Ok, its um.. <checks date of last post> been a while. I wanted to make a post because, well, picking this up again is something I have time for. And also, I just spent a couple of hours doing something which really hammered home to me the value of both virtualisation *and* the Fedora project’s…
My home lab is undergoing a bit of a shift, as I experiment with different management interfaces for a virtualised server farm. Its all the fault of my Supermicro X9DRH-7F, which is running as a separate home lab with currently 128GB of memory, as I’m exploring ways to make my home server more complex, but…
History I’ve been running Xen since something like 2008, originally on an AMD Athlon X2 dual-core, when Paravirtual installs were the only option as hardware virtualisation wasn’t a thing yet. Obviously I’m bloody-minded 🙂 These days, virtual machines are much easier to do, but I still like to push boundaries, and for the last 3…
Part of my new build has me running 5x Samsung 840 Pro 512GB SSD’s as a RAIDZ array (stripes with one drive worth of redundancy), which I’ll be using as a pool for iSCSI targets off which will hang multiple VM’s as their boot drives. Overkill? Yes, certainly for a home server. Having just installed…
Danger Will Robinson!! This page has information which is not substantiated, and certainly not supported by any vendors mentioned on this page. Any damage sustained to yourself, your equipment, or your data is entirely your own responsibility, and if you break things, whilst I am sympathetic and feel your pain, I am not responsible as…
So I’m looking at hardware prices again, and my wallet is burning holes in my pants (or maybe I just don’t like shopping, and my pants are old and full of holes? sshhh, don’t tell anyone!). The recent release of AMD’s Threadripper (best. cpu. name. ever.), has me lusting after new hardware, but of course,…
Used Tyan S7012 How-To Per the title, I bought a used Tyan S7012GM4NR motherboard as the start of my new home server build. They’re super cheap on Ebay, and can be had for less than $US80! And here it is in all its glory: Basic specs are: Dual LGA1366 18 RAM slots (Triple channel config…
So I’m back, and this time to blog about my updates to my home network. Looking through my history here, its been 2.5 years since I set up my current incarnation of my home server, which is a neat little mATX case and motherboard, with an aging Lynnfield X3450 Xeon cpu, a supermicro motherboard, and…
Since the debacle where Electric Sheep Fence made their git repository private and gated access to it, it seems a fork has sprung up.. OPNsense. I found out about it when I was searching for simple firewall alternatives which could run on a wifi/ADSL custom firmware, as I’d like to get some of my less-tech…
First off, thanks to reader “Goats” for poking me.. I needed a kick up the arse to get back to this blog thing. Background In August of last year I mentioned in passing that I fitted a solid state drive to an old 2006 iPod Video (aka 5th generation). So I guess the first question…
I’m experimenting with making a switch to Linux for my main desktop, mainly driven by wanting Linux as a development environment for python, rather than Windows. After installing Fedora 21 Workstation version, its become annoying that the login manager, gdm, isn’t remembering the display configuration for my multiple-monitor setup. I run Portrait Landscape Portrait setup…
After a quick test install of pfSense 2.2’s beta image (dated 1017 – I see there are two newer builds up since then), I’m pleased to report that Xen support works with pfSense 2.2 without rebuilding it! yay! iso image here: http://snapshots.pfsense.org/FreeBSD_releng/10.1/amd64/pfSense_HEAD/livecd_installer/?C=M;O=D I’ve been running a build of pfSense 2.1 I built over a year…
So I picked up a few 256GB solid state drives on a whim. Its time to upgrade some of the older drives around the house in the PC’s which need the capacity. This time, I decided to just buy msata drives, and use more mSATA to 2.5″ adapters to fit them into desktops and laptops. …
So after a couple of comments from readers (what? you mean I’m not just screaming into the void?), I decided to investigate building the latest version of FreeNAS with Xen support. Since my original post about building FreeNAS 9.2 for Xen, the FreeNAS developers released 9.2.1 which added some cool stuff like Samba 4, newer…
In my previous blog post about choosing the right dom0, I came to the conclusion that in the face of an upcoming RHEL7 which is based on Fedora 19/20, it made sense to set up my dom0 for using Fedora 20. Given the similarity between Fedora 20 and RHEL7, it should be the same process…
