As an engineer who is new to homelabs, networking, and software configuration, one of the first and simplest improvements to my quality of life was setting up a Pi-hole! In this Pi-hole install guide, we’ll go through the basic steps one needs to do to lower the number of advertisements in their life. This Pi-hole

Hi, my name is Alex and this a look into my homelab. I have always been passionate about tech, but my interest in IT started about 13 years ago. My first home lab setup consisted of just a Dell Dimension E521 desktop. Back then, the OS to play with was Windows Server 2003. This setup

The Serial Cables PCIe Gen4 m.2 adapter (PCI4-AD-x4M2-04-G4) allows test labs and users to add an extra Gen4 slot PCIe x4 to desktops and servers with a supported motherboard. Traditionally, m.2 adapters offer enterprises a cost-effective boot-drive alternative for servers (without taking up a front-mount slot); however, this highly customizable adapter can be used for

Video surveillance is an interesting vertical as it has a lot of seemingly contradictory requirements. On the one hand, it must have a high level of availability and be secure, reliable, and able to process different video streams efficiently in real time. On the other hand, it needs to be able to run in locations

Earlier this year, Dell Technologies launched a new storage array line, PowerStore, geared to contend in the highly competitive midrange storage arena. PowerStore was designed to not only meet today’s storage needs, but also be compatible with the new ways in which storage is consumed, supported, purchased, and managed in the future. To get a

We’ve previously reviewed Intel’s SSD Toolbox, a GUI application for managing and updating Intel’s SSDs. Instead of updating the software, the company up and replaced it at the end of last year with the new Intel Memory and Storage (MAS) Tool. Sometimes it is better to just start from scratch and build it the way

QNAP Systems is continuing to expand its QuTS hero line with the QNAP TS-h2490FU NAS. This 2U, rackmount NAS is more performance-oriented with a second-gen AMD EPYC CPU and all NVMe flash storage. Being a “hero” NAS, it is ZFS-based, that while lending itself to more enterprise features, it tends to pull overall performance down.

In a recent article, we looked at one of the more interesting technologies currently being deployed in the datacenter: disaggregated hyperconverged infrastructure (dHCI). In particular, we looked at HPE’s implementation of dHCI as they are a leader in this technology. As a recap, dHCI is similar to hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI) in the sense that it

With this lab effort, we wanted to create a tiny but powerful 3-node Proxmox VE 6.3 cluster. We’ve been impressed by the Lenovo Nano line of PCs, so we snagged three more for this experiment.  Using Lenovo ThinkCentre m90n’s, we can demonstrate the amount of computational power and storage performance, that can be fit in