PK1048

Large ZFS File Server

I have seen a couple questions about ZFS and TrueNAS scaling over on the TrueNAS forums and figured I would recount a large file server I designed and implemented using ZFS back in 2008 or so. The customer had a requirement for one large SMB share with a capacity for well over a million files and 50TiB. Remember, this is 2008 and large hard disk drives (HDD) were 1TB. The only filesystem we found that would scale that far and not have serious performance issues was ZFS. They only needed 3 or 4 users accessing it at one time. The...

March 19, 2025

TrueNAS SCALE 24.10 Failed to Find boot-pool After Installation

The Problem I have been using FreeNAS / TrueNAS for over a decade. In the past year I moved my home server from CORE (FreeBSD based) to SCALE (Linux based) and have been very happy. I moved my backup server from 24.4 to 24.10 and ran into an interesting issue. I did not do an upgrade in place, I did a fresh installation. During the first boot after the installation from USB the system hung with an error that it could not mount the boot-pool and dropped me into an Ubuntu initramfs recovery shell. Troubleshooting this, I manually tried importing...

March 8, 2025

Computers / Mac OS

ApacheDirectoryStudio and macOS (ARM)

I have been using ApacheDirectoryStudio (ADS) for years as the best tool to manage LDAP information directly. It is a fantastically powerful, yet still easy to use tool. It is written in Java in the Eclipse environment. Ever since I got my M1 macBookPro I have had fits getting ADS to work with each macOS version. The online resources I have found (Stack Exchange and the ADS bug reports) all talk around the issue(s). I am documenting what I have found here to make it easier for me, and maybe others, to get this working without having to spend hours...

May 3, 2024

Appliances / Geek / Home

How to Improve an Electric Clothes Dryer (phase 1)

Electric clothes dryers are very simple devices which have not changed much in 50 years. While electricity is very efficient at generating heat (virtually 100% conversion from electricity to heat), it is not terribly economical. While there are now (as of 2024) heat pump based dryers, they are still fairly expensive (and I started this project almost 10 years ago anyway). I have undertaken to improve the economy of the basic, very reliable, electric clothes dryer. My clothes dryer is a White Westinghouse Electric 27″ drum unit from 1988 or so, about 36 years old. I have had to repair...

April 16, 2024

SciFi Conventions / Sound / Video

Hybrid Conventions

When the COVID-19 Pandemic hit, all of the Sci-Fi conventions I volunteer with had to cancel or switch to an online format. Since the Pandemic has stabilized, it is not over, we have just learned more or less how to live with it, conventions have gone back to in-person events. But, we realized that there is a demand for online Sci-Fi convention activities. There are people who cannot attend in-person for a variety of very good reasons, from health and age related to cost and time. There is a market for online Sci-Fi convention activities. A couple notes on terminology...

June 24, 2023

Uncategorized

Helpful CWP Hints

I host a number of sites using the Control Web Panel (CWP), an open source alternative to CPanel. Even though I have support on CWP, there are a bunch of little things that are either not documented or not well documented. This post is collecting up my notes on things that are not or not well documented. Backups CWP has a built-in capability to backup configuration and end user data. It backs it up to a local directory, which you can then configure to rsync out to a different server. It even has a convenient way to test your ssh...

July 29, 2022

Email

Helpful postfix Hints

On the servers I manage I use the postfix MTA (mail transfer agent). I occasionally find things about it that are not documented. I am adding this post to track those things so I can find them when need them. I hope some others can benefit from my notes. DKIM After setting up CWP (Control Web Panel) I found that users could not send email. It was being rejected due to a duplicate DKIM header. Literally the same, exact DKIM header appearing twice in the headers. CWP uses postfix with opendkim. Postfix was calling opendkim twice, both before and after...

July 28, 2022

Electronics / Sound

Weird Tape Deck Problem

I have been working on a long term project to convert my (and my Father’s) old reel-to-reel tapes to digital. As part of that I have been working on a Teac X3mkii deck. Skipping all the mechanical fun, at this point it is pulling tape very nicely (for a consumer deck) and I was impressed with the 8 KHz stability coming off of the MRL alignment tape. The purpose of this post to search for an answer to an electrical problem with the deck. The problem is ion both channels, but much more pronounced in the right. There is an...

June 16, 2020

Sound

When is Ground not Ground?

A while back I was working entertainment tech for a small convention, I was the Sound Designer and had inherited the Power Design (usually done by the Lighting department, but we did not find a Lighting Designer until very late). The event was held at a hotel with a 4-section ballroom, call the sections 1, 2, 3, and 4. The stage was set in section 4 and we had a social event in sections 1 and 2 on Friday night with the airwall between 2 and 3 in place. After the social event the airwall between 2 and 3 was...

November 5, 2019