Category Archives: NAS Adventure

On The Road With A Travel Router: The RAVPower FileHub WD009

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A few weeks ago, the folks at RavPower asked if I’d like to do a livestream review on their Facebook group for the newest version of their FileHub travel router/battery pack/micro-NAS device.

You can find the video of that 25 minute session here on Facebook.  Skip to 4 minutes in, and excuse the terrible laptop audio artifacts.

Promo codes turn up in the RAVPower Official Group on Facebook from time to time, as well as on the Amazon listings themselves. You can purchase through this link and also support rsts11 a little bit. .

I also talked about their newest “PD Pioneer” 20100mAh 45W Power Delivery charging bank on another live stream on May 8th,

See part one: “Introduction and Overview” for an explanation of the concept of a travel router and what you might look for in one. Watch for part three coming soon.

Disclosure: RavPower provided the review unit at no cost to me, and provided me with a commission for any sales through my promo code. They also shared some use cases to focus on, but did not preview or edit the  livestream or this post.

WHAT’S WITH THIS RAVPOWER FILEHUB YOU WERE TALKING ABOUT?

The WD009 FileHub. Credit card sized hotel key card and US quarter for scale.

The WD009 FileHub. Credit card sized hotel key card and US quarter for scale.

So first of all, here it is on Amazon. The usual price on Amazon is $59.99, but they often have checkbox discounts of a few bucks, or discount codes on their website and Facebook community.

The FileHub WD009 is (I believe) Ravpower’s third generation travel router. I’ve used the first generation (WD02, no longer available on Amazon) and they have a WD03 “FileHub Plus” model that’s available internationally with 802.11n wireless connectivity.

If you can’t acquire the WD009 (sorry to the Aussies in particular), the WD03 is a good deal at $43. It is single-band like the WD008 “FileHub Nano“, so no option for 5GHz band, and I’d expect it to be a little bit slower (and with no one-touch backup option–we’ll discuss this later). It does have the same 6700mAh battery built in. Continue reading →

System Build Report: A Xeon-D “HTPC” for FreeBSD Corral or VMware vSphere

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I’ve been planning to do some network testing and deploy some new storage for VMware vSphere in the home lab. My Synology NAS boxes (DS1513+ and DS1813+) have good performance but are limited to four 1GbE ports each, and my budget won’t allow a 10GbE-capable Synology this spring. [See below for a note on those $499 Synology systems on Amazon.] Continue reading →

I’ve looked at clouds from both sides now – are they just vapor?

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For those of you not of a certain age… a bit of a soundtrack for this post.

 

 

I wrote last month about the “antsle” “personal cloud server,” and a few people on Minds had a brisk but respectful debate over whether it was cloud, and whether there was more to cloud than cloud storage (i.e. Dropbox, Box, Owncloud, OneDrive, Sugarsync, etc).

It got me to thinking about how I’d define “cloud” and why others feel differently. So here’s a bit of a soft-topic consideration for you along the way.

I was first exposed to the buzzword around 2009, when a major PC and IT gear reseller from the midwest was trying to convince me on every call and email thread that I should buy The Cloud(tm). My rep never could tell me why, or what problem it would solve, a common shortcoming of quota-bound sales reps. I think the closest to a justification I ever got was “Just give a try, you’ll be able to tell where you can use it.” And I didn’t.

As the current decade rolled along, anyone running the server side of a client/server model called themselves The Cloud(tm). And of course, Amazon Web Services and other players came along to give their own definitions and market shares to the matter.

Today, at its extreme interpretation, anything not running in focus on your current personal device is probably considered “cloud” by someone. And to be fair to antsle, that’s where they fit in a way.  Continue reading →

Taking POHO to Interop 2014 – Three Roads To Take

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I’m looking forward to returning to Interop Las Vegas in under two weeks. Where has the winter gone? I know, I’m in Northern California, I can’t complain much about the weather.

interop-2014-banner

Click above for conference details, or visit this link for a free expo and keynote pass.

There are three aspects of Interop that I’m looking forward to.

First, I’m looking forward to meeting some Twitterverse friends, and maybe a Twitter-averse friend or two, as well as contacts I’ve made at my conferences last year. I will be dropping in on the Interop HQ and Social Media Command Center to see how the UBM team handles social media on-site. As my friends at @CiscoLive and VMworld know, I find the social media aspect of a conference to be as important as the formal content. Networking and getting advice and answers as you go makes the event more efficient and useful, and it’s always good to say hi to the folks who make it happen. I also hear there are collectible pins, and those of you who know where I work know we’re known for our pins, among other things.

Watch the hashtags #Interop and #CloudConnect and follow @interop for the latest news from the events.

cloud-connect-summit-logoSecond, I’ll be trying to take a bootcamp or two at the Cloud Connect Summit  and come up to speed on some technologies that are newish to me. There’s an AWS Boot Camp presented by Bernard Golden (alas, it’s not hands-on, so I’m not sure I’d call it a boot camp), and an OpenStack Boot Camp that looks promising as well. These may end up just being focus opportunities, or I may change my plans, but they look interesting. And as a guy who’s mostly running bare metal big data on a daily basis, it’ll be good to get some exposure to the virtual side of things outside of VMware.

Third, while I’m attending with my press hat and not my mouse ears, I do work in a sizable technology environment, so I’ll be checking out some larger technology options that may not find their way into my lab but may find their way into my day job.

Highlights in the enterprise space for me (alphabetically): Arista Networks, Cisco, Juniper Networks.

tfd-generalFourth, I’ll be joining the Tech Field Day Roundtables again this year. HP Networking will be presenting at this event, and they tie in with POHO below as well. Also presentingwill be a company rather dear to my heart in a strange way, Avaya. At the turn of the century, I worked for the Ethernet Products Group (or whatever we were called that quarter) at Nortel Networks, and my team’s flagship product was the Nortel Passport 8600 routing switch. Imagine my surprise when I ran across a slightly different color of 8600 (with much newer line cards) at the Interop network last year, now known as the Avaya Ethernet Routing Switch 8600. A couple of my Rapid City/Bay Networks/Nortel Networks coworkers are still at Avaya, or were until fairly recently… so it’s sort of a family thing for me.

If you can’t make it to the roundtables, we usually live-stream the presentations, or have them posted afterward, at TechFieldDay.com. Check it out and track #RILV14 and #TechFieldDay on Twitter for the latest news.

And last, but not least… there’s POHO. The Psycho Overkill Home Office, a gateway to big business functionality on a small business budget, is a topic near and dear to my blog, my budget, and my two home labs. I will be stopping by to speak with several vendors at Interop whose products intersect with the burgeoning (and occasionally bludgeoning) home lab market and the smaller side of the SMB world (I’m taking to calling it the one-comma-budget side of SMB).

Some of the POHO highlights that I’m seeing so far (in alphabetic order) include Chenbro Micom, Cradlepoint, Linksys (now part of Belkin), Memphis Electronic (think 16GB SODIMMs), Monoprice, Opengear, Shuttle Computer Group, Synology, and Xi3.

There are a lot of other names on the exhibitor list who will appeal to anyone, and if you’re going to be there with an exhibitor who you think would be of interest to my POHO audience, feel free to get in touch (I’m on the media list, or contact me through this blog).

And if you noticed that I went down five roads instead of three, give yourself a pat on the back. I should’ve seen that coming.

Upgrading my home VMware lab (part 1: Ivy Bridge) #rsts11

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My most popular post on rsts11 has been my compact VMware server at home post. Thanks to Chris Wahl mentioning me on the VMware forums, and linking from his lab post, I see a dozen visits or more a day to that page.

Imitation is the sincerest form of laziness^wflattery

I have to admit that I’ve been a follower in my use of intriguing lab environments. I got the vTARDIS idea from Simon Gallagher, and built a version of it at work at my last job on a Dell Core 2 Quad workstation under my desk. Then I saw Kendrick Coleman tweet about this new SH67H3 from Shuttle that supported 32GB of non-registered RAM… bought one and put 32GB and an i7-2600S processor into it, as mentioned in the “server at home” post mentioned above.

Now as you may know, the i7-2600 series processors are now a generation behind. Sandy Bridge gave way to Ivy Bridge (the i7-3×00 processors) which are currently easily found at retail. But… SH67H3 v1.0 motherboards don’t support Ivy Bridge. And that’s what was shipping when I bought mine in early 2012.

I found an unbelievable deal on a second SH67H3 open (missing) box at Fry’s in February 2013… let’s just say I spent more on a basic Pentium chip to test it with than I did on the chassis itself. But alas, the second one also had a v1.0 motherboard.

Let’s make the ivy (bridge) grow!

I found sources on the Internets that said a v2.0 board supporting Ivy Bridge was out. I further discovered that Shuttle would trade in your v1.0 board for a v2.0 board for $40. Instructions here at Cinlor Tech’s blog if you’re interested in doing this yourself. Note that you can request the case number through Shuttle’s web-email portal if you prefer this to calling. That’s what I did.

sh67 corpsesI shipped off my two boards in a medium Priority Mail box to Shuttle on the 26th. On the 29th I got confirmation of the return shipment. They should be at my door on April 2nd. I’ll be reinstalling them, and at some point upgrading to the i7-3770s processors on both.

Waitasec, 2600 “S”? 3770 “S”? What’s this all about, then?

Yes, that’s correct. I chose to go with a low power version of the i7-2600 processor a year and change ago. The i7-2600s has a lower base speed than the 2600 or 2600k (unlocked version), 2.8ghz vs 3.4ghz. All three support turbo boost to 3.8ghz though. And the i7-2600s is 65W where the others are 95W.

(Here’s a comparison chart of the three i7-2600 and three i7-3770 processor options via Intel, if you’re curious.)

Other noteworthy differences are on the 2600k, which costs $20 more, but does not support VT-d (directed I/O), vPro management features, or Trusted Execution. VT-d is the only feature of particular concern when you’re building your virtualization lab though. (I’ll admit the VT-d was an accidental discovery–I chose the 2600s more for power savings than anything else). If you’re building a desktop, the “K” model has HD3000 graphics vs HD2000 for the other two chips, by the way.

Now that I’m building a second box, I find that my usual local retail sources don’t have the i7-2600s in stock anymore. I could order one on eBay or maybe find it at Fry’s, but for about the same price I could get the Ivy Bridge version and be slightly future-proofed. Once again, the “S” is the way to go.

The 3770 series run at 3.1ghz (“S”), 3.4ghz (3770), and 3.5ghz (“K”) base speeds, all turbo capable to 3.9ghz. The “S” processor is 65W again, vs only 77W for the other two chips. They all have Intel’s HD4000 integrated graphics and the newer PCIe 3.0 support. They support 1600mhz RAM speeds, vs 1333 top for the previous generation. The “K” processor lacks VT-d, vPro, and Trusted Execution, but does have a nearly $40 premium over the other two chips.

All six of these chips have VT-x including extended page tables (EPT/SLAT), hyperthreading, and enhanced SpeedStep. And they’re all 4 core/8 thread/32gb RAM capable processors that make a great basis for a virtualization environment.

nuc-scaleSo what’s next, Robert?

Well, with two matching machines, I’ll be basically starting from scratch. Time to upgrade the N40L Microserver NAS box to 16GB (Thanks Chris for finding this too!) and probably splitting off a distinct physical storage network for that purpose.

But now, thanks to Marco Broeken’s recent lab rebuild, I’ve been introduced to Intel’s Next Unit of Computing (NUC), so tune in soon for my experience with my first NUC system. Sneak peek of the ESXi splash screen and the actual unit here… stay tuned!