Rick Gouin

Tag: Homelab

Perform Data Conversions in Windows Calculator

· Rick Gouin
calculator

I don’t know about you, but in my line of work, we frequently have to convert between various data measurements.  Whether this is storage capacity or network throughput, we convert between TB, TiB, GB, GiB, and others every day.  If you visit my calculators page, you’ll even find a converter I wrote available there.  Believe it or not, I actually used that converter sometimes… until today, when I was shown this tip: Windows Calculator can do these conversions right out of the box! First, what are we talking about? Ever notice how if you buy a 1 TB hard drive, […]

Self host Bitwarden in AWS

· Rick Gouin

I’ve used a number of different password managers over the years.  I was a LastPass user for a long time, but recently felt compelled to take a look at other options in this space.  After a number of evaluations, I’ve settled on a new option: Bitwarden. My two favorite parts about BitWarden: There is a self-host option, and the project is open source.  There are a number of different open source implementations of various aspects of the project, which is awesome. I decided to deploy my self-hosted Bitwarden deployment in AWS.  My first decision to make was “how should I […]

Nutanix CE 5.0 Released

· Rick Gouin

Nutanix 5.0 Asterisk was released in the commercial version about 2 weeks ago.  Then, about a week ago, it became available in the CE version.  I have already upgraded my home lab to run CE 5.0, and wanted to take a few minutes to talk about some of the key updates in this new release.  There have been a LOT of changes, but I’m just going to focus on the things that I think are big news.  Most of this stuff applies to both the commercial and the CE release. For those of you that are wondering, I have this […]

How to Install Crashplan on Your Headless NAS

· Rick Gouin

One of the most popular articles of all time on this blog has been an article on how to get CrashPlan running on a headless server.  Crashplan changed some things in how this needs to be done, so my old article was no longer correct.  I went through the process and updated this blog, so as of today, this process is working correctly. Many of you run a NAS of some sort at home.  Crashplan is a great choice to backup these devices, but its not terribly intuitive to do so, and it’s technically not supported to use Crashplan in […]

Running Nutanix CE on the Lenovo TS140

· Rick Gouin

I’ve been meaning to setup a box running Nutanix CE for a while.  I’m not going to use it for my “production” services at home, because I don’t need 3 nodes, and 1 node doesn’t provide me with any fault tolerance.  That said, I thought I might be able to use it for customer demos, presentations, and lab type activities.  I especially want somewhere to play around with AHV. I have an IBM TS140 hanging around, which I talked a bit about here.  I decided to try and get CE up and running on that system.  There are just a […]

Comparing the IBM TS140 to the Dell T110 II

· Rick Gouin

I have both servers running in my home lab right now, and thought a brief comparison of the 2 servers might be interesting to some folks who are shopping for their own home lab components. In terms of acquisition cost, the servers will be fairly comparable.  At times, you can find great deals on either one. As you can see, the Dell Poweredge T110 II is physically larger than the IBM Thinkserver TS140.  The Dell stands a few inches taller and is perhaps 1 inch deeper.  I have them installed on a shelf in a standard 19″ rack.  Both units […]

Use Powershell to Edit MP3 Tags

· Rick Gouin

Here is a bit of a change from the usual datacenter type posts. A nameless friend of mine recently plugged her Ipod into a different PC that was set to auto-sync. It appeared to erase all of her MP3s from her Ipod without prompting or intervention.  I am not familiar with iTunes, iPods, or any Apple products, but a quick search suggested this was a common occurrence.  There are even a few software packages out there to recover the information, as the files don’t actually get deleted.  It seems just some meta data gets removed.  After running one such software […]