Category Archives: POHU

First look: Checking out the “antsle” personal cloud server

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Check out the followup to this post, featuring antsle’s second generation of servers, here: Quick Take: Antsle coming out with Xeon-D models with 10GbE in December

Most of you know I don’t shy away from building (or refurbishing) my own computers. I used to draw the line at laptops, but in the last couple of years I’ve even rebuilt a few stripped-for-parts Dell and Toshiba laptops for the fun of it. Warped definition of “fun,” I’ll admit.

So when I saw a Facebook ad for a “cloud server” called “antsle,” I was curious but unconvinced. It was something like this:

The idea is you’re buying a compact, fanless, silent microserver that, in addition to some fault-tolerant hardware (mirrored SSD, ECC RAM), includes a proprietary user interface for managing and monitoring containers and virtual machines. You can cram up to 64GB of RAM in there, and while it only holds two internal drives, you can add more via USB 2.0 or USB 3.0, for up to 16TB of officially supported capacity. Not too bad, but I’ve been known to be cheap and/or resourceful, so I priced out a similar configuration assuming I’d build it myself.  Continue reading →

Overkill in the rsts11 lab workshop – a homelab update for 2017

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After being chosen as a VMware vExpert for 2017 this month, I was inspired to get working on refreshing my vSphere “homelab” environment despite a busy travel month in late February/early March. This won’t be a deep technical dive into lab building; rather, I just wanted to share some ideas and adventures from my lab gear accumulation over the past year.

As a disclosure, while I do work for Cisco, my vExpert status and homelab building are at most peripherally-connected (the homelab at home connects to a Meraki switch whose license I get an employee discount on, for example). And even though I’m occasionally surprised when I use older higher end Dell or HP gear, it’s not a conflict of interest or an out-of-bounds effort. It’s just what I get a great deal on at local used hardware shops from time to time.

The legacy lab at Andromedary HQ

Also read: New Hardware thoughts for home labs (Winter 2013)

C6100

Stock Photo of a Dell C6100 chassis

Continue reading →

Lowered Expectations – How Low Can Your Laptop Go?

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[An Interop Aside: I visited with a couple of vendors at Interop who are sending some gear for me to explore. I’m holding off on their coverage until that happens, although another summary post may be forthcoming.]

I’m a big laptop fan. Afficionado, not cooler, mind you. It’s a problem, especially since my recent rebuild acquisitions and components are blocking the fireplace at the moment.

There’s been a disturbing trend over the last couple of years, whereby laptop manufacturers decide to move more toward the netbook specifications for memory (and often storage), rather than to the state of the art for the current generation of laptop processors. I was commiserating with my friend John Obeto about this recently.

For a couple of months now, you’ve been able to order a Dell Precision 7000-series laptop with 64GB of RAM. That’s twice as much as many desktops can handle today. And even if you don’t have room for four DIMM slots in your laptop design, DDR4 16GB SODIMMs are very affordable and readily available even at retail. So there’s really no reason for a 13″ or larger laptop to have an 8GB limit.

But it is the way of the world, for most lightweight laptops these days. Even Dell’s remarkable XPS 13 9343 maxed at 8GB – the 9350 model this year has a 16GB option but it’s online order only (and in the $2000 range as I recall). Continue reading →

A word on PoHo coverage for 2016

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Greetings, readers.

As you may have noticed, rsts11 has had limited content over the past year. Day Job(tm) has taken precedence, and while we’ve been creating content, it’s been for the Day Job.

On the one hand, we’ve managed to completely avoid conflicts of interest between rsts11 and the Day Job, but there’s a substantial backlog to come out over the upcoming months, as well as some new industry observations and technology updates.

There are also a couple of eBooks in the works that should be available by early summer. We’ll have one on big data and one on meeting hygiene, and possibly some more.

Feel free to follow me personally on @gallifreyan and the blog update feed at @rsts11 on Twitter, and subscribe to get the latest updates here. If there are topics I’ve mentioned through social media or at events that you’d like to read more about, feel free to make suggestions in the comments here.

What planet are we on? (The Third) — the RSTS11 Interop preview

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Greetings from Fabulous Las Vegas, Nevada. For the third year, with apologies to Men Without Hats, I’m back in the Mandalay Bay Convention Center for Interop. 

This week, I’m actually a man without hats as well. My Big Data Safari hat is in my home office, and my virtual Cisco ears are back at home as well, next to the VPN router that was powered down before I headed for the airport. (Alas, after moving from Disney to Cisco, I lost the theme park discounts and the epic mascot reference.)

What are you up to at Interop this year, Robert?

So why am I back at Interop, when a dozen conference calls a day could have been in the cards for me this week? 

My readers, my fans, and my groupie all know that I’ve been a fan of the Psycho Overkill Home Office (POHO) for quite a while, going back to when I had a 19-server, 5-architecture environment with a 3-vendor network in my spare bedroom. Today it’s about 12 servers, all x64 (Shuttle, Intel, Cisco, Supermicro, Dell, and maybe another secret brand or two), and technically a 5-vendor network, but the idea is similar enough.

And having built a couple of startups up from the under-the-desk model to a scalable, sustainable production-grade infrastructure, the overkill in my home office and labs has led to efficient and effective environments in my workplaces. 

This week I’m taking a break from my usual big data evangelism and the identity aspects of working for a huge multinational juggernaut. It’s a bit of a relief, to be honest; earlier this month I attended my first event in 10 months as a non-booth-babe, and now I’m getting to focus on my more traditional interests. 

What’s on the agenda this week?

I’m looking forward to return visits to the folks at Sandisk, Opengear, and Cradlepoint. Cradlepoint was the first interview I did two years ago at Interop 2013, and I’ve been a customer on my own for many years; Opengear was a presenter at Tech Field Day Extra at Cisco Live 2013; and I last talked with Sandisk at Storage Field Day 5 about a year ago, as well as having been a Fusion-io customer at a previous job. 

I have a couple of other meeting requests out, so we may hear from a couple of other POHO/SOHO/ROBO/lab staples, and I’ll at least be dropping by their booths in the Interop Expo to see what’s new. 

While I’m only recording this week for notetaking convenience, I am starting to ponder what to do about the podcast I’ve been thinking about for a couple of years. So maybe I can pull in some interesting people from time to time… last night’s conversation over Burger Bar shakes with Chris Wahl and Howard Marks probably would have been fodder for several podcasts alone (and I don’t think any of us even had any alcohol!).

And seeing as a number of my friends are presenting this year, including Chris and Howard, I’ll be trying to make my way to their sessions (although there’s a LOT of overlap, and triple-booking isn’t uncommon… there’s a lot more than the Expo floor to experience at Interop, as always).

So where do we go from here?

If you’re at Interop, who are you looking forward to seeing/hearing/heckling/buying drinks for? (And if you’d like to meet up, catch me on Twitter at @gallifreyan.) If not, check out the exhibitor list at interop.com/lasvegas and let me know who you are curious about on that list.