PC-BSD

I’ve been wanted to get back to where we started, specifically my MacBook Air (MBA) and doing something with the spare partition I created when I setup eOS, but I hadn’t really found the time or decided what I was going to use it for.

Given FreeNAS runs on FreeBSD I thought that was probably the most sensible option, so decided to give PC-BSD a shot, mainly as I expected that to be a lot easier than trying to install FreeBSD and then get a desktop environment up and running (although I had managed that in a virtual machine running a Xfce desktop).  If PC-BSD works, then maybe I’ll try that next.

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Harmony Elite Remote

After getting to grips with Alexa (well kind of) I thought I’d ramp up the home automation and get a Harmony remote to consolidate all my other remotes and allow for some further voice activation.

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HDD failure

Always a pain, but at least with my FreeNAS set-up, it’s never too much of a worry knowing I can tolerate 2 failed drives without any loss of data, whilst also having the safety net of a full local backup.

To be honest, the drive in question hadn’t actually failed but had reported SMART errors for a month or so.  It started with just 8 unrecoverable sectors, which I tend to ignore for a short time.  Only when it jumps above 8 do I take action, which it did yesterday.

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VirtualBox

In my earlier FreeNAS post I talked about my use of VirtualBox (VB) and thought it might be useful to do a ‘How to…’ type blog showing show to create a VB jail and get a Virtual Machine (VM) up and running.  It’s really not that difficult, I promise!

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Never underestimate the power of the Dark Side

I’ve seen these decals on other people’s Mac’s before, and always thought they looked a bit tacky, but when I saw this one pop up in my Facebook feed, I couldn’t help but click the link.  

It cost less than £10 delivered from www.decalontop.com so I was seduced by the Dark Side 😀

 

It was a bit of a pain to detach from the backing paper and then transfer onto my Macbook, and initially, I wasn’t too impressed as it had a number of trapped air bubbles (even after trying to move them to an edge of a credit card) which made it look a bit naff. 

After a few days though they’ve completely gone, and I now think it looks great!  Hopefully, it will last the 3 years I plan to keep it for…

FreeNAS (part 2)

So I finished off part 1 with the following list of things I use FreeNAS for…

  • Plex Media Server (a couple of jails)
  • PlexPy
  • PlexEmail
  • emby
  • ownCloud
  • nextCloud
  • openVPN
  • Unbound (DNS)
  • Calibre
  • Webserver (FEMP)
  • Nginx Proxy
  • VirtualBox (4 jails running various Windows, Linux and FreeBSD OSs)

Here’s a little more about how I use them! (more…)