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 done so earlier Services like Transmission and PlexPy have been staples on my home server for years. Since the beginning, they were…
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 world of SOHO NAS devices, most people would solidly recommend Synology. Arguably, the software is second to none, but then again so…
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 I decided I wanted to move away from ESXi. My VMUG renewal is coming up, I wasn’t very happy with the bloated…
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 replace a handful of very expensive Nimble storage units in the near future. The first step was to get Proxmox installed and…
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 is a virtualization platform by Citrix that adds VMWare-ish capabilities to the otherwise fairly bare hypervisor Xen. Xen is probably one of the most…
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 in my home network, it was time to replace my firewall and router that was running pfSense. My trusty SYS-E200-9B that ran…
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 all my aging production hardware as cheaply, but efficiently as possible. This encompasses a few Nimble SANs and a stack of Dell servers,…
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 the DC->DC power supply I was using. Simple fix right? Just install the original power supply. I wasn’t entirely happy with the…
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 whitebox finally arrived. As soon as the parts were delivered, I went to work. I pulled the original power supply and installed…
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 pre-built one from a company like Apple or Dell. To whitebox a computer means to buy the parts like the CPU, motherboard,…