Mike Trello’s Technology Musings
Home lab, virtualization, servers, storage, networking and whatever technology I’m tinkering with.
Recent Articles
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My Dodeca
In 2023, the Dell T3500 Workstation I had been using since 2016 as my daily driver had become very limiting. I had been working full-time remotely since 2017, so having a geriatric machine I spent eight or more hours (usually many more) in front of daily was a liability to my sanity. I decided to…
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After ten years, I’m back
After a decade away, I’ve decided to resume documenting some of my many technology diversions. A couple weeks back, I finally broke down and reworked my ArcadeCab.com site to make it more user-friendly. This was a long, long overdue task that had never quite made it to the top of my project list, but felt…
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Xeon W3670 Hyperthreading with Handbrake
Since I upgraded to my Dell T3500 early this year, I have really been enjoying how fast it encodes any Bluray rips thrown at it (I was previously using an AMD tri-core for that task). I decided to run a test today (it is 100F outside so the nice cool basement seemed preferable to that)…
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Migration to Dell T3500 Workstation
Since I traded computers with the kids’ community one so my son could play his games (apparently Plants V Zombies’ user experience on a dual-core AMD with integrated video is not good), I had felt its limitations. We purchased an HD camcorder last year but could not even play the 1080p/60 videos on the machine. …
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Veeam Endpoint protecting the household machines
I discussed Veeam Endpoint a while ago, and how much I enjoy it. All our Windows machines in the house, including my wife’s laptop, get backed up nightly to the OpenMediaVault storage pool. Some machines get the default 14 day protection, but my primary machine gets 21 days. The total storage used is reasonable given…
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Veeam Endpoint
As I’ve mentioned in previous posts, all the data on my network is backed up daily, with external and offsite backups updated manually. I’ve mostly neglected the boot drives of my three Win 7 PCs. I’ve toyed with a few different (free) backup products the last couple years, but nothing I decided to stick with.…
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Plex.tv
As anyone who has visited before, you know that I use the Plex channel on my Rokus, as well as using the Plex app on our tablets. Something I had not considered before was the ability to access our fairly extensive media collection from outside our home. PlexTV now gives me that capability. I decided…
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Ordered memory from Chinese ebay seller computex_tech
As I mentioned in a previous post, I thought it time to attempt a ram boost in the VMWare server. This would be to give me more headroom to do some Windows 10 testing. My normal suppliers (Newegg and Amazon) either didn’t have the DDR2 memory or it was priced like gold. So I decided…
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(Trying to) Upgrade memory in ESXi server
My ESXi server has been faithfully serving me for the past five years. As noted previously, it has just 8GB of ram installed (4x2GB). No, you did not misread that; eight gigabytes. This has been fine for my needs as the virtual machines running are not ram-hungry. The 2003 server, vortexbox, Openmediavault and an XubuntuLTS…
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The backup GPT table is not at the end of the disk, as it should be.
I began seeing an error in my vkernel logs in ESXi. The backup GPT table is not at the end of the disk, as it should be. This might mean that another operating system believes the disk is smaller. Fix, by moving the backup to the end (and removing the old backup)? This will also…