TrueNAS Scale and Proxmox VE are my two favorite appliances in my homelab. Overall, TrueNAS is primarily a NAS/SAN appliance, it excels at storage. It is the most widely deployed storage platform in the world. Proxmox on the other hand is a virtualization environment; so it is excellent at VM and software-defined networking. I agree … Read more
Good morning. Today is March 31st. 🌐 It’s World Backup Day. This is a good day to review your backup strategy. I thought I’d share a cloud backup experiment I’ve been running for 9-months. I hope you find it helpful. I needed a cloud service for my offsite backups… the two prominent services are BackBlaze … Read more
Have you heard about WireGuard? I was looking at OpenVPN and other VPN options recently and came across WireGuard. WireGuard is built into the Linux kernel and is now available for just about every platform: Windows, Mac, FreeBSD, Android, iOS. I would just run WireGuard in a VM but if you wanted to it can … Read more
I found a project called StorJ. With it, you can “be the cloud” by renting out your spare NAS or hard drive storage. The consumer side is Tardigrade which allows people to store their data. It seems to be targeted at people looking for a decentralized version of Amazon AWS S3. About Tardigrade A few … Read more
My Proxmox server was at 85% capacity. The daily email from Proxmox reminded me of two drives throwing SMART errors. It was time to replace the array. I like to think hard drives can last 5-years so it’s best to proactively replace drives around that age before the failure rate starts to increase. I ask … Read more
Why You Should Have a Homelab In 1998 my friend Meredith gave me a RedHat Linux CD. I spent hours each day experimenting with Linux–I loved it. 2 years later I’m in a room with 30 other students at a University applying for the same computer lab assistant job–I’m thinking my chances are grim. Part-way … Read more
FreeNAS 11 introduces a GUI for FreeBSD’s bhyve hypervisor. This is a potential replacement for the ESXi + FreeNAS All-in-One “hyper-converged storage” design. Hardware Hardware is based on my Supermicro Microserver Build Xeon D-1518 (4 physical cores, 8 threads) @ 2.2GHz 16GB DDR4 ECC memory 4 x 2TB HGST RAID-Z, 100GB Intel DC S3700s for … Read more
ZFS is flexible and will let you name and organize datasets however you choose–but before you start building datasets there’s some ways to make management easier in the long term. I’ve found the following convention works well for me. It’s not “the” way by any means, but I hope you will find it helpful, I … Read more
Catching up on email, I saw a Newsletter from iX Systems announcing the FreeNAS Mini XL (the irony). On the new FreeNAS Mini page it looks just like the FreeNAS mini but taller to accommodate 8-bays. Available on Amazon starting at $1,500 with no drives. Here’s the Quick Start Guide and Data Sheet. The pictures show what appears to be equipped … 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