I recently posted about the process I took to get data from an old FreeNAS to a new one. Truth be told, that process did work (and reasonably well), but I ended up tweaking things a bit more … actually a lot more. I won’t go into details about it, as it isn’t really relevant, but as I was mucking about, I found myself running a handful of commands over and over. ...

The first stop for us at Tech Field Day 12 was Cohesity’s office, where we had a nice breakfast waiting for us (along with a great delegate gift consisting of a multi-end USB cable, a notebook, a portable battery, and a Polaroid Snap camera). Soon after settling in, we got straight down to business. I had previously written a ’ primer’ regarding Cohesity, and I saw them present recently at the Toronto VMUG, but I still wasn’t fully familiar with the brand or their offering. Cohesity markets itself as secondary storage, a market that its founder, Mohit Aron, felt was being underserved. Without repeating everything from my previous post, the common use-cases for secondary storage include data sets such as backup targets, cold data, and test / dev. ...

Igneous Systems recently presented at Tech Field Day 12, and honestly, I was quite looking forward to learning more about them. All I really knew going into the presentation was that they provided ‘cloud storage, on premises’. Once we started picking into the details, things definitely got interesting, along with some mind-crippling moments when trying to digest what was presented. A Quick Overview Igneous’ stance is that data is growing at a tremendous rate. Things such as IoT sensors, media (4K video for example), and just raw data (think bio-medical or mineral data), chew up lots of space. In fact, one of the delegates I was talking to mentioned that he goes through petabytes a year! So, the problem is very real, even though it may not be common. ...

A tool that I have been aware of for awhile now, but haven’t paid too much attention to (until recently) is Chocolatey. What is it, you may be asking yourself? It is essentially a package manager for Windows that is run via the command line. Various ‘flavours’ are available, ranging from free (which is what I use) to paid options. At the moment, there are 4343 community maintained packages, so you’ll likely find at some of what you need there. ...

I’ve been using FreeNAS for many, many years. I believe I started back in the .6 beta days, which if memory serves would have been somewhere around 2009ish? Over that time, I have had a handful of machines doing the work - three if I’m not missing anything. Power-related issues killed the first two (PSU / board death on one, and blown capacitors on another). I then scraped together some ‘old’ hardware at the time and built what is now my ‘current’ FreeNAS box. It is comprised of a whopping Pentium Dual-Core E6500 CPU and 4 GB of RAM. The real kicker is that it is running on a single 1.5 TB SATA drive. ...

Note: This post was written earlier this week, so some of the ’time contexts’ might be off. As I am writing this post, I am on my way to Tech Field Day 12 in San Jose. I am very excited about it, but deciding to come was actually a very stressful decision? As a bit of background, all of my costs are covered, I don’t need to do any prep work, and I don’t need to do anything after the fact. Of course, I have already done a lot of prep work (see my previous ‘Primer’ posts), and I do plan on doing ‘follow-up’ work after the fact. ...

A bit of a personal reflection post today, but this is also a topic I see that comes and goes in ‘waves’ amongst my peers and a lot of in the ‘vCommunity’. Imposter Syndrome is something that affects a lot of us, and it isn’t always easy to work through it. Timing on this is also impeccable, given that I just wrapped up my first Tech Field Day event. I’m not ready to start re-capping the event yet, but in the spirit of the vDM 30 in 30, I wanted to get something posted today. ...

I could have sworn that I have written about this before, but a search of my blog didn’t return anything. Oh well, if I did write about this, please point it out if you find it so I can see if my viewpoint has changed / wavered at all. A common ’trait’ (for lack of a better word) that I have come across in IT folks in the past is a hesitation to engage vendor support. I know I was guilty of this early on in my career, but now I definitely try to avoid this. So, what do I mean by this? ...

In a previous post, I covered off some of the podcasts that I listen to on a regular basis. I tend to consume a lot of audio content, so that list was far from done. I still have a fairly long list of podcasts, but I am going to cut the remainder down to ones that I think are worth recommending to most folks. So, once again, in no particular order, here are some more podcasts you should check out if you have already. ...

This will be last of the primers for the upcoming Tech Field Day 12 event. Some of you may notice that I have not covered off Intel - unfortunately they have had to cancel their appearance due to a scheduling conflict on their end. Too bad as their sessions in the past have been quite informative. So, let’s talk about Dell EMC. Unless you have been living under a rock, you likely heard about the Dell and EMC merger that was finalized earlier this year. From the time it was announced (October 12, 2015) to the time the merger closed (September 7, 2016) there was a lot of speculation as to how things would look after the completion of the $67 billion deal. Things are still very much in a ‘settling’ phase, but the new behemoth is still moving forward. ...