Computer and technology related topics
The last few days I have been getting a lot of calls from “Unknown Caller” for which I didn’t pick up. This morning I got a call from a number in the 845 area code so I answered. It was my friendly Dell Support rep from India! Hello, this is Dell support, we detected some malware activity … Read more
Last year I started looking at 2FA (Two Factor Authentication) solutions and came across YubiKey which is a fantastic little device. I ordered a few NEOs to play with. There are several models, I opted for the NEO since it supports the most features and has an NFC chip that Android phones can use. It’s $50 on Amazon or … Read more
We’ve been using Ting for Kris’s phone the last 3 years, it’s been great (see my Ting Review)–but at our new house Sprint’s signal isn’t that good–it can’t really pull in a 3G signal consistently. In rural North Idaho the best coverage is indisputably Verizon, so I limited my search to Verizon MVNOs which have … Read more
The stock ROMS on Verizon/Samsung phones are awful. The phones come shipped with Samsung Touchwiz which makes the UI ugly and a half a dozen apps that you can’t uninstall—some eating up battery, some sending telemetry data to Samsung (using up your data), some changes Samsung does introduce vulnerabilities not to mention it takes Samsung … Read more
Last night, I was attending a LAN party remotely and between games I noticed my pfSense router needed to be updated but of course an update brings down my internet for 30 seconds while it reboots which I didn’t want to do–and then I thought, I should really cluster this. I found a straight-forward pfSense HA … Read more
Here’s my current battlestation… since the office and guest bedroom are shared I recently migrated from a desktop to a Dell Latitude E5450 with a docking station so I could use the room as an office most of the time but undock when guests are staying the night. Starting with the Lackracks… 2U server running VMware and … Read more
Playing with bhyve Here’s a look at Gea’s popular All-in-one design which allows VMware to run on top of ZFS on a single box using a virtual 10Gbe storage network. The design requires an HBA and a CPU that supports VT-d so that the storage can be passed directly to a guest VM running a ZFS … Read more
I don’t have room for a couple of rackmount servers anymore so I was thinking of ways to reduce the footprint and noise from my servers. I’ve been very happy with Supermicro hardware so here’s my Supermicro Mini-ITX Datacenter in a box build. Motherboard: Supermicro X10SDV-F CPU/Motherboard: Xeon D-1540 X10SDV. 8 cores (16 including HT … Read more
This is a guide which will install FreeNAS 9.10 under VMware ESXi and then using ZFS share the storage back to VMware. This is roughly based on Napp-It’s All-In-One design, except that it uses FreeNAS instead of OminOS. This post has had over 160,000 visitors, thousands of people have used this setup in their homelabs and small … Read more
Updated October 19, 2022. Today’s question comes from Jeff…. Q. What drives should I buy for my ZFS server? Answer: Here’s what I recommend, considering a balance of cost per TB, performance, and reliability. I prefer NAS or Enterprise-class drives since they are designed to run 24/7 and also are better at tolerating vibration from … Read more