2020 turns out to be a hardware refresh year for ROMWNET.

I’ve upgraded the network to a 10Gbps backplane using a Netgear XS716T linking to the already existingNetgear M4100-26G through a 4Gbps LACP connection.

I’ve added a Asustor AS7010T to the mix for storage and backup archival purposes. I went ahead and upgraded the box to include an additional 8GB of RAM and a 10Gb network adapter. In total, I have 32TBs of storage split between magnetic state and solid state.

Infrastructure Nodes

These passively cooled and self-contained Hyper-V machines host virtual machines critical to network operations. These virtual machines keep the network up and the Internet accessible in case the main cluster goes offline for whatever reason. Critical services include a Firewall, Intrusion Detection System, Mail Smarthost System, Authentication Systems, and a Z-wave Home Automation Controller.

Specifications:

Cluster Nodes

These actively cooled Hyper-V machines are configured in a automatic failover configuration for all the remaining virtual machines on the network.

Originally I attempted to re-use the spare M350 chassis I had lying around with the X11SDV, but I discovered that the heatsink alone could not dissipate enough heat to keep the system from shutting off while idling for 5 minutes. So, I tried the SCE300 with the Noctua NF-A4x20 PWM fans which would allow the system to stay up while idling but would shutdown under load.

I ended up using the Supermicro FAN-0100L4 fans which move enough air to keep the system cool while even under load.

Specifications:

Conclusion

Overall, I have been very happy with the systems performance and stability over the last few months. My only complaint about the new configuration, over the old configuration, is the fan noise even when most of the system is idle.

Someday…

—– Rom

After a bit of research and experimentation, I figured out how to fix my permalink issue due to the conversion from DasBlog to WordPress. I’ve also fixed up all the broken links and images within the various blog posts.

At this point, I think I’ve completed everything I need to do to believe I’ve completely migrated everything to the Worldpress environment.

—– Rom

After a seriously long time, I’ve finally upgraded my blogging platform to WordPress. Dasblog was no longer being supported and I started receiving emails from a security firm (known to me) stating that my blog was being used as an open redirection relay for bad actors.

I managed to migrate all my previous blog posts, but was unable to keep the comments, trackbacks, or pings. I haven’t yet figured out how to handle the DasBlog permalink issue yet, maybe I’ll get to that at some point. Sorry for breaking all the existing links.

—– Rom

So yesterday Candace and I were outside and noticed a little snake trying to eat a small frog. The snake wasn’t actually able to swallow te frog and eventualy the frog got away. Here is a picture of Candace holding the snake before putting back in the yard.

I took a bunch of pictures of the snake trying to swallow the frog, they can be found in the Photo Album.

—– Rom

Over the last few weeks I’ve been upgrading ROMWNET. My bandwidth requirements have been increasing pretty quick, last December my website served up 2.5GBs of data, last month it served up 3GBs. Already this month it has served up 4GBs and climbing.

Most of the traffic is coming from the various search engines and web crawlers out there. I am actually surprised at how many different search engines there are.

It was pretty apparent by the middle of last month that my network equipment was no longer capable of handling the load I needed it to handle anymore. Using my phone during certain times of the day was useless, I use Vonageand since my primary firewall/router was a Netgear FWAG114 which didn’t support QOS packets queues, my phone would cut in and out if the search engines started to download a few pictures at the same time.

As good as the FWAG114 was, it would still crash if you were using BitTorrent and was downloading something with 2000 or 2500 seeders.

In this major overhaul I also wanted to reclaim my notebook which was my acting VM server since my media center machine had been out of commission since the move.

So after a couple of weekends of work and some new equipment I now have something better than I had before, with most of my requirements fulfilled.

I purchased three M300-LCD systems, used two of them as VM servers, and one as a pfSense 1.0.1 embedded firewall device.

Setting up pfSense turned out to be a non-trivial exercise with the M300-LCD since the gigabit Ethernet adapters have a newer PCI identifier then the version of FreeBSD that pfSense relies on knows how to deal with. I’ll write another post about that experience.

—– Rom

Happy New Year Everyone!!!

—– Rom

Akismet announced they fixed the issue my blog was having with their service.

So, thank you Akismet for fixing the issue. 🙂

—– Rom

Well I installed a newer version of dasBlog which has better error handling when using the Akismet spam blocking service.

As of right now things seem to be working with them again, I sent them a network sniff of a failure last night.

I still haven’t been able to reproduce or fix the Firefox 2.x problem. For now the solution seems to be use a different browser, I don’t like the solution but it is the only one I have at present.

—– Rom

I’ve had several people tell me comments were not working the last couple of days.

It turns out two problems were happening at the same time.

My ISP’s DNS servers are freaking out about something and not fulfilling requests, and my blog could not successfully find Akismet to verify comments with.

OzzFan originally reported the problem but I had forgotten I was already logged into my blogging software and so it doesn’t run my comments through the spam filter.

I have switched my machines over to using OpenDNSDNS Servers, Akismet is still giving me a problem though so I have it disabled for right now.

Sorry about the problems everybody, I wasn’t intentionally blocking anybody from posting anything good or bad about me or BOINC.

—– Rom