coding-mayhem

My Dell Laptop MB from 2011 There was a time back in the day where everyone used PCs. Laptops were not as powerful and were rare and expensive. I would say I have build roughly about 20 PCs from scratch for friends and family during those good old times. Nowadays building a PC seems like something only gamers do.  I'm in the process of building a home server. I will talk about the whys in a future post. In the process I had to refresh my knowledge about building a PC. In this post I will outline the thought process I went through while building my Server from scratch. First step is to decide on the processor. Everything else evolves around the processor. For example, Motherboard chip-set  Memory speeds Memory types ( M.2, Ultra M.2 ) I/O capabilities ( SATA 6Gb/s, 3Gb/s ) On-board graphics Overclocking Budget First I checked Intel processors. I assumed that Intel is going to be more expensive compared to AMD so the idea is to find the best Intel Process...

(This is a continuation of my previous post ...) In the last post I talked about the RAID failure and needing to find a new solution. In this post I will talk about the solution I went with. If we are to look back at the failed attempt, the reason I decided to go with a RAID5 setup with my 3 disks is  Having a 2TB disk Between vindy and myself having 2TBs seem enough space Redundancy  The Raid5 disk can survive a 1 disk failure due to the way parity works. How do I achieve similar outcomes without the power of RAID. The answer is "Nightly Backups" First of all I nuked the RAID5 and partitioned the disks again. This time I created 3 NTFS partitions. Did I hear you ask why NTFS. If for some reason I get the disks out of the NAS I have the flexibility to plug them into any of the devices we use. As mentioned in my first NAS post I use an XPS 15 with Ubuntu and Vindi uses an XPS 12 with Windows. I mounted these so that OMV knows about them. This ...

(This is a continuation from my previous post ...) In this post I'll be covering the following, Software setup  Open Media Vault  Software Raid using `mdadm` Expectation vs Reality Raid setup failure I received my hardware. Happy days ... Before narrowing down the hardware I was looking at OMV (OpenMediaVault) and FreeNAS . Newer versions of FreeNAS needs a 64 bit processor and at a minimum 8 gigs of memory. No need to say I went with OMV.  Software Setup Open Media Vault OMV has an images for single board computers (SBC). This made installing OMV in the Pi a peace of cake. There are so many good and even more bad videos on how to do this. I recommend this by TDL. There are a few gotchas to watch out for. First of all get the correct image for your board. Second of all patience is a virtue. OMV images for SBCs go through a setup in the first boot. If the first boot is unable to complete the setup your image is toast. Make sure you ha...

So this is the story about my NAS ( Network attached storage ) build. Spoiler alert, the initial implementation fails but I manage to compromise and go for a plan B. Why ? Well why not. :). Actually to tell you a bit of the back story. I use a Dell XPS 15 running Ubuntu as my PC and my better half uses a Dell XPS 12 running Windows 10 . Our on-board disk sizes are 500GB and 250GB respectively. We keep our data in external USB drives. Vindi ( my wife ) does food photography as a side gig / hobby. So I think it's fair to say that we were having a bit of an inconvenience when it comes to storage. How ? So now to find a solution to my problem. The decision to go with a NAS was quite obvious Accessible to both of us Accessible by all our devices Less upkeep after initial setup Seems like a fun project 😉 Hardware I know there are off the shelf systems but where's the fun in that.  I wanted to keep the cost to a minimum so I decided to use the existing U...