Outlook 2013 – Attachment Check Reminder

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This may very well be the best new feature of Outlook 2013 – it should hopefully prevent people from forgetting to attach attachments to emails. Here’s how it works – you can try it for yourself! Type up an email and include the words “have attached a file” or something similar and don’t actually attach anything. Then click send – and you get a nice reminder stating that you may have forgotten to attach a file. … Read more…

LogMeIn Free Limited to 10 Machines

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Recently, I logged in to my LogMeIn account to provide some “remote support” to my parents when I noticed a nice error message stating that You will soon have to pay for more than 10 computers – the free version will be limited to 10 computers only. I was able to remove a few computers that had either been replaced or that I was no longer actively managing…but I know of several companies that use … Read more…

FreeNAS Build Project: Part 1

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FreeNAS Build: Part 1 – Turn on a Power Supply without a Motherboard After doing much research, I’ve decided to move forward with my FreeNAS build for my home lab\storage. I will be storing VMware datastores via NFS and tons of files via CIFS. The system will be configured (for now) as follows: HP DL360G5 2x Dual-Core Xeon 3.0GHz 32GB RAM 4 1Gb NICs IBM ServeRAID M1015 flashed to an LSI-92118i HP SAS Expander Habey ESC-2122C for 12 … Read more…

Comcast Xfinity Fastest In Home WiFi?!?

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Comcast has been touting a new “feature” to try to keep up with Verizon FiOS – it is all over radio ads and TV commercials…they have ‘The fastest In-Home WiFi’! Way to go, Comcast – let’s make a bogus claim, not back it up and confuse customers while you’re at it! First let’s compare the most common Internet speeds from both providers: Comcast: 50Mbps down, 10Mbps up – $75 per month FiOS: 50Mbps down, 20Mbps … Read more…

FreeNAS – ESX and NFS; Synchronous Writes and the ZIL

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I’ve been testing FreeNAS lately – connecting ESX hosts via NFS for virtual machine storage. Being POSIX compliant, ZFS must abide by any calls made with the o_sync flag set meaning essentially that all disk activity must be written to stable storage before success is returned. This includes most commonly databases, file server operations and most importantly NFS. This means that the ZIL (ZFS intent log) will be used as a special place on disk in the pool … Read more…

Habey ESC-2122C Storage Server Chassis Review

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I have been testing lots of storage software lately – since a NetApp Filer is overkill for a home lab environment, I’m sticking with other software based storage. The goal has always been to serve storage for two things – Fast storage for an ESX cluster and lots of storage to share over the network with CIFS. The first iteration was a DL380G5 with a p800 card connected via external SAS to an MSA50. The … Read more…

Insteon Review – Part 1: The Test Device

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I have long been interested in getting into Home Automation ever since X10 came out many moons ago. Having watched, researched, and debated several of the major HA vendors and products, I finally decided to take the plunge. The choice was not easy – products based on UPB or Z-Wave seemed to provide a higher reliability than others…but they also came with a higher price tag. X10 essentially died off…Insteon has a great range of … Read more…

FreeNAS Performance: Part 3

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I recently storage-VMotion’d all of the lab home lab VMs over to FreeNAS based storage. It is an NFS share based on 4 10K 146G spindles configured for RAIDZ – deduplication is turned off, instead opting for lzjb compression. The physical specs of the FreeNAS host are the same as in this post. Keep in mind that there are several other VMs banging away at these 4 disks. That said, 75% write\25% read (75% random) is considerably … Read more…

New Insteon Micro Modules

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New from Insteon – Micro Modules! At just under 2″ x 2″ x .7″ – they will pretty much fit anywhere! These could very easily fit behind any switch in a box, or pretty much anywhere. Last line is the best part: Every Micro Module is Dual-Band! This is game changing! Plus the sense wires for existing switches…can’t wait to get a hold of a few of these. More info is available HERE at SmartHome