pfSense – What it is?

Posted on July 19, 2012 by Mitchell

What is pfSense?

“pfSense is a free, open source customized distribution of FreeBSD tailored for use as a firewall and router. In addition to being a powerful, flexible firewalling and routing platform, it includes a long list of related features and a package system allowing further expandability without adding bloat and potential security vulnerabilities to the base distribution. pfSense is a popular project with more than 1 million downloads since its inception, and proven in countless installations ranging from small home networks protecting a PC and an Xbox to large corporations, universities and other organizations protecting thousands of network devices. ”

More Information

Posted in Home Lab | Tagged , , | Leave a comment

ZFS File Server – Harddrive Upgrade

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Mitchell

The server was purchased with 5 x 1.5TB drives.  4 of which are Western Digital Green drives and the other was a Seagate 7200rpm drive.  In order to make sure the Seagate drive won’t cause a problem later, I decided to remove it and replace the drive with another Western Digital Green drive.  I also wanted to add an additional drive in order to full out the available slots.  The Dell Poweredge 2950 has 6 total harddrive slots.  I ordered two new Western Digital Green drives and a few days later installed them in the server without many issues.  The only issue I encountered was that I didn’t make sure the server contained 6 drive trays.  When I received the new drives I realized that one of the hot swap bays didn’t have a harddrive tray in it so I ordered one from Amazon and it was there the next day.

Posted in Home Lab | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment

ZFS File Server – Memory Problems

Posted on July 17, 2012 by Mitchell

After booting the server an error was displayed that two of the memory modules had failed the memory test and I could press F1 to continue.  I continued to install Freenas and didn’t think much of it.  The available memory displayed in Freenas was 2GB instead of the 4GB that are installed.  Eventually I looked into the issue and it ended up being that the memory modules were not seated correctly anymore after all the moving and transporting of the server.  I reseated all the modules and they all passed without any problems.  Now the server has all 4GB of memory available for Freenas.

Posted in Home Lab | Tagged , , , , | Leave a comment