Technology Solutions Company

Build a DIY NAS: TrueNAS or Unraid on a Mini PC | ComputingForGeeks This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more.Building a NAS yourself comes down to two decisions: what box to put it on, and whether to run TrueNAS or Unraid. Get those two right and a DIY NAS gives you more bays, more compute, and full hardware transcoding for a fraction of what a turnkey unit with the same specs costs. Get them wrong and you fight driver quirks, USB drop-outs, and a pool that rebuilds for a week. A UPS with graceful shutdown keeps a power cut off that list.Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 1690332026 makes the case stronger than it has been in years. A wave of small x86 NAS boxes (Aoostar, CWWK, Topton) now ship with Intel or Ryzen silicon, multiple SATA bays, 2.5GbE or 10GbE, and an open BIOS, so they run TrueNAS or Unraid out of the gate. At the same time Synology pulled the Intel GPU driver from DSM on its 2025 models, so those boxes can no longer hardware-transcode Plex or Jellyfin on stock DSM, which is exactly the gap a DIY build fills. This guide ranks the hardware worth buying, settles the TrueNAS vs Unraid question, and walks through a TrueNAS install we ran end to end on 25.10 “Goldeye” in June 2026, with the Unraid 7.3 details checked against current docs. Quick picks If you want the verdict before the reasoning, here it is. Every box below has an open BIOS and runs TrueNAS or Unraid; the drives and the OS are separate choices covered further down. Best overall, easiest to live with: Aoostar WTR Pro. A finished 4-bay box with hot-swap trays, dual 2.5GbE, and two NVMe slots. Around $400 for the barebones, check the live price. Best value, most bays per dollar: CWWK i3-N305 6-bay board. An ITX motherboard with six SATA ports and four 2.5GbE NICs for about $220. You supply the case and PSU. Best powerhouse, real ZFS machine: Aoostar WTR Max. Eight Ryzen cores, ECC support, dual 10GbE SFP+, and eleven drive positions. Around $650, check the live price. Best when you already own a mini PC: a TerraMaster D4-320 USB enclosure bolts four bays onto any machine for about $170. Read the USB caveat below before you point ZFS at it. The OS: run TrueNAS if data integrity is the priority and your drives are matched; run Unraid if you have mismatched drives or want to add one disk at a time. Both are excellent in 2026. How we built and tested this The hardware picks were checked against each manufacturer’s spec sheet and a live retailer listing, and every Amazon link here was confirmed against the exact model before it went in. Prices move weekly during the 2026 storage and memory shortage, so each one is a band with a link to the live listing rather than a number that ages badly. The software half is hands-on. We installed TrueNAS 25.10 “Goldeye” (build 25.10.4) on a fresh machine, carved four disks into a RAIDZ1 pool, created datasets, shared one

Best UPS for a Homelab and NAS (Tested) | ComputingForGeeks This post contains affiliate links. If you buy through them, we may earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. Learn more. A homelab UPS has one job your desk UPS does not: hold the load steady long enough for a NAS, a Proxmox node, or a ZFS pool to flush its writes and shut down cleanly. Get that wrong and a two-second flicker can mean a corrupted pool or a half-written database. So the choice comes down to two things most “best UPS” lists skip: a pure sine wave output that your server’s power supply will actually accept, and clean integration with Network UPS Tools so the box shuts itself down on low battery.Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 169091There are really six UPS units worth buying for a homelab or NAS in 2026, split by load size and whether you mount it in a rack. Below is where each one wins, the specs we verified against the manufacturer, and a tested NUT setup that turns any of them into a self-protecting box. Current as of June 2026. The graceful-shutdown setup below was tested with Network UPS Tools 2.8.1 on Debian 13. The short version If you only read one line: get the CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD for a tower homelab, or the CyberPower OR1500PFCRT2U if it lives in a rack. Both are pure sine wave and both speak NUT over USB. Here is the full set of picks: Best overall (tower): CyberPower CP1500PFCLCD. Pure sine, 1000W, the homelab default. Best value pure sine: APC Back-UPS Pro BR1500MS2. APC’s software ecosystem at a fair price. Best for a serious rack or cluster: APC Smart-UPS SMT1500C. Long runtime, a real management card slot, serviceable batteries. Best rackmount: CyberPower OR1500PFCRT2U. 2U, pure sine, converts to tower. Best budget for a single NAS: CyberPower CP1000PFCLCD. Pure sine at the lowest sensible price. Best for a low-draw NAS or network shelf: CyberPower CP850PFCLCD. Small, pure sine, cheap. How we tested and what actually matters Every spec, waveform, and outlet count below was confirmed against the manufacturer’s own product page, and each Amazon listing was checked to confirm it resolves to the exact model and is currently in stock. Prices move constantly, so treat the figures here as ballparks and check the live price before you buy. The part we ran ourselves is the software. A UPS is only useful if your server reacts to it, so we built the full Network UPS Tools chain on Debian 13 (the same base Proxmox runs on) and drove it through a real power-loss sequence using NUT’s simulation driver. That let us confirm the exact behaviour you care about: the moment the battery hits the low threshold, upsmon runs the shutdown command. The runtime numbers per model are from the manufacturers’ own runtime calculators and published reviews, not our bench, and we say so where it matters. The single spec that separates a server UPS from a gaming-PC UPS is the output waveform. Cheap units

Install Docker and Podman on openSUSE Leap | ComputingForGeeks openSUSE Leap 16 ships with Podman already installed and Docker one command away. The catch nobody warns you about is that both want to own the docker command, and SELinux runs in enforcing mode by default, so a careless setup leaves you with either a broken docker symlink or a container that cannot read its own volume.Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 169092This guide installs Docker and Podman on openSUSE Leap 16 from the distribution repositories, runs real containers under each, and walks through the two things that actually bite on Leap: SELinux volume labels and how Docker punches straight through firewalld. By the end you will know which engine to reach for, have Compose running a multi-container stack, and be able to manage containers from Cockpit in the browser. Ran the whole thing on a clean openSUSE Leap 16 box in June 2026, with SELinux left enforcing the entire time. Docker 29.4 and Podman 5.4, both working end to end. Docker or Podman on openSUSE Leap 16: which to install Use Podman. It is the engine SUSE backs on Leap 16, it is already on the system, it runs rootless and daemonless, and it understands SELinux without any extra configuration. Reach for Docker when a specific tool expects the Docker daemon or its socket: a CI runner, a Compose file written against Docker behaviour, or a dev tool that talks to /var/run/docker.sock. You can run both engines on the same host and most people end up doing exactly that. The one hard rule is that only a single package can provide the docker command, which is the first real decision this guide forces. Install the genuine Docker engine and you get the real docker. Install the podman-docker shim instead and docker becomes an alias for Podman. You cannot have both. Prerequisites You need a fresh openSUSE Leap 16 install, a regular user with sudo rights, and internet access to pull images. SELinux enforcing and an active firewalld are the Leap 16 defaults, and this guide keeps both on rather than switching them off. Sizing follows the workload, not the engine. Both Docker and Podman idle in tens of megabytes; the containers you run set the real RAM, CPU, and disk needs. The lab here is a 2 vCPU / 4 GB VM, which is fine for following along but is a floor, not a recommendation for a production container host. A box that runs a database plus a few services wants RAM sized to the working set and disk sized to your images plus volumes plus headroom. 1. Update the system and confirm SELinux Refresh the repositories and apply pending updates first, using the standard zypper commands: sudo zypper refresh sudo zypper update Confirm SELinux is enforcing. Leap 16’s switch to SELinux enforcing by default is unusual for SUSE and shapes everything containers do with host files: getenforce The mode should come back as enforcing: Enforcing The policy that lets containers work under enforcing mode lives in th

Harden an openSUSE Leap 16 Server \| ComputingForGeeks A fresh openSUSE Leap 16 server is reachable over SSH the moment it boots, and straight out of the installer it still accepts password logins and lets root authenticate with a key. Before you put it on a public network, close the parts that are exposed by default.Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 169103This guide hardens a new openSUSE Leap 16 server end to end: a non-root sudo account, key-only SSH, a locked-down firewall, SELinux left enforcing, fail2ban against brute force, and automatic updates now that YaST is gone. Every step was run on a real server, and the failure modes are called out where they bite. Tested in June 2026 on openSUSE Leap 16 with SELinux left enforcing throughout. Prerequisites You need a fresh openSUSE Leap 16 install with root or initial sudo access, and a second terminal you keep open while you change anything to do with SSH. Do not skip the second terminal. The failure mode is locking yourself out of a remote box with no way back in. SELinux enforcing and an active firewalld are the Leap 16 defaults. This guide keeps both on. If you have only just finished the install, work through the general post-install steps first, then come back here to lock the server down. Step 1: Create a non-root sudo user Running day to day as root means every typo and every compromised process runs with full control of the box. Least privilege starts with a normal account that can escalate when it needs to. Create one and put it in the wheel group: useradd -m -G wheel -s /bin/bash ops passwd ops On Leap 16 that group membership is all you need. The distribution ships a sudo policy that grants wheel members full sudo using their own password: sudo cat /usr/etc/sudoers.d/50-wheel-auth-self The policy overrides the old openSUSE default that asked for the root password: Defaults:%wheel !targetpw %wheel ALL=\(root\) ALL Note the path. Leap 16 moved vendor configuration to /usr/etc and reserves /etc for your own overrides, so the shipped sudoers files live under /usr/etc/sudoers.d/. Leave them alone and add your changes in /etc. Confirm the new account can escalate before you rely on it: su - ops -c "sudo -v && echo sudo works" It should prompt for the account’s own password and print sudo works. From here on, use this account and stop logging in as root. Step 2: Set up SSH key authentication Keys replace guessable passwords with a credential that brute force cannot grind down. Generate one on your own workstation, not on the server: ssh-keygen -t ed25519 -C "ops@workstation" Copy the public key to the new account on the server: ssh-copy-id ops@SERVER\_IP Now test the key in a separate terminal before you change a single SSH setting. Do not skip this. If the key does not work and you have already disabled passwords in the next step, you are locked out: ssh ops@SERVER\_IP If that session opens without asking for a password, the key is in plac

Network Devices Explained: Routers, Switches, APs | ComputingForGeeks Every network you have ever used is built from a small set of device types, and each one has exactly one job it is good at. A router moves traffic between networks. A switch moves traffic inside one network. A firewall decides what traffic is allowed through. An access point puts that traffic on the air. Once you can say what each device does and, just as importantly, what it cannot do, the rest of networking gets a lot easier to follow.Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 169065This guide walks through the eight core network devices you meet first: routers, Layer 2 and Layer 3 switches, next-generation firewalls and IPS, access points, wireless LAN controllers, endpoints, servers, and Power over Ethernet. For each one, the part that matters is the same three questions: what does it forward, which layer does it make its decision at, and where does the logic actually live. Everything here was checked on Cisco IOS in a GNS3 lab in June 2026, including the real router and switch output further down. That diagram is the map for the whole article. We will come back to it at the end and walk a packet through it once every device makes sense on its own. What a router does (and what it cannot do) A router forwards IP packets between different networks. It keeps a routing table, and for every packet it reads the destination IP address, finds the best matching entry in that table, and sends the packet out the matching interface. Each interface on a router sits in a different network, which is why a router is the device that connects networks together. For the hosts in a network, the router is the default gateway: anything destined off the local network gets handed to the router first. Here is the part people skip. A router makes its decision at Layer 3, using IP addresses. It does not keep a table of MAC addresses, and it will not forward traffic the way a switch does. That single distinction, IP packets versus Ethernet frames, is what separates a router from a switch. If you want the deeper version of how routers learn their paths, the guide on IP routing and routing protocols covers static routes and routing protocols in detail. This is the routing table on a real Cisco router we configured in the lab. It has a static default route, two directly connected networks, and the local host routes IOS adds automatically: The S* line is the static default route (the gateway of last resort), the C lines are networks the router is directly attached to, and the L lines are the router’s own interface addresses. This table is the router. Take it away and the device has no idea where to send anything. Layer 2 switches versus Layer 3 (multilayer) switches A Layer 2 switch forwards Ethernet frames inside a single network. It learns the MAC address of every device connected to it and stores those in a MAC address table (sometimes called the CAM table). When a frame ar

Network Architectures Explained: Campus to Cloud | ComputingForGeeks Before you can design a network, you have to know which shape it should take, and that shape depends almost entirely on scale and on the direction the traffic mostly flows. A single building does not need the same layout as a data center full of servers talking to each other, and neither looks anything like the box on the wall in a home office. There are six named network architectures worth knowing, and the useful skill is not memorizing their definitions but knowing which one belongs where.Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 169073This guide walks through all six: two-tier and three-tier campus designs, spine-leaf in the data center, the WAN options that connect sites, the SOHO setup, and the on-premises-versus-cloud decision that cuts across all of them. Every topology figure below was generated from our own lab tooling in June 2026, so the node counts, link patterns, and addressing are consistent with how these designs are actually drawn. The six architectures and where each one belongs Start with the map. Each row is a different design, and the rest of the article expands one row at a time. The column that does the most work is the last one: get the traffic direction right and the choice of architecture usually follows. ArchitectureUse caseScaleMain traffic direction Two-tier (collapsed core)Single-building campusSmall to mediumNorth-south (user to server) Three-tierMulti-building campusLarge enterpriseNorth-south (user to server) Spine-leafData centerScalableEast-west (server to server) WANConnecting sitesAnySite to site SOHOHome or small officeVery smallNorth-south (user to internet) On-premises / cloudWhere resources liveAnyDepends on placement North-south traffic is the classic pattern: users at the edge reaching servers or the internet, traffic moving up and down the hierarchy. East-west traffic is servers talking to each other across a data center, which is a different problem and the reason spine-leaf exists. Keep that distinction in mind and the rest falls into place. The two-tier collapsed-core campus The two-tier design has two layers: an access layer where user devices plug in, and a distribution layer above it. It is called collapsed core because the core layer’s job, high-speed forwarding between distribution blocks, is folded into the distribution switches rather than given its own dedicated tier. For a single building or a small campus, that is plenty. The trade-off is redundancy versus cost. Each access switch uplinks to both distribution switches, and the two distribution switches connect to each other, so any single link or distribution switch can fail without taking the building down. You pay for that with the extra links and the second distribution switch, which is an easy call in a campus and overkill in a closet. The distribution switches are Layer 3 (multilayer) switches: they route between the VLANs the access layer

Troubleshoot Cisco Interfaces: show interfaces | ComputingForGeeks When a Cisco link misbehaves, the interface counters usually told you why long before anyone noticed the slowdown. A port stuck in notconnect, a CRC count climbing by the second, or a link that says it is up while throughput crawls: each of these has a signature in the output of two commands. This guide is the ordered way to read that output, decode every counter that matters, and map what you see to a root cause and a fix.Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 169096The focus is the two commands you will live in, show interfaces status and show interfaces, plus the status codes and error counters they expose. Get comfortable here and most physical-layer and data-link problems become a 30-second diagnosis instead of a guessing game. Tested in June 2026 on a GNS3 c7200 router and an IOSvL2 switch; the command output shown below is real lab capture. If you are new to moving around the IOS prompt, skim the CLI navigation guide first. This article uses the same R1 and SW1 lab from the base device configuration, so the interfaces already have IPv4 addresses. To follow along on your own gear, the R1 and SW1 base-device topology and paste-ready configs are in our CCNA labs repo: load them in GNS3, EVE-NG, or Packet Tracer, or paste straight onto real hardware. Read interface status at a glance Start wide, not deep. On a switch, show interfaces status prints one line per port, and that summary tells you which ports to investigate before you read a single counter. Read the Status column first. connected means the port is up and passing traffic. notconnect means the port is enabled but has no working link, the single most common state on a port that should be working: no cable, the far end is down, or a speed mismatch dropped the link. disabled means someone shut the port (or port security did). Here Gi0/0 is connected to R1, and the unused ports sit at notconnect. Now the Duplex and Speed columns, and the detail people miss: the a- prefix. a-full and auto mean the value was autonegotiated, not configured by hand. That prefix is your fastest tell for a duplex problem. If one side reads a-half while its neighbor reads a hardcoded full, you have found your mismatch without reading another line. Routers do not have show interfaces status; use show ip interface brief for the same fast sweep on a router. Decode the show interfaces counter block show interfaces on a single interface is where the real diagnosis happens. The first lines confirm the physical and data-link state, the speed and duplex, and the MTU. The block at the bottom is the counter history, and that is what you came for. The opening line, GigabitEthernet0/0 is up, line protocol is up, is the two-part status you will decode in the next section. Full Duplex, 1000Mbps confirms the negotiated duplex and speed. Then the counters. The ones worth memorizing: input errors: the parent counter. It sums run

How Switches Work: MAC Address Table Explained | ComputingForGeeks A switch with an empty MAC address table behaves like a hub: the first frame it ever sees gets copied out every port. Seconds later it stops doing that, because it has started learning. By reading the source address of every frame that arrives, the switch builds a table that maps each MAC to the one port it lives behind, and from then on it forwards traffic to that single port instead of all of them. That table, how it fills, how it ages, and what the switch does when an address is missing from it, is the whole of how a switch forwards frames.Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 169115This guide walks the exact, observable behavior on real Cisco switches: how MAC learning records the source MAC and ingress port, how the aging timer expires stale entries, the forward-versus-flood decision, and how to read show mac address-table output, including the one detail the exam loves, where a host shows up in the table of a switch it is not directly connected to. Captured every show command below on two Cisco IOSvL2 switches running IOS 15.2 in GNS3, June 2026. If you need to move around the switch CLI first, the IOS CLI shortcuts cover the modes and filters used here, and the lab runs on the same two switches from the base device configuration. What a MAC address table is The MAC address table is the switch’s forwarding database. Each row maps a destination MAC address to the single egress port that reaches it, scoped to a VLAN. When a frame needs forwarding, the switch looks up the destination MAC in this table and sends the frame out only the port the table names. That one lookup is the difference between a switch and a hub: a hub has no table and floods every frame out every port, while a switch learns where things are and forwards selectively. Every row carries four fields, and reading them in order tells you everything the switch knows about a host: ColumnWhat it means VlanThe VLAN the entry belongs to. Learning is per-VLAN, so the same MAC can appear once per VLAN. Mac AddressThe hardware address the switch learned, in dotted-hex (for example ca01.0758.0008). TypeDYNAMIC (learned from traffic, ages out) or STATIC (manually set or system, never ages). PortsThe single interface behind which that MAC lives. This is the egress port for any frame sent to it. How MAC learning works The switch learns from the SOURCE MAC of every incoming frame, never the destination. When a frame arrives on a port, the switch reads its source address, notes the port it came in on and the VLAN, and writes a dynamic entry: this MAC lives behind this port. If the entry already exists, the switch refreshes its timer instead of adding a duplicate. Destinations are only ever looked up, never learned, because the switch has no idea which port a destination is on until that device sends a frame of its own. Here is SW1’s table after the two hosts in the lab exchanged traffic. H1 is wi

Wireless Networking Fundamentals Explained | ComputingForGeeks Three things decide how a Wi-Fi network behaves: the radio band it transmits on, the name it advertises, and the encryption that protects it. Get those three right and a wireless network is fast, secure, and easy to roam. Get any of them wrong and you end up with the classic complaints, slow throughput in a crowded office, clients that drop when you walk down a hallway, or a network anyone in the parking lot can join.Original content from computingforgeeks.com - post 169123These wireless networking fundamentals are the mechanism behind each of those three decisions: how radio waves actually carry data, why the 2.4 GHz band gives you only three usable channels while 5 GHz gives you more than twenty, what an SSID and a BSSID really are, and which cipher belongs to each generation of Wi-Fi security from WEP to WPA3. Every channel number, cipher, and 802.11 figure below was checked against the current Cisco CCNA material and the IEEE 802.11 references in June 2026. How radio waves carry Wi-Fi traffic A radio wave is an electromagnetic signal that oscillates at some number of cycles per second, and that rate is its frequency, measured in hertz. Wi-Fi lives in the microwave portion of the spectrum, transmitting around 2.4 GHz (2.4 billion cycles per second) and 5 GHz, with a newer 6 GHz band added for Wi-Fi 6E. The data you send rides on those waves by modulating them, varying the signal in tiny, agreed-upon ways that the receiver decodes back into bits. The key insight that explains most of wireless behavior is that frequency trades range for capacity. A lower frequency like 2.4 GHz has a longer wavelength, so it travels farther and passes through walls more easily, but it carries less data and sits in a crowded band. A higher frequency like 5 GHz has a shorter wavelength that is absorbed faster by walls and distance, but it offers far more channels and bandwidth. That single trade-off is why a home router puts slow, far-reaching IoT devices on 2.4 GHz and fast laptops on 5 GHz. One more property matters for every Wi-Fi design. Radio is a shared medium where only one device can transmit on a channel at a time, so Wi-Fi is always half duplex. Wired Ethernet detects collisions after they happen with CSMA/CD; wireless cannot hear itself transmit, so it tries to avoid collisions ahead of time with CSMA/CA (Carrier Sense Multiple Access with Collision Avoidance). A station listens, waits for a clear channel, and uses acknowledgements to confirm each frame arrived. This is why airtime, not just signal strength, decides how a busy cell performs. The 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz bands compared A channel is a slice of a band wide enough to carry one Wi-Fi conversation. The reason 2.4 GHz and 5 GHz feel so different in practice comes down to how many of those slices fit without overlapping, and that is the single most important design fact in wireless. 2.4 GHz: only three clean channels The 2.4 GHz b

Bitcoin's nemesis, the Dollar Index, is on the verge of a major breakout Your day-ahead look for June 18, 2026 https://lnkd.in/d74GGnJg