Something I see pop up fairly regularly on a few of the forums, Discords, and subreddits that I hang out on is that the RB4011 is not capable of 10 gigabit routing Guess what? THAT’S WRONG I’d be lying if I said that this xkcd wasn’t me sometimes: Of course, whenever this pops up I’m…
Battle of the Virtual Routers
This is going to be a bit of a long post, so I’ll be brief in the intro. Over the last few years, I’ve become enamored with routing. As part of that, I’ve spent a lot of time exploring the various virtual routing platforms, trying to eek out the best performance possible. So I…
A New Switch for a New Day
I am constantly on the hunt for new switches. Between finding the right combination of power consumption, noise, and 10Gb, it seems like there is always something new on the horizon. In business, for years my go-to switch has been the Cisco 2960x. While I often hear “Nobody ever got fired for buying Cisco”, my…
Let’s Play with Routing – Part 1
In this series of posts, we’ll be working through building a routing lab-within-a-lab featuring VyOS. If you are unfamiliar with VyOS, you can read more about it here. Over the last few months, I’ve switched all the routing for my homelab to virtual VyOS instances. The main reason was to really get my hands dirty…
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 10TB Seagate drives that refuse to be stable in any ZFS array, except on Linux. It’s worth mentioning that running them on Linux…
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 worth the headache. There is absolutely little to zero support, and even with some Enterprise hardware that is potentially only 4 years old now, the driver…
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 switching. Well, not constantly, but it’s something that I keep finding reasons to try and hash out. A few days ago, thanks…
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 recent post on /r/datahoarder outlined shoving 15 drives into a DVD duplicator tower, I jumped all over the idea. One thing I…
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 in the budget, but I HATE electricity. Too many years of geeky endeavors have resulted in far too many shocks, and mains…
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 done so earlier Services like Transmission and PlexPy have been staples on my home server for years. Since the beginning, they were…