The Dell H730 Mini’s HBA Mode is NOT What You Think!
If you’re building a ZFS system or performance-sensitive storage server, you’ve probably come across the Dell PERC H730 Mini — a RAID controller found in many Dell R630, R730, and other 13th-gen PowerEdge servers. It’s great since it fits in the integrated slot and doesn’t occupy one of the PCIe expansion slots. Dell refer to […]
HOMELAB 24/25
Repurposing EMC 520b Sector Drives
I recently picked up a batch of enterprise-grade EMC SAS hard drives off eBay for a homelab storage project. They were dirt cheap and came from a decommissioned EMC storage array. I slotted them into a JBOD (KTN-STL3 enclosure) and connected it to a Linux server running Proxmox – but quickly hit a wall. The […]
PSA: A 16GB Intel Optane ZFS SLOG is Not as Good as You Hope
I recently picked up a 16GB Intel Optane drive off eBay for pennies, thinking I was in for a big win. My hope? That it would supercharge ZFS synchronous write performance when used as a SLOG (ZIL) device -especially to help out some aging SAS SSDs I also bought online. Those early-gen SSDs turned out […]
C.A.L.C.I.F.E.R
Cortical Archival Library for Contextualization, Inference, Filing, and Efficient Recall Yeah, that acronym is a bit of a stretch… but you get the idea. Calcifer, or Cal for short, is my ever growing AI powered assistant written in python. It’s main function is to archive and organise all my thoughts, so they are browsable, indexable and […]
PSA: Running a Tor Middle Relay Can Cause Blacklisting
This is just a quick note to reassure anyone else who thought they were losing their mind because they thought there was something wrong with their firewall or DNS. In the end, it actually wasn’t DNS for once. This is not a particularly ground breaking or surprising observation, but good to have solid evidence that […]
Recovering CEPH/Proxmox After a Major Oopsie
Archive of a panicked post by me on the LevelOneTechs and Proxmox forums in August 2024. I hope this helps some poor sod who also goes through the same stress! Please reach out if your cluster reaches the same sticky end and I will do my best to help you. Needless to say I learnt […]
Troubleshooting Very Average Wireguard Performance on IONOS
I’ve been obsessing over this on and off for about a month, and I just can’t seem to figure it out. The situation is as follows: public internet ———-> VPS <====WG Tunnel====> pfSense ———-> LAN/Server I have a Wireguard tunnel set up to route all traffic between my pfSense LAN and a VPS. This means […]
Homelab ’23
A whistle stop tour of my new server and homelab environment. I’ve migrated from XCP-NG to Proxmox and explain a little bit about my rationale. Apologies it’s in crap video form.
Weird Network Problems in XCP-NG
I have no idea what is going on. I’m getting consistently inconsistent throughput and latency issues. This is a post to collect my findings so far… Not very interesting to anyone else but me. Ping via PIFs: No problems there. Pings between VMs, using VIFs: Not terrible, but not amazing. Throughput tested with iperf3: Throughput […]