King Cake

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We started a tradition last year where Eli and I make a Birthday King Cake on New Years day (which is also Eli’s Birthday).  We still had to call Kris a dozen times to help us interpret the recipe but I think we did a little better this year. Eli has gotten pretty good in the … Read more

FreeNAS vs. OmniOS / Napp-It

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       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

Ben’s Banned Popcorn Recipe

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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

SSD ZFS ZIL SLOG Benchmarks – Intel DC S3700, Intel DC S3500, Seagate 600 Pro, Crucial MX100 Comparison

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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

Intel DC S3500 vs S3700 as a ZIL SSD Device Benchmarks

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I ran some benchmarks comparing the Intel DC S3500 vs the Intel DC S3700 when being used as a SLOG/ZIL (ZFS Intent Log).  Both SSDs are what Intel considers datacenter class and they are both very reasonably priced compared to some of the other enterprise class offerings. Update: 2014-09-14 — I’ve done newer benchmarks on … Read more

Purple Screen of Death

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Well, my ASRock C2750D4I Build has not been doing so hot… I woke-up one morning to find VMware crashed with a PSOD (Purple Screen of Death)… and then the next day it crashed again.  Over the next few days I had several crashes, often after only an hour of uptime.  Here’s a sampling of the … Read more