Networking

There are many reasons why I’m doing this. In the days when Virtual Machine was the thing, VMware Workstation was the go-to option for a Windows host to run VMs. We have to find cracked version for personal use, since there was no VirtualBox neither Hyper-V. Many years ago, when I first decided to have a proper homelab in my household, I went blindly into ESXi just because VMware Workstation has already installed on all of my computers. Although I was pretty like Proxmox during that time, it was considered for not so serious projects. ...

Days before mini-PC become a thing, there was no NUC, MinisForum or Beelink. It was the time of thin client and SFF (small-form-factor), manufacturers such as Shuttle, Dell and Lenovo were made a lot of these. Back then, the performance of SoC was too weak so that even laptops wouldn’t use them. But my first dedicated home lab machine was an Atom D525, which was called embedded industrial computer. It served as a router rather than server due to its performance and heat. That was also the time when I got into the world of m0n0wall derivatives (pfSense/FreeNAS). ...

Recently I came down to want a mobile hotspot when going out of home, something like Netgear Nighthawk M series, but able to flash custom firmware (OpenWrt/pfSense equivalents) and cheap. However, there is no such thing on the market even without budget consideration. So it has to be done with DIY, like USB tethering with a router. In the case of tethering or so called Ethernet over USB, we are using a phone as a cellular modem for our router. ...

RustDesk is my favorite remote desktop tool which is the best alternative to any closed-source solutions, such as TeamViewer and Anydesk. It’s kinda like Bitwarden in the post-breach era of the cloud password manager (LastPass/1Password) market. As a light user of RustDesk, I use it only occasionally. So I didn’t setup my own RD server on VPS even though I suppose to. For some reason, one of my RustDesk client got blocked to the official servers. So now I have enough reason to properly making it up. ...

Cheapskate’s NAS Migration from Unraid to Openmediavault For decades, I come across a lot of abandoned computers and recycled parts out of them. This article is about the recycled Dell Vostro 220s with LGA771 to LGA775 Mod I mentioned in the last post. It was running Unraid with a low power Xeon L5410 and 2 GB of RAM for many years. The only repair was a PSU replacement two years ago. ...