Home Lab

13 posts

October 9, 2014 Home Lab , Reviews

Upgrading a sluggish 2008 iMac from a Western Digital HDD to a SanDisk Extreme II SSD, with before and after benchmarks.

May 6, 2014 Home Lab

A beginner's guide to pfSense aliases, showing how to group IP addresses and ports for cleaner firewall rules.

November 21, 2013 Home Lab

Review of the Cisco SG300-28P managed switch for homelab use, covering PoE, VLANs, inter-VLAN routing, and SNMP monitoring.

November 21, 2013 Home Lab

Detailed look at a Supermicro 24-bay storage server purchased from eBay, including specs, expandability, and IPMI setup.

August 16, 2013 Home Lab

Outgrowing a Dell PowerEdge 2950 file server and finding a cost-effective Supermicro 24-bay replacement on eBay.

August 12, 2013 Home Lab

Step-by-step guide to installing pfSense on a Watchguard X750e firewall appliance, including BIOS flashing and Compact Flash tips.

November 15, 2012 Home Lab

Handling my first ZFS hard drive failure on a Dell PowerEdge 2950 running FreeNAS, including the RMA process and array rebuild.

July 25, 2012 Home Lab

Why pfSense is a powerful alternative to consumer routers, offering more RAM, CPU, and features like DNS, DHCP, VPN, and failover.

July 25, 2012 Home Lab

Step-by-step pfSense installation on a Dell Poweredge R200, including NIC auto-detection tips and an overview of firewall, VPN, and caching features.

July 20, 2012 Home Lab

An introduction to pfSense, a free and open-source FreeBSD distribution used as a firewall and router for networks of all sizes.

July 18, 2012 Home Lab

Replacing a mismatched Seagate drive and adding a sixth Western Digital Green to fill all hot-swap bays in the Dell Poweredge 2950.

July 18, 2012 Home Lab

Diagnosing and fixing memory errors on a Dell Poweredge 2950 where unseated RAM modules caused FreeNAS to report only 2GB of the installed 4GB.

July 18, 2012 Home Lab

Purchasing a Dell Poweredge 2950 from Craigslist to use as a FreeNAS and ZFS file server, including specs and the decision-making process.