Everything, newest first.

Fun and Profit with UNAS Pro 8: NVMe Cache the Hard Way

Posted on January 31, 2026 by pds hardwarehomelab

Otherwise known as how to void your warranty but have working stuff… standard disclaimer applies. Before you read further, this is not some glowing gushing Youtube talking head review… go there if that’s what you’re into. Yes, I’m posting this
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Claude Context at Scale: Managing Sessions Across Environments

Posted on January 24, 2026 by pds ai

I’ve been using Claude Code heavily for infrastructure work across multiple environments – homelab, production, various projects. The problem I kept running into: context loss between sessions. You know the drill. You’re deep into debugging something, have Claude fully up
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Home Lab (2022 Edition)

Posted on December 23, 2022 by pds hardwarehomelab

It’s nearing the end of 2022 and it’s time to refresh the homelab again. I recently re-allocated two of the three custom built Supermicro servers previously in the home network cabinet over to a colo cluster, creating a need to
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UDM-Pro docker container as a Proxmox quorum device

Posted on July 14, 2020 by pds hardwarehomelabproxmoxubiquiti

I recently switched the majority of my self-hosted services over to Proxmox running on a custom built 1U supermicro server. It’s been working so well I decided to build a second one, and setup a two node HA cluster to
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Migrating SmartOS instances to SDC

Posted on November 9, 2014 by pds homelabjoyent

If you haven’t heard by now, Joyent has recently open sourced SmartDataCenter and the Manta object storage platform. Most people probably don’t realize it yet but this is a really big deal. Mad props to everyone at Joyent involved in
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ZFS Snapshots and Remote Replication

Posted on September 6, 2013 by pds homelabstorage

I frequently have the need to create ZFS snapshots and replicate them from one host to another for backup and disaster recovery purposes. There are many blog posts and articles that present custom scripts using zfs send/recv to automate this
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Install SmartOS and keep your existing pool

Posted on October 11, 2012 by pds homelabstorage

I am skipping the SmartOS introduction because Magnus Hedemark has us covered with Discovering SmartOS. Instead, I’ll dive straight in and tell you that it’s great as an all-in-one storage and virtualization server, despite only being branded as the latter.
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How to fix a stuck ZFS log device

Posted on January 11, 2012 by pds storage

I ran into a troublesome ZFS bug where a pool with a log device became “stuck”. The zpool remove command would complete but would not remove the device. This was a bad place to be in, because the device was
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Integrating Snow Leopard Server with Unix LDAP and NFS

Posted on January 15, 2011 by pds hardware

I recently purchased a pair of Apple Xserve boxes for a project at work, with the goal of providing a functional Mac OS X desktop environment via our existing Sun Ray thin-clients. These two systems will be setup using Aqua
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New co-lo box

Posted on October 10, 2010 by pds hardwarestorage

It has been about six years since I last upgraded my co-lo box that hosts a myriad of services and websites for opensource, business, friends, and personal hobbies. Now I have a new machine in place that should last at
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Supercharge your X4500 Thumper with SSDs

Posted on May 13, 2009 by pds hardwarestoragezfs

Hybrid storage pools are the new coolest thing in ZFS land and are being pushed commercially with the recent release of Sun’s 7000 series open storage. For various reasons, Sun has only added a supported SSD option to the X4540
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My ZFS media server

Posted on December 16, 2008 by pds hardwarestoragezfs

Every self-respecting geek has a home media server to store their CD and DVD rips, downloaded TV shows, photos, etc. and I’m no exception. I’ve always found it interesting to see what others put together to fill this void, so
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Flash 10 on Sun Ray

Posted on December 12, 2008 by pds hardware

Once again I’m revisiting the state of Flash support running under Sun Ray software. My previous post showed there had been improvements made on this front. How are things doing over a year later? My Sun Ray environment today is
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Ultimate Home ZFS Storage Server?

Posted on October 31, 2007 by pds hardwarehomelabstoragezfs

Chenbro has announced a new mini-itx home server/NAS chassis that would make for a super small, super quiet OpenSolaris ZFS storage server. Couple this with an MSI Industrial 945GM1 Core 2 Duo Mainboard, 4GB of memory, a 2.5″ system disk,
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Flash 9 on Sun Ray followup

Posted on October 26, 2007 by pds hardware

There have been some improvements on this front since my last post. Adobe’s pre-release flash player 9 update has the smurf effect color problem fixed, and Tobias Oetiker has made a libflashsupport patch that uses the $AUDIODEV environment variable. I
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Getting Flash 9 with sound on a Sun Ray

Posted on March 12, 2007 by pds hardware

I have a deployment of approximately 40 Sun Rays at work that serve as the primary desktops for our scientists. Currently these Sun Rays are powered by Sun servers running Debian Linux, although I intend to migrate over to Nexenta
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