2U Supermicro servers are my go-to. These are much quieter than 1U servers, but the fans spin at 8800RPM. The IPMI fan modes available are Full (9000RPM), Heavy IO (6000RPM), and Optimal (supposed to auto-adjust). Unfortunately, setting the Fan Mode to Optimal seems to have a floor speed of 4500RPM, which is too loud. Even though my servers are in the garage, I sometimes work on projects there and can’t have it that noisy! In the past, I’ve replaced Supermicro fans with low RPM Antec or Noctua fans, but since I moved my homelab to the garage I don’t need it to be that quiet. Here’s my script ..read more

Good morning. Today is March 31st. ? It’s World Backup Day. This is a good day to review your backup strategy. I thought I’d share a cloud backup experiment I’ve been running for 9-months. I hope you find it helpful. I needed a cloud service for my offsite backups… the two prominent services are BackBlaze B2 and Amazon S3. I wasn’t sure which would be cheaper. But there’s one way to find out. For the last 9 months I’ve been backing up my TrueNAS data to both BackBlaze B2 and AWS S3. About the NAS Data My TrueNAS Data that I’m backing up to the cloud consists of the following: 1.39 TB Archive ..read more

Our Dell Laptops were EOL (End of Life) for BIOS security updates. This time, I refreshed with MacBooks. I used to use Macs so they’re not new to me. But a decade ago, I ran into issues with a lemon Macbook and Apple being unable to provide support in North Idaho. It takes all day to drive down to the nearest Apple store and back. After they had me drive down to Spokane twice, eating up two Saturdays, I decided to use Dell. If you get next-day business support at least Dell will send a tech to your house which is a lot better than driving to Spokane–although Dell seems to be having trouble sta ..read more

Whoever is slothful will not roast his game,     but the diligent man will get precious wealth. — Proverbs 12:27 LSB Before hitting the tools, I categorize my work into the following areas: Tasks – Small units of work. Usually < 1 day. Responsibility Areas – Ongoing operations for which I’m responsible. Projects – Groupings of tasks to accomplish a large goal. Goals/Vision – Long-term > 1 year objectives with a defined outcome. Themes – Overarching areas of attention for the year. Here are the tools I use to manage projects & tasks. Tasks (Microsoft To Do) For ..read more

When Pops was a teen he and some of the older boys would sneak out of church and hang around outside. One day a handful of young kids fell asleep and their parents took them out and put them in the back of their wagons or cars, and returned to the service. My Grandpops and friends thought it would be a good prank to swap all the sleeping kids. To my grandfather’s delight, the parents didn’t check and went home with the wrong children. Of course not everyone had a phone (think party lines) so it was a mess and took all afternoon for the parents to sort out the kids and get them to the right fam ..read more

By now, almost everyone has heard of the LastPass breach. Most cybersecurity professionals are taking a well-reasoned approach that we need to take action but let’s do it right. Here are my thoughts: First off, I must compliment LastPass on two things: They knew they got hacked. They had the integrity to disclose it publicly. LastPass had tools in place to detect data exfiltration. I suspect several password managers have been hacked without even realizing it. That said, what did the hackers get? The hackers got the encrypted vaults and data from fields that were not encrypted. I addressed ..read more

To make more room in the house (converting my home office into a bedroom), I moved my homelab into the garage. It’s still a work in progress, the cable management is a mess, but that’s about as good as it’s going to get for a while, as I have other things to attend to, but here’s the progress so far. Homelab in the Garage Homelab Equipment in Ascending Order: Eaton 5P 1500RT UPS Battery Backup 3 Mini-ITX Supermicro servers running Proxmox VE and TrueNAS Scale. You are loading this website from the server on the left. In hindsight, I should have gotten rackmount servers, but I didn’t think I’d ..read more

There are lots of features in this little box. It even has a printer in there somewhere. My Brother MFC-L3770CDW LED Printer / Scanner / Copier HP LaserJet 4 (from Wikipedia Commons) HP used to make decent laserjet printers, like my dad’s HP LaserJet 4 from the 1990’s. That engine is a workhorse rated for a duty cycle of 20,000 pages per month. It’s so reliable that many have done a million prints and are still running to this day! HP went downhill from there. And not just HP. Printers nowadays are cheaply made, designed to sell you ink, locked to a cloud service, and have DRM-protected ink ca ..read more

How to shop for mortgages and pay your mortgage off early. Noelle Asks: Hey Ben! Do you have any resources/advice for finding a good mortgage lender? Hi, Noelle. Here are 9 Tips on finding mortgage lenders: 1. Compare Mortgage Options Even if you don’t use them, the AimLoan.com website will let you compare various scenarios without you giving your information or doing a credit check.  No other broker will get you information like this ahead of time.  You can see all your options and decide what you like best. It’s basically a game of (a) interest rate, (b) closing costs/po ..read more

This post is an unscientific spot test I did of Verizon, AT&T, and T-Mobile providers in the greater Sandpoint, Idaho area. What’s the best mobile provider in North Idaho? Verizon, by far, has the best network coverage, but it is oversold and slows to a crawl at times. T-Mobile is the only network with usable 5G in Sandpoint, is the fastest, and the best at penetrating buildings. AT&T had the worst signal of the three, especially inside buildings or in rural areas. But has the best-prepaid plan if you frequent Canada or Mexico. Overlay of Verizon, T-Mobile, and AT&TSummary of Wir ..read more