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....
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....
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....
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....