Tiernan's Comms Closet August 2015

Windows Server 2012 R2 returning to The GodBoxV2

August 23, 2015 tiernano

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After a few months of running Sabayon Linux on the GodboxV2, i am going back to Windows Server. Back around October of last year, i installed Windows 10 Preview on the GodBoxV2, and, well, there where issues with graphics drivers, etc. Then, some time after, i cant remember off hand when, i moved to Sabayon Linux. Its based on Gentoo but has a lot of the components pre-built. Gentoo is a “Build from scratch” sort of OS. You get a basic kernel and a basic set of components, but you build everything else from scratch… including rebuilding the kernel if you want. Sabayon, on the other hand has all that mostly prebuilt, though you can still use Gentoo’s Portage to build stuff yourself.

Anyway, for the last few months, all was going mostly well… but I miss Windows. And, given i have pretty much always ran a server OS on my main workstations, I am heading back to Server 2012R2. I was tempted by 2016, but its still very early days… Maybe i will run it as a VM for a while, but we will see…

ZFS Home storage pool

August 10, 2015 tiernano

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Over the weekend, my BTRFS pool for my /home directory on Linux failed… Not sure what happened, but it made me
do something i wanted to do for a while: Build a ZFS pool for my home dir.

First things first, the pool consists of 4 2Tb hard drives and 1 128Gb SSD. Its setup in RAIDZ1 (equivilent of RAID 5)
and then the SSD is set for caching.

To create the pool i ran

zpool create home raidz sda sde sdf sdg

then, to add the cache drive

zpool add home cache sdd

the pool (in my case) got mounted to /home, and then i restored my backup to it. to do some tests, i can the
following…

614MB/s write and 5.3GB a second read is nothing to be sniffed at! 🙂

Ubiquiti EdgeRouter PoE in the lab

August 5, 2015 tiernano

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Today, my Ubiquiti EdgeRouter POE arrived in the house. I got it hooked up to both UPC connections (as secondary connections) and all seems to be working grand. Some notes i wanted to put up here:

out of the box, the install was quite simple. set my Ethernet connection to a static ip in the 192.168.1.x/24 range,
using 192.168.1.1 as gateway and dns, and then point at http://192.168.1.1 for admin. login (ubit for both username and
password) and heay presto. I was asked did i agree to the license, and then im in.
by default, NAT is off… i turned it on, and enabled DNS and was able to surf.
I also noticed the software was out of date… Oddly, there did not seem to be an option to update automatically, but
you can manually download the tar and upload it, which i did.
so far, so good… not sure yet if i will be using it as my main router, but it may end up being a VoIP router.

Finally, speed test result below:

More Ubiquiti stuff arriving tomorrow… will post more stuff then.