Part 2: The Motherboard
Picking the right motherboard for our project was most likely the most difficult part. Besides the overwhelming amount of motherboards to choose from, we had a very strict set of demands:
- Must have two PCI-E x8 or x16 slots, three would even be better
- Must be supported under FreeBSD/FreeNAS 7.x/8.x
- Must offer at least 6 onboard SATA ports
- Must offer at least two, teamable or Link Aggregation (LAGG) compatible network interfaces, thee would even be better
- Must have an onboard USB port
- Must be server grade quality
- Must have an onboard Video card
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A NAS storage is no longer a luxury for the big companies that are able to spend 5-6 figures. For the last few years NAS storage has become a common product even to be found in small offices and home environments. Most of these products perform pretty good out-of-the-box and do exactly what they where designed to do; Store data and make it accessible through different protocols.
But….. i am looking for more. Most 4 to 6 drive solutions do not offer me the Terra-bytes needed to store my data. I need more and I’m not willing to pay an arm and a leg to get it. So I decided to build my own hardware setup and use FreeNAS to build our own NAS storage.
I’m going to build this unit on borrowed knowledge and good common sense. There are some pretty decent sources of information on the web, like the FreeNAS community or different public community forums. And a lot of DiY NAS builders that have paved the way.
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Filed Under (Windows Networking) by Just An Admin on 25-11-2010
Setting up a more advanced Wireless network within a business, school or other large organization network quickly brings you to use 802.1x for security reasons, allowing you to connect to a LDAP, RADIUS or Active Directory (AD) service. My brand new wireless network, consisting of a Ruckus ZoneDirector 1006 and five Ruckus 7363 Access Points was going to be connected to our Windows 2008 Server using Network Policy Services (NPS). Users connecting to this network have to be registered in the AD and be able to use that account to connect to the Wireless network. I know PSK/Certificate based solutions are offered too, even with the Ruckus product itself, but this is what we decided upon.
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Filed Under (Windows Networking) by Just An Admin on 22-11-2010
My current internet service provider does not support IPv6, yet. So to get some hands-on experience using IPv6 from my home computers I configured an IPv6 Tunnel offered by Hurricane Electric (http://ipv6.he.net/). This worked perfectly and never let me down.
Using IPv6 is not an activity you plan on doing. You just use it… or not. So it has been a few months that I last used my tunnel to connect to IPv6 services and found that is was no longer able to connect. When pinging an IPv6 host I got errors like Request Time Out or Could not find host.
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Filed Under (IIS 7, Windows Networking) by Just An Admin on 21-09-2009
Today i received my first UCC certificate from GoDaddy for use with an Office Communications Server and Exchange 2007. While installing the new certificate in IIS 7 i encountered the following error:
CertEnroll::Cx509Enrollment::p_InstallResponse: ASN1 bad tag value met. 0x8009310b
Upon checking the certificate store for the Local Computer, no certificate was installed. Within IIS 7 there is no trace of the certificate.
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