Mike Trello’s Technology Musings
Home lab, virtualization, servers, storage, networking and whatever technology I’m tinkering with.
Recent Articles
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Open Media Vault (OMV) on my ESXi server
Background Openfiler had been serving me reliably for about four years but had begun to seriously slow down as my media pool grew. My project of ripping all my DVDs and BluRays to the pool had slowly increased the pool size. The data was spread across three independent drives in the server (I don’t use…
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Plex Media Server (follow-up)
Roku encoding all our movies A couple weeks ago we installed a Roku with a Plex channel on it so we can access our home media archive from the bedroom TV (and our mobile devices). I have discovered over the past two weeks that none of our files can be direct-played on the Roku; they…
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Poor Man’s Wireless Access Point
A couple weeks ago I added a Roku to our bedroom TV setup. I noticed that the wireless signal was listed as merely ‘Fair’ on the Roku, and we routinely toggled between one and two bars on our Nook Color. The router was located in the basement, and the bedroom is on the second floor…
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Plex Media Server on Windows 2003 ESXi virtual machine
I’m always looking for ways to (cheaply) extend the capabilities of my home network. I have an XBMC box connected to our primary TV/speaker system, which is driven by media stored on an OpenFiler vm on my ESXi server. That works wonderfully and is easy enough for my children to navigate. There have been times…
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XBMC Live 10.0 CPU utilization on Zotac ZBOX HD-ND02
I have a Zotac ZBOX, which has been a wonderful little device. The Dual-core Atom within is not the most powerful of processors but the Ion graphics chip more than makes up for the CPU’s shortcomings. XBMC Live 10.0 runs on the machine and really maximizes the machine’s capabilities. A while back I ran some…
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Home Network Backups
The past two months I have been working on cleaning up the home network and streamlining my backup processes. Anyone who has accumulated PCs and hard drives over time knows that data creep can overburden your network. I used to split drives into a number of partitions to keep data segregated. Over time some partitions…
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Connect to Windows 2008 R2 NFS Datastore from ESXi 4.1
Background I had been successfully backing up to a NFS Datastore on my backup server running XP for the past year. Hardware issues began to crop up on the server (which was a hodgepodge of parts, most of which were at least seven years old) which necessitated a rebuild. A new motherboard, CPU and 8GB…
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AoE (ATA over Ethernet) benchmarks on my home network
This week I stumbled upon a technology that was new to me: AoE, or ATA over Ethernet. This protocol was being hyped as a faster, much cheaper alternative to iSCSCI and NFS. In a nutshell, AoE “is a network protocol, designed for simple, high-performance access of SATA devices over Ethernet”. I found a short description…
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Backing up XBMC Live 10.0 configuration to network CIFS share
The last several posts have described my foray into HTPC territory. My XBMC Live installation is humming along nicely on the Zotac ZBOX HD-ND02, and we are thoroughly enjoying it. Although the installation of XBMC Live was quick and painless, I have made quite a few changes to the skin settings, media paths, SSD settings,…
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Tuning a Solid State Drive (SSD) on XBMC Live 10.0 HTPC
I have a Kingston SSDNow S100 SS100S2/16G 2.5″ 16GB SATA II Internal Solid State Drive (SSD) in my home theater PC. Although this was my first actual taste of a SSD, I understood that TRIM must be enabled on the drive to keep it performing smoothly for the long haul. Otherwise it would gradually decline…