Setup a VPN free home office

Right we don't really like the VPN client provided by corporate or the customer you support.. dedicate client needed, multi-factor authentication, platform dependent... especially when you have multiple clients you need to use every day.

As a poor IT guy like me you may have tried getting a socks proxy through SSH tunneling, and you liked it...

Install ESXi 6.0 on HP ZBook 15 Mobile Workstation

It used to be pretty hard to install ESXi on HP Laptop but since 6.0 VMware made it pretty easy to do so. below is what I did on my ZBook 15 G1 laptop.

The hardware
It's a whole flash ESXi setup with three SSD drives:

ESXi 6.0 works on A1SAI-2750F OOTB

Back in version 5.5 it has issue with the Intel Giga ethernet but now much easier :) The board really has enough power to run a home lab using vSphere, only one thing missing would be VT-d...

New firewall/router at home

I used to be a big fan of Linksys home router. it's a pretty neat small device with all the features you would need for home use. I owned nearly 10 Linksys devides in the past 5 years. As I'm getting more and more devices at home and now I feel they are pretty weak and slow. You won't feel it if you only have a phone and two laptops, I just got too much (~30) devices that need network connection, including few Kodi streaming set-top boxes. DD-WRT gives more capabilities but it's still on the same weak hardware,  and really it's more like a hacked OS and not 100% reliable.

Flash IBM M1015 to IT Mode

I use M1015 RAID card as many others run FreeNAS. It's a card with hardware RAID support but with ZFS you probably don't want to use it (google why). Here are the steps to flash it into IT mode so it just passthrough the disks to ZFS.

I was able to install my low-profile card to my Supermiciro board in a mini-tower enclosure and flashed the bios in just few minutes, and it was successful.

Why HPGMS

Someone asked me why I choosed a domain name hpgms... Simple answer - those are the companies I worked for - HP PG GM MS. Pretty smart huh?

My FreeNAS build at home - Love it!!

I have been using consumer NAS production for many years (Buffalo LinkStation, IOmega ix2, etc.). they are `fine` products and easy to use. If you just need a shared storage on your home LAN to put your files there you're probably going to happy with them.

To me - they are weak and slow, period. I built my Giga home LAN since 2006 but I wasn't able to take full advantage of it at all. I only got an average ~25 - 30 MBps rate over Giga ethernet. for bigger files might be better around 40 MBps.

It's time to say Sayonara to all the consumer NAS product.

Moved to new domain blog.hpgms.com

Didn't realize jjyy.org has been owned by someone else for quite a while... I liked that name