Homelab on Steady Monkey

The cautionary nightmare

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 09:38:15 +0000

I had a dream. Rather, I had a nightmare last night. It went as dreams go, mixing reality and fantasy. When I awoke, completely stressed out for the day before morning light could stream through my window, I decided I would not let the dream happen. Here is the gist.

In that dream, my brand new laptop that I left in the car was stolen. Actually the car itself was stolen, but found later with only the laptop missing. The laptop sleeve was still in the car, though. Clearly that was the first sign this was ridiculous: who would take the time to take the laptop of its protection sleeve before stealing it? Anyway, my laptop is a few years old and I don’t even own a car. Details.

More adventures with the NAS

Wed, 17 Nov 2021 11:14:29 +0000

About ten days ago, I received a scary e-mail from the NAS (it has a name by the way, it’s called cactus): my boot pool was degraded but still operational. The SSD I added not so long ago to mirror the USB drive actually started to fail. TrueNAS detected slow read performance, and eventually detached the drive from the pool of its own accord. Smarty pants.

I was certainly not expecting the SSD to fail before the USB drive (they were roughly as old), especially given that the SSD did not see much wear and that it was stored in an ESD-safe bag together with a desiccant bag.

Upgrading my NAS to TrueNAS Core

Sun, 24 Oct 2021 19:23:26 +0000

Over the course of the week-end, I (finally) upgraded from FreeNAS 11.3 to TrueNAS Core 12.0.

One of the most notable things with the new version is that it is strongly discouraged to use a USB stick as boot drive. Since my NAS has an internal USB port for a boot stick, it is of course what I have been using since the beginning: a very small SanDisk Cruzer Fit of 16GB. Good opportunity to use that old (but unused) Intel SSD of 40GB that has been forgotten in the unnamed box of electronics.

Refreshing my NAS configuration

Sat, 28 Aug 2021 20:47:14 +0000

I setup my Network Attached Storage (NAS) back in 2014 after getting a nice discount on a HP MicroServer of the previous generation. I added some more ECC RAM, fitted four hard drives, installed FreeNAS, and then happily used it to offload my poor computers of all the media and random stuff I had lying around there. When I moved out of the country in 2015, I packed light and left the NAS behind. Until 2021.