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 Processor /

(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 have wired n

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