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Cake day: August 2nd, 2023

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  • I have never done RAID over USB, but have done various JBOD setups using SCSI. I think the general idea is that USB having such an easily disconnected connector plus the latency overhead on translating SATA to USB to SATA again means you have a higher chance of corruption. SCSI setups typically have connectors with locking mechanisms to prevent easy disconnection.

    If eSATA is an option it might be better for the performance and it has a latching mechanism to prevent easy disconnection. You can get a 2-port eSATA PCI card for about 50 bucks.

    Oh, and if you have a free PCI port, you could add internal SATA ports to mount the drives internally.



  • With TrueNas you can do it two ways: ISCSI disks that are mounted to the VMs or via NFS. With ISCSI you won’t have access to the data from the TrueNas side as the data will be stored as a volume file. With NFS you get the best of both worlds as you’ll be able to access the files via other TrueNas services like SMB/SFTP. I have my Jellyfin/Plex running via NFS and have few issues, though I’ve not tested it with large 4k/8k videos yet. I mostly run 1080p.




  • This would depend on whether the limit is defined as ingress or egress or both. For example AWS has free ingress traffic from the internet but there is a cost for egress traffic to the internet.

    A better solution would be to find a unmetered service, which means that you have a fixed transfer speed (e.g. 500 Mbit) but have unlimited bandwidth. OVH offers this in their VPS products.







  • In days past some drive vendors had different sector layouts for drives and would cause issues with raid. Pretty sure most nowadays are all the same layout and you won’t run into any issues. I still look to get the same drive model anyways just to be perfectly sure that there are no issues.

    Even then you may run into weird issues like one of my 1.2 TB enterprise ssd drives was reporting 1.12 TiB rather than 1.09 TiB the other 7 drives had. TrueNas refused to build a vdev with that drive and I had to return it to get a new one.


  • Typically a Fiber ISP will run Fiber optics only to your DEMARC (or Demarcation) point. This will be usually where your main cable (before any splits) or DSL line used to come in (in the US they’ve been using Orange tubes to indicate this and it will usually run to a panel in some closet or laundry). At the DEMARC they’ll install one of two things: a basic fiber to ethernet converter which will provide you a single ethernet port and a pure tap to the internet, or a Gateway device that will convert the fiber to multiple eithernet with NAT (usually providing other capabilites like TV, Phone, etc).

    If you have the latter, you may not get much say in what you can do with your connection, and would be limited to a DMZ mode that is configured on the Gateway. What you put behind the converter or gateway is up to you.


  • I’ve got my mom setup on their PC backup service, no complaints so far (on the Backblaze side that is, she still insists that she doesn’t need continuous backups even though I’ve had to restore multiple times for her).

    I switched my backups from Crashplan to B2 as it was significantly cheaper than going to AWS. B2 is more expensive than what I was paying for Crashplan Pro Unlimited (about 8x for the amount of data I have), but I have more peace of mind with it not relying on Crashplan’s terrible Java client.

    A reminder that the only good backup is a tested backup.


  • Yes, ULA are one of the exceptions I mentioned. It covers fc00::/7 which is fc00 to fdff, though I believe most use just the top half. I use one for an intermediate network between my edge router and my primary firewall to not consume one of my limited /64 networks.

    I haven’t played with IPV6 NAT much. I know its use is a bit discouraged as NAT was always designed as a stopgap measure for IPV4 exhaustion. It might be a good option if you need additional space and your ISP doesn’t support additional prefixes. Just keep in mind that if you use these in DNS, they won’t be accessible externally.


  • Its a bit complicated and depends on your ISPs support level.

    If your ISP supports basic IPv6 they will likely use SLAAC or DHCPv6 to advertise the /64 that any directly connected devices, like your router, can use (/64 being the default size for a single LAN segment, even between point-to-point connections). If you have devices behind that router that want to use IPv6, you will need additional prefixes. The most common method nowadays is to use Prefix Delegation (DHCPv6-PD) where your router will ask the upstream router for an additional routeable prefix which you will use on another interface of the router. The RFC for prefix delegation recommends a /48, but many ISPs are not delegating that much. I only get half of a /60 from my ISP’s modem.

    If the ISP just provides you a static routeable prefix, then you would just assign that to your router’s interface and enable SLAAC/DHCPv6 to give out that prefix. This would only need to be configured in a single device and is why they don’t recommend hard coding servers and workstations with IPV6 addresses.

    Keep in mind that your router will also need a firewall as all of these IPv6 prefixes are routeable and public. While IPV6 space is quite like finding a needle in a haystack, you could still find yourself having a bad day if you treat it like private IPV4 space.

    The end result though is that you would setup DNS so that devices register their IPv6 addresses and it just works. There’s also the MDNS protocol that supports IPv6 which will do segment-local resolution for device names.


  • On one hand you definitely don’t want to be assigning manual/static IPv6 to all your devices because if your prefix ever changes you’ll have to update it everywhere. IPv6 doesn’t really have a concept of private address space (with a few exceptions). On the other hand most modern IPv6 stacks support dynamic protocols like SLAAC while also assigning a static suffix to the published prefix (e.g. You want :0:0:1234:1 to go to your server, and SLAAC gets the prefix 200x::5678/64 your server would assign itself 200x::5678:0:0:1234:1).

    DHCPv6 fixes a lot of these headaches for managed networks by allowing you to reserve specific IPv6 for a given DUID.

    IMO, your network, do what you want. I have two jump Raspberry PIs that I have static suffixes so I always know where they are without relying on DNS or whatever. Edit: I apparently misremembered how I had these setup. I use a custom interface up script to take the SLAAC prefix and append the custom suffix to it as a secondary IP.


  • You’ll probably have to provide the netmask info for us to review. If you’re using /24 then those all reside in the same network so I would expect them to be in the same broadcast domain.

    If you have mismatched netmasks that could be trying to route traffic to the gateway which then reflects back. Ensure your devices have the same network, netmask and broadcast ip (e.g. 192.168.1.0/24 will have broadcast ip of 192.168.1.255)



  • For the disks, you may have a small issue with having multiple types of disks in a single RAID10, as those disks might have slightly different physical attributes. ZFS is an option here as you can add two vdevs for the different drive types and add them to the same zpool, which effectively creates the RAID10 you’re looking for. You would typically not use LVM on top of ZFS but if you go with RAID10 it would let you create logical partitions that can be expanded easily at a later time.

    Another ZFS option is to use RAIDZ1 with the 4 disks in a vdev. The vdev will use 1 disk of space across all disks to maintain a parity with the other disks. You will have 12TB of usable storage on your 16TB raw storage. This will allow you to lose one drive with no data loss.