Recent content by ttabbal

I love Brother printers. They have a good selection with network support, decent quality, and no crazy requirements for drivers etc.. They "just work" with everything. Windows, Linux, Android, ChromeOS, whatever. No screwy DRM and usually very good aftermarket toner support. I use a mono MFC and...

raidz only, and unless you are using a newer version. They added the ability to grow raidz a while back. It's not perfect, but it's not horrible. For a number of years, I've been running striped mirrors. I can expand or add anytime. Either add a pair to the stripe, or just replace individual...

ZFS: I really like the reliability. There are even some options to expand raidz volumes now on Linux. For Linux based, proxmox is nice. Solaris based setups work great, but Oracle bugs some people. There's also BSD based options. They all have pros and cons. It depends a lot on what features and...

This is how I do it, which might help. The inter-VLAN routing is on an OpnSense box. The main switch handles the VLAN isolation. Managed switches usually have 2 modes for the VLAN side. One, everything on a port is on whatever VLAN you tell it. Other VLAN traffic is blocked. The second is a...

If you want Linux, don't let it stop you. For a file server, Proxmox works great out of the box with ZFS. It also supports Containers (like BSD jails) and KVM virtual machines. I wouldn't want a distro that doesn't natively ship ZFS for a storage box. Dealing with the kernel patching, even the...

Thought it might be fun to check. Now I'm thinking I should get a backup drive ordered. 2TB spinner. :)

I have it on 5G using the n41 band mostly. It's ok. My local towers aren't too congested, so I don't get hit with the deprioritization too badly. What I do have is occasional times of high packet loss for no apparent reason. It will be basically unusable for a while. I have another connection I...

Even a good SSD is unlikely to keep up with 10Gbe. If you trust your backups and don't mind a little down time, there's nothing wrong with the idea. I don't know that I'd bother with copies=2 in that case though. You have checksums and verification, along with good backups. It doesn't hurt...

Yeah, it's old school, but still plenty for the sort of things I ask it to do. I have a pair of x5675s in it, and plenty of RAM. Works well as a Proxmox host serving ZFS and a number of containers for various services. The array of rust likely pulls more power than the mobo/CPUs, and power...

Right, the address assigned from SLAAC should be stable with most even remotely modern gear. You can put them in DNS without issues. If you find a problem, you can static assign as well. The OS determines the details, like which method is used to generate addresses and if privacy addresses are...

What I did was to generate a ULA prefix using one of the many websites that do it for you. You want this so that your prefix is unique, at least that you have a high probability of it being unique anyway. This is nice so that you don't have collisions should you use a VPN or something else that...

I don't know how much more "secure" the network is with a VPN. You're moving the point where someone has access to the unencrypted traffic, but it does help somewhat with stupid ISPs and such. There are VPN services that work with ipv6, so that's one option. I think I would set up a VPN only...

CPU, they will both work fine for what you are talking about. I'm not 100% up to date on video transcoding, but I'm sure you can find info on that. If you want to do things like hardware passthrough, Epyc and Threadripper are nice as you have more PCIe lanes so you don't lose performance with...

Shrug.. I still run 2 1366 systems. One is a firewall on OpnSense, one is my main storage/VM server. It gets the job done. They are power hungry, but so is the 10G switch, and the HDDs in the storage box use more than the CPUs. I will say that the single proc firewall can't saturate a 10G link...

SATA expanders seem to have more issues than you would get with just a HBA. SAS expanders seem to work well for most people, but you can get a pair of HBAs for less than the cost of an expander, at least at the time I was looking. I would just get a pair of 8i HBAs unless you get a really good...