I take a look at the Oracle Sun Fire X4170 M2. A nice compact 1U system featuring dual LGA 1366 processors and 18 DIMMs.

Storage Server 2015 was a roller coaster of a build. There were many things that tried to stop the updating of the storage server, although it ended up working out!

In this video I go over the basic of VLAN’s. Why you want them, what the benefits are, basic functionality.

Quite sometime back (Sept 2014) I created a small bash script as a proof of concept for a shortcoming of Proxmox. This was originally posted on the TekSyndicate (now Level1Techs) site and is linked HERE. Proxmox is a very powerful tool, which I have used for many years. It even supports the use of live-migration of VM’s (and containers) between other Proxmox nodes. What is Proxmox? What is Live Migration? Live migration is where the VM being run is migrated to another Proxmox node whilst it is still running.

If you are reading this and using this as a guide….. you are crazy. I joke, but seriously DISCLAIMER if this fudgess up, it is not my fault. Firstly, what is a cross flash? Essentially its where you flash the BIOS of one product into another. This is not guaranteed to work for every single product in existence, but in the case of the LSI 9240-8I (and IBM M1015) it can be done.

Home Firewall using PfSense After facing some major issues with the network at my parents house, a full blown router rebuild was done. Switching away from the crappy out of the box/ISP provided solutions to an x86 based platform. Using an old Sophos firewall, it was up cycled to its new home. It was removed from its old case, into a larger ATX tower so a better cooler could be used.

Server Build - Part 2 So continuing from Part 1 the build log. Additionally to purchasing the parts for the server, I picked up this pretty neat small LCD with a temperature probe attached. Made by XSPC they are avaliable in a lot of different colours. I got green becuase… I could. Note the additional small fan attached to the chipset heatsink. For some reason in Windows this chipset gets extremely hot, whilst under Linux it doesn’t.

Server Build - Part 1 Back in the Summer of 2013 when I originally built this machine, I used to have a lot of pre-built OEM machines. Mainly Dell Poweredge machines. However their only limit was their age. All the servers I had were either LGA 771 or older and only had an average of 8-16GB of DDR2 RAM. So I decided (after a quick browse of ebay) to build my own.

Welcome

Well hello there! This is my silly tech blog that I ‘maintain’ and place the projects and various tech things that I am doing.

Anyway thanks for dropping by and I hope you find something interesting!