Quad8

Here is that post that I talked about, so in it ill be having a look at Open Media Vault and Nas4Free! The system I am testing on is an Intel sg2600gz, a pair of Xeon E5-2650 @ 2.0GHz with 32gig rddims @1600 and raid 1 10k 6gig SAS drives. I know the SAS drives will bottleneck the system so any performance tests are going to be a little lacklustre considering they are also running a few other OS on them. To test the transfer speed I will copy a single 20 gig VMDK file FROM an SSD to ensure the source is not the bottleneck. VM’s are running on ESXi-6.5.0-4564106. Open Media Vault Ver used: 3.0.86 vCPU’s=2 Ram=2gig 5 16 virtual disks (thin) The install process was super easy, just like installing a copy of Debian, once that was all done when to go check out the web UI was it was incredibly clean and responsive! The storage page was layout was simple and easy to understand however I tried to change some settings other than the default raid ones but I found myself unable to d...

So I've sat down and done a bit of research on some of the NAS like operating systems around. Originally Freenas Corral is what got me so interested in building my own. I’ve had a look today and iX have dropped Corral completely and have no intention of updating it. I thought the whole UI change was quite nice and its a shame to see all that effort gone to waste. Freenas 11.0 U3 is available right now however I’ve been using it in a VM and I can't say I like it over corral. Now I acknowledge that I don’t yet understand the key differences between corral and 11.0 but from a fresh set of eye and around 2 – 3 playing around with both of them corral felt so much more easy to achieve what I wanted. So as a result of this I’ve decided to have a bit of a poke around until FreeNAS 11.1 is out (hopefully with native docker support) and see what other systems have to offer! The list I have compiled is related to what interested me enough to download an ISO and have a play in ESXi t...

Turns out that the spare Hynix ram I had lying around was ECC registered! Unfortunately, the Gen8 micro server only takes unregistered DDR3 which is kinda expensive (when compared to registered). Through some research, though I discovered that the gen8 server is rather picky about what unregistered DDR3 you put in it. I used the gen7 micro-server wiki to view what ram it accepted and was met with a rather small list of verified ram that works, Kingston was the brand and only 3 sticks were certain to work. I have spent quite a bit of time on eBay looking for a reasonably priced stick of the stuff (hence the long time before this update post) and they were averaging around 100-140 AUD per stick. This was a bit frustrating as I bought 32g ecc registered from china for 130 aud delivered! I had been spending some time just fluffing around until I found some NEW hp OEM memory, the very sticks that were certified by HP and on their spare parts list! I had struck gold after some cheeky eBay ...

After pulling the batteries out and having a closer look at everything I noticed that one wire had some damage done to the outer plastic shielding however it had not gone through to the copper wires. Gotta treat these with respect  I decided that I should repair that little issue and grabbed some heat shrink and the trusty heat-gun to patch it up. Before After After the new batteries arrived I plugged them in and let them charge for the next day. The next day I decided to test the system and unplug it while it had a load on it and it worked! I had the system on the UPS for 5 minutes and the new batteries still had another 15 minutes left in them. Bit messy… I decided to take the opportunity and clean up my little area, do some cable management and whatnot. Before and After After that bit of work, I was presented with a nice clean computer area! Hooray, all clean! So at the end of the day, I’ve taken a few things from this learning experience ...