i had to do a full recovery recently of my sons MacBook and in doing so, i was greeted with rather mysterious message from Apple: the app store download could not start because it has already been downloaded too many times what? after searching (i’m no longer googling) for a while i couldn’t find anything that made sense. after carefully reviewing internet recovery options i finally found a small, but important difference: ...
last post in the series about my home lab resulted in a number of interesting emails in my inbox. i have to admit that i really appreciate words of praise. as well as those with constructive, critical feedback :) so after short description what is connected where and how (see link above), let’s focus now on services. first and foremost - remember it’s “always DNS” ;) so let’s tackle that. ...
it took me a few hours to figure out the new subtleties. new computers from Apple with a built-in T2 chip (i.e. new iMac Pro and Macbook Pro 2018 edition) have a dedicated operating system protection. what’s the problem? first of all, by default, they can not be booted from an external medium. it’s part of the security that Apple introduced to make it more difficult for a potential hacker. to change this setting, you have to get to the system tools that live on a special ‘recovery’ partition. then it is simple: ...
as you can easily guess, i’m networking geek. my home network was thus built with hacking, not with ‘smallest footprint possible’ in mind. it’s great if you can test your “great” ideas before recommending them to anyone, and of course getting feel of new features is also a plus in this case. so, my first assumption was it has to be fast - fiber. both floors are connected with fiber network, that’s aggregated near front door, in the cloakroom. the room itself is however small, and won’t let me put whole 19" rack there… so we need to haul traffic back to my dedicated server room downstairs (yes, my desk along with server room is located below the ground level, which has its own benefits). ...
my 256GB SSD drive in MacPro 2013 started to fill up recently. i went on short googling to see how to extend it without relying on NAS of course. and i get nice offer. it seems that good people in the internet found a way to interface typical NVMe disk drives with the socket Apple uses. and so i became user of 1TB Samsung SSD drive. that upgrade gave me also speed bump - on encrypted drive transfers shoot up from 500MBbs (reading) and 380MBbs (writing) to 1.3GBps for both reading and writing (disk itself can do 2.5Gbps but PCIe bus in MacPro is limiting factor here). ...
FreeNAS is special edition of tuned-up FreeBSD, with GUI available over WWW to enable easy setup and maintenance. i had to migrate recently my old Synology 1815+ thanks to well known Intel SNAFU with Atom CPUs. interestingly enough, even Synology own service department declined to RMA the NAS, without even discussing the situation. so i managed to setup quickly 12x 3.5" bay server. i had five 3.5" 8TB HDDs from Synology that i wanted to rescue data from. the server itself is kind of old one - but solid. it’s a dual Intel L5100 series chassis (with sadly one CPU only), 64GB of RAM, LSI/Avago RAID card and Intel twin 10GE NIC. for ‘fast & dirty’ hack it was more than enough. ...