Recent content by mgraves

I had not been aware of the schism that seems to have arisen in the pfsense community over the past year or so. It's been discussing ion passing on the m0n0wall mailing list since the announcement on Sunday. Unless some new alternative emerges I'll likely deploy an instance of pfsense when...

From the project web site.... http://m0n0.ch/wall/end_announcement.php Dear m0n0wall enthusiasts, on this day 12 years ago, I have released the first version of m0n0wall to the public. In theory, one could still run that version - pb1 it was called - on a suitably old PC and use it to...

Just a note to say that I finally purchased a FreeNAS Mini loaded with 8 TB of disks. It's a very nice system, but a little complicated to get setup. It's worth noting that our aged LaCie 5BIG Network drive took a weekend to backup it's contents. Restoring that same content to the Mini took...

Does anyone have experience with the small commercial NAS that iX systems offers? I was once a fan of FreeNAS and like the idea of ZFS. The Mini seems only slightly more costly than some of the much less capable commercial NAS. Tim, any plans on reviewing the commercial offering? Michael

Actually, it could make some sense. LaCie had made a concerted effort to develop its brand with respect to the creative markets. They put in a pretty decent showing at some of the video, broadcast and post-production trade shows. They were selling large, cheap storage into the low-end of those...

As it happens my LaCie 5Big Network disk just lost it's second disk this past week. It had been rocking 5x Seagate 2TB in RAID 10+Spare. Back when I bought that aged beast it was loaded with 5x 500 GB and I ran it RAID5. I twice upgraded it; first to 1TB drives, then to 2TB drives. Bad...

I would happily provide a handful of dual-band USB wifi interfaces if I had some confidence that the 5 GHz band was not as crowded as the 2.4 GHz band. That overcomes the lack of clients with the exception of a few tablets & cell phones.

Yes, we pay a company for a wired net drop to the booth. Then we arrange our local network with a Netgear AP. The trouble is that dozens of other exhibitors so the same thing, and the venue itself provides wifi to attendees for a fee. That's a lot of APs in the same physical space.

I recently had a pretty bad experience with wifi at a trade show exhibition hall. There details are here: http://www.mgraves.org/2011/04/when-the-wifi-blows-experience-at-nab-2011/ Which leads me to ask a question: would making use of 5 GHz by way of a dual band AP and some USB clients...

All details here: http://www.mgraves.org/2010/08/the-sprint-3g-mifi-one-year-later/ Issues with battery life and the inability to use the Sprint Mifi via a USB connection. The ability to share the access between multiple machines is only occasionally useful. The problem of keeping it powered...

I am considering abandoning my Sprint issued Mifi in favor of a USB stick type of 3G/4G wireless access. In order to do that I'd like to buy a travel router that converts the USB stick into a wifi AP for those rare times when I truly need to share the access amongst a few machines. Does...

Just yesterday I had a conversation with my ITSP about firewalls & routers. Their perspective on it is really simple; only Cisco and Juniper have application layer gateways that correctly handle the wide variety of NAT & media handling issues related to SIP traffic. They recommend that we...

I found you series of reviews on netbooks immensely helpful. It was the single biggest factor in my choosing the HP Mini 2140. More recently the review of the meraki mesh wifi gear was very timely. It was published just days after I decided to buy similar, but cheaper gear from Open-Mesh.com...

The T5700 that I used was a bit vintage. As a result it's BIOS would only support 512 MB of memory. I tried 1GB and 2 GB DIMMs as I had them on hand, but neither would work. It just wouldn't POST. I ordered a 512 MB DIMM from an online vendor and that work fine when it arrived a couple of...

I think that 128 MB is not enough memory to run both FreeNAS and SqueezeCenter. My T5700 has 512 MB and runs fine. I started with 256 MB and it ran in that, but not well.