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
I thought I’d do a followup to my last post, because this is another issue with Verizon Wireless. Sometimes you need to be able to forward ports to devices on your LAN and this is impossible to do when you’re behind a Verizon Wireless NAT. But, it is possible to create a port forward by using ssh to … Read more
Today’s Question is From Tom: Hey Ben, Could you share a post or details on how you configured your SoftEther VPN in order to reach the internal network from the outside, on Verizon? I’m in the same predicament, which an unlimited 4G connection, but am unable to reach files due to Verizon’s 4G NAT firewall. … Read more
I was waiting on someone to make this comparison. Flashback: Mozilla CEO Steps Down Over Gay Marriage Views
2015-01-07: I’ve updated this post to to reflect changes in FreeNAS 9.3. I’ve been using OpenIndiana since late 2011 and switched to OmniOS in 2013. Lately I started testing FreeNAS, what drove me to do this is I use CrashPlan to backup my pool but recently Code 42 announced they’ll be discontinuing … Read more
You May Die From Eating This Please read about how bad coconut oil is from the liberal CSPI organization (linked removed because it’s dead) and learn all about the danger of Coconut Oil from Michelle Obama (link removed because it’s dead) and the CDC (link removed because it’s dead) before proceeding. The secret to great popcorn is coconut oil … Read more
I ran some performance tests comparing the Intel DC S3700, Intel DC S3500, Seagate 600 Pro, and Crucial MX100 when being used as a ZFS ZIL / SLOG Device. All of these drives have a capacitor backed write cache so they can lose power in the middle of a write without losing data. Here are … Read more