the birdhouse in my soul

The newest addition to my home lab is a Synology RS3413xs+ NAS. While installing it, I came across a couple of details that I didn't know before buying it. So for other people thinking of buying this unit, here's what I found out: If you add network interfaces in the available PCIe slot, they might be numbered _before_ the four onboard interfaces. They were in my case. So onboard 1-4 are eth2-5, and add-on interfaces 1-2 are eth0-1.  the SSD cache feature only works with identical drives in the both cache slots. You can buy two 120GB SSDs, but you can't just add one 240GB SSD. Except if you configure it manually through the CLI, and want to work without Synology support.  as explained in an earlier post, there's no multiple-VLAN-over-one-interface support in the GUI, but you can work around that in the CLI the DSM web interface counts VLAN-tagged packets twice in its "Total Network" graph. The per-interface/per-bond counters are correct however. PS that loo...

Synology, like other SOHO/SMB NAS vendors, touts VLAN functionality with their current DSM 4.1 software. However, the web interface just lets you specify one VLAN tag to use over each eth interface (or bond interface). Manual approach In the busybox environment that you can ssh into as root (after enabling ssh through the webinterface), there's all the tools you need to use multiple VLANs over one link (eth or bond), however: First you insert the 802.1q module into the Linux kernel:  /sbin/lsmod | /bin/grep -q 8021q || /sbin/insmod /lib/modules/8021q.ko Then you add each VLAN you need to every interface (bond0 in this example)  /sbin/vconfig add bond0 4 And finally you can configure IP addresses on every interface.vlan combination (bond0.4 in this example)  /sbin/ifconfig bond0.4 192.168.4.1 broadcast 192.168.4.255 netmask 255.255.255.0 The same type of script would work on a QNAP NAS too, by the way. They offer 8021q.ko and vconfig in their commandline environment a...

Buying the right NAS device for a vSphere home lab is not an easy task. This blog post documents the decision process you should go through IMHO. First, decide which data you are going to put on it. Lots of people buy a NAS for secondary data only (I.e. backups), but in a home lab, there's probably primary data too. How important is the data , and do you require a backup of this primary data? Then, think about the volume of data you need. Is it 1TB, more like 5TB, or rather 10TB? Number three, protection level. No one wants to lose data, but how badly? Surviving one disk failure is a minimum, but a RAID5 set enters its "danger zone" when that happens. That means an additional failure will make you lose all the data on the set. The danger zone ends after you've replaced the failed disk and it's contents have been rebuilt. RAID6 enters the danger zone after losing a second device before the first is rebuilt. Kn ow your danger zone ! A fourth decision is spe...

My original home lab, three years old now, included two PC's running virtualization software, with Intel core 2 quad CPU's and 8 GB RAM each. While browsing for a replacement, I found Didier's Shuttle SX58J3 review . I researched some alternatives, but decided to go for the SX58J3 as well, fitted with 12 GB RAM and i7-970 CPUs, hexacores with hyperthreading. shallow: depth is critical in my telco rack. reduced height: I might get 4 shuttles in the same space as 2 minitowers earlier. They're actually slightly wider, but not by much. 12 GB per server is 50% more than the old lab (16 GB is supported but slower) the Intel core i7-970 CPU gives 100% more MHz than the old Q6600. They are much more expensive, truth be told. But being Westmere generation, they support vSphere4.1 features like DirectPath I/O and Fault Tolerance. I can re-use the PCIe dual gigabit adapters I had in the old lab. One real problem so far: in BIOS v100, I couldn't change any setting without rende...