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