Computer and technology related topics
Update 2013-12-23: Using the internet access on my phone I’ve moved the website to another server (thanks Jeff!) So the website is back up. My internet is going down until Jan 1st. Looks like I forgot to disable my CrashPlan backup again (unfortunately CrashPlan doesn’t offer a way to stop backing up to CrashPlan … Read more
Dear Intuit, I’ve been a long time Quicken user, my dad taught me to use Quicken for DOS to track money in my “Bank of Dad” account. My current Quicken file which I started in college after opening my bank account has data back since 2001. For the last 12-years I’ve loyally purchased a new … Read more
My Xeoned Microserver caught fire and burned up! Just kidding. |:-) A few weeks ago out of the blue a real-estate agent told me the house we’re renting was going to be put on the market. I was surprised because owners typically list in Spring or Summer when people are looking to buy a house, … Read more
Here’s a quick overview of installing the IBM ServerRaid M1015 HBA (aka LSI SAS9220-8i) in the HP Gen8 Microserver. These cards can be bought for around $100 on eBay. The HBA has two 6Gbps SAS ports (each port has 4 lanes, each lane is 6Gbps giving a theoretical maximum of 24Gbps per port and 48Gbps … Read more
Thanks to a homeservershow forum member keeping track of prices I ordered the HP Gen8 Microserver 1610T … of course, nobody wants to run VMWare on a Celeron so obviously the first thing to try is installing a Xeon processor. Update April 12, 2020. The 8th Gen HP Microserver is outdated. If you have one … Read more
We switched to Ting from Virgin Mobile… here’s my quick review: What is Ting? Ting was started by Tucows in 2012, like Virgin Mobile it’s an MVNO (Mobile Virtual Network Operator) backed by Sprint wireless. Ting’s marketing point is that most people don’t actually use all the data, texting, and voice that they pay for. … Read more
*** DEPRECATED StartCom no longer exists. Please see my newer SSL Certificate Guide Using Let’s Encrypt *** Here’s a quick tutorial on how to obtain and setup a certificate from StartCom. StartCom offers free personal certificates, these aren’t the fake certs where you have to setup your own CA and it only works when people … Read more
I messed up my zpool with a stuck log device, and rather than try to fix it I decided to wipe out the zpool and restore the zfs datasets using CrashPlan. It took CrashPlan roughly a week to restore all my data (~1TB) which is making me consider local backups. All permissions intact. Dirty VM … Read more
I’m in the progress of switching my ZFS Server from OpenIndiana to OmniOS, mainly because OmniOS is designed only to be a server system so it’s a little cleaner, and they have a stable production release that’s commercially supported, and it has become Gea’s OS of choice for Napp-It. One of the last things I … Read more
Just saw on STH that the HP Microserver Gen8 specs have been released… Intel Pentium G2020T (2 core, 2.5Ghz, 3MB, 35W) OR Intel Celeron G1610T 2GB ECC memory (up to 16GB, 2 slots) One PCIe expansion slot. Dual gigabit ethernet ports (332i adapter) Dynamic Smart Array B120i/ZM 150w power supply HP iLO4 remote management port … Read more