Posts

Reasoning for upgrading After running my NAS on a Intel Xeon E3-1225 v5 for a couple of years it became clear that it was not fast enough anymore. So time to upgrade. But not sure with what, I could upgrade the CPU to a E3 v6, however the improvement would not be good enough for the price of such a CPU, even buying used. Next Steps What to do next? After watching a youtube by LTT, the solution was unexpected. Upgrading to AMD. The EPYC CPU’s seems powerful and used quite affordable. As a result more is needed then the CPU. Also another motherboard and memory are needed. A slightly larger operation. ...

In my post Road to CISSP I mentioned my use of a Fanless PC with a Intel Core i3, 8GB of RAM and 6 ethernet ports and a simple Wireless Access Point TP-Link AC1200. This post describes the next steps I took in this road lab setup. Purpose For me the purpose of this setup is two-fold. First I would like to have the same level of online security when I am not at home. The roles the server would have to fulfill: ...

This post tells my journey into becoming a Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP), not just the happy flow, also my doubts and struggles. The last couple of months were very tough and demanding of not only myself, but also of my family. Without their support I would not have been able to even start this journey, let alone bring it to the finish. This post is (currently) one of my most elaborate ones, buckle up, it is a read. ...

After working for an employer for almost 13 years, I am taking the big step to continue as a freelancer under Nefkens ICT. Over the past period I have learned a lot in various IT related fields and I have grown as a person, from senior iOS Developer to Private Cloud Architect. I have also experienced growth in the field of leadership, setting priorities even better and bring together both short and long-term goals. ...

The last post of this year. In the past years (June 2018 - December 2022) I have worked for Pro Warehouse, with great joy and lots of challenges and opportunities. In this reasonable long period I have been given increasing responsibilities, started in a Apple Platform Developer role in which I coded the Erase Install wrapper application. My first real purpose MacOS application I developed, a very nice project to do. This work grew into from being responsible for the project-management of the in-house developed FileMaker Pro application to designing, building and maintaining the Pro Platform. The Pro Platform hosts the FileMaker Pro application and all services and servers to display the data you now see when visiting the Pro Warehouse Sites. ...

Documenting Network Upgrade Creating a nice graph of the home lab What is next? Documenting Documenting, always the part most engineers loath. However it is proven to be a life saver. For me the home lab was becoming increasingly more complex, my better half, righteously, was more and more concerned that in case something happens to me or I’m not available for whatever reason, she did not know, where, how and what to do when it is relating to the devices at home. ...

Introduction Finding the right template IDE Migration Template changes Deployment Conclusion Introduction When I moved from Digital Ocean to Strato I also moved into a Static Site solution with Publii. The application had benefits at the time. A little over a year ago I had some troubles with the default free template, with a update of that template the site broke. At the time no real time left to investigate properly in the why and how to solve. So I went for the “easy” solution in purchasing another template. Too busy to spend my downtime on my site. Priorities… After 6 months I realized that the use of the template was with a small caveat, namely the updates of the template were only possible inside a window of 6 months. Again no time to move in a different direction, got myself a “update” for another 6 months. These 6 months are almost up. And now I do have some time and I am willing to see what else is out there. After some investigation online I made the decision to do a deep dive into using Hugo. What I saw I liked, a lot! Being able to code my site, have it under VCS, and written in Go. Definitely a winner! ...

When I bought this iMac in 2018 I “broke” the Fusion drive and replaced the internal HDD with a Samsung 860 EVO SSD. The prices that Apple charges for SSD upgrades are really something. Way too much in my opinion. Anyway after 4 years of use I did notice some slowness and was no longer fully convinced that the SSD was good enough to drive the iMac. Time for an upgrade. Thanks to OWC a very nice upgrade is possible. Replacing the Blade SSD with a faster, much faster SSD. Slight challenge: the SSD is located at the backside of the mainboard. A near complete teardown needed. ...

Since 2014 did I have a simple server (droplet) at DO. In December 2020 I migrated to FreeBSD as the host OS. However with the move into a pre-rendered website using Publii I no longer need a full fledged server. Just some space where I can let the site be hosted as is. Since I made the move for our email to Strato earlier this year, let’s see what the possibilities are. ...

Part 1 Part 2 Part 3 The amount of the disks in the server is limited and I wanted to see if I could get a JBOD enclosure attached. I wanted to be able to increase the disks and it needed to be affordable. At the current prices enclosures are quite expensive. Thanks to this post, although quite old, twelve years to be precise, the concepts are still valid. ...