Building a NAS, Part 1: Requirements
A friend would like a new NAS, with a combo of features and performance that would normally place them in the $10k+ range for enterprise grade storage. I offered to see what I could do with hardware from Ebay, and I figured I’d write down my thought process for this kind of thing, in case it’s of use to other homelab shoppers.
Recovering the Intel Management Engine
As I was setting up my new NAS, I got a nasty surprise: psrinfo, Illumos’s command to list processor information, told me that my CPU only has 1 core. The CPU is a Xeon E3-1220v3, which the Intel Ark says is a 4-core processor. What’s going on?
Why are ethernet jumbo frames 9000 bytes?
In a marathon of Bryan Cantrill interviews, Bryan wondered out loud why “jumbo” ethernet frames are 9000 bytes. These days, that’s not a particularly jumbo number, and it’s also a bizarre number. Why not a power of two, or at least a nice round 10000?