Replacing a disk in a zpool

Of late, I have been seeing a number of S.M.A.R.T errors from one of my drives in the zpool. The drives are raw device mapped into the FreeNAS virtual appliance giving them the appearance and functionality of real disks in the virtual appliance. This allows for FreeNAS to be able to collect and display S.M.A.R.T … [Read more…]

An Ode for a Home Server

Here’s to my home server. An HP Microserver N36L that is running ESX 5.5 and hosts my media, web, NAS and OpenVPN servers: All the data disks are passed through using raw device mapping to FreeNAS which then treats them as JBOD for RAIDZ1. This is fine given that I don’t think of RAIDZ as … [Read more…]

Connecting the dots …

Back when I joined VMware in 2012, I had used VMware’s ESX but not extensively enough to realize the value that this product brings to a data center. As a system admin in a previous life, I found it extremely handy to be able to manage virtual machines versus managing actual physical servers. At Columbia … [Read more…]

Starting out with GNU Radio

I have always been interested in amateur radio; back in India, we never had much exposure since my city did not have a ham radio club. I remember setting up a random wire antenna and connecting it up at the roof on the sixth floor of the apartment we lived in. I could receive Germany, … [Read more…]

First post ..

Thanks to a generous colleague at work who wanted to get rid of his HP MicroServer, I finally got around to getting a domain name, and hosting my web server from home. Right now I have it as a Ubuntu Server VM hosted on ESX 5.5 which incidentally also hosts my MediaTomb media server.  At … [Read more…]