my media. I felt betrayed and stabbed in the back by my oldest and best friend.
mediaserver A #MovieMan I have always been a HUGE consumer of media. Even before Netflix, there was nothing better for me than spending a whole weekend vegging out and binge watching my favorite TV Shows. The
