Why didn’t anyone tell me…

I haven’t written about my home ESXi server in a while, and remember, this is a good thing. Mostly it just works and I get along. The previous hardware combination if you remember was the following: ESXi supermicro pizza box. Internal SATA non-raid disk for the VMs. Adaptec 3805 card passed through to a CentOS [...]

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Sometimes, you realize you’re just expecthing things to be ‘just so.’ You want your knives on the left, forks in the middle, and spoons on the right. You want your peanut butter to be unnaturally smooth with oil on top, because as illogical as it is, you just plain want it that way. Difficult and [...]

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Notes that seem to need clearing up on the internet: 1. Handbrake is still your friend. In 0.9.4 (current version) use the profiles named “High” or “Normal” and all is well. They support HD if you see note 2. 2. Keep it under 4 gig. If you’re encoding to HD – make sure to use [...]

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So now I have a question for you all, my three loyal readers. I joined this Facebook thing in an effort to reconnect people to people – specifically myself to more distant relations, and myself to long lost hometown friends. But I can’t help but think as a new user, why do people stay there? [...]

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“What, Dave, more?” you ask. Yes, I’m afraid so. I’m afraid so. Trying to keep it short this time. All builds have a server, 4+ disk RAID5, and offer flexible storage expansion to keep them around for about 2 to 4 years. Each has a “Priced from scratch” number. Remember that this includes 4x $100 [...]

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One of the abstraction problems I had with plotting out home virtualization is that I’ve already solved a number of these problems, and I don’t have a dedicated budget to go about replacing my whole – working – infrastructure. But knowing how much electricity is lost and heat generated with each little power brick and [...]

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Apparently it’s time to start in on the project, as my Linksys router is melting. Getting any decent load on the router causes it to reset. This is especially problematic because it is the central switch in the network. That backup you were doing? Not so much. I borrowed a switch from the basement storage [...]

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In my previous post on the topic, I presented a couple alternative ways to get a lot of home infrastructure with little redundancy and some virtualization. The fact is, it’s pricey to do it ‘properly’. So I set out to look at the pros and cons of some alternative methods that make it a more [...]

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How will Dave centralize his home infrastructure?

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encode Back Story We finally stepped part way into the HD era, by attaching a PS3 to our SD television. Sacrilege, I know, but it’s what I have for now, and the economy isn’t getting any better this week. But, as we only have two games for it (Little Big Planet and Mater-National Racing), we [...]

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