I really really liked the HP MediaSmart Windows Home Server that I bought years ago. It was one of the best Microsoft devices that I have ever purchased and just sat in the corner doing its job quietly. Since it was awesome, that means Microsoft created a new version that sucked and then discontinued it. In Microsoft's defense they have baked a lot of the functionality directly into Windows 10, but I wish they would have kept the Home Server platform alive. My Windows Home Server is still chugging along, but I am slowly migrating its tasks to a Synology RS816 NAS that I bought last year. I bought the RS816 specifically because it was the cheapest rack mountable unit that Synology makes. So far I am enjoying having it as an addition to my network and it has a host of features that just work, including storing photos, security camera monitoring, and VPN access. The RS816 has built in slots for 4 drives and I started out with two 4TB Western Digital Red drives in a RAID 1 configuration, giving me a redundant 4TB of storage. I store movies on it in an MKV format and Blue-ray movies in particular can be over 20GB in size so I quickly started to fill up that 4TB of storage. Synology has made adding space a very easy task and I put together a video that walks through installing new drives, from physically putting the drives into the RS816 to configuring the drives in the DiskStation web interface. I added two more 4TB Western Digital Red drives giving me a total of 12TB (4 X 4TB drives in a Raid 5 configuration), using one of the drives for redundancy. The one thing that stood out in the process is that it actually took 2 days for the RAID to be reorganized onto the new drives. The original 4TB was still available for read and write access during this time and after 2 days of the NAS working through things the additional spaces was finally available.

Well it has definitely been quite some time since I wrote up a post. It even took me a while to remember the password to log into my blog. Having three kids apparently really cuts down on the time to blog. I'm hoping to start making more of an effort to post something on a regular basis. I've gotten into several interesting hobbies and have been busy at work solving problems so hopefully those things will unfold into some interesting blog posts. (Do people even blog anymore?) I'm still an independent contractor and even though on my current contract I was brought in as a .NET developer my job has really morphed into a problem solver or MacGyver as I call it. I've had some interesting projects including figuring out how to talk to some machinery via a canbus (and deciphering a lot of hex values) along with a system of Raspberry Pis all across the globe running Windows 10 IOT. I've also put together several Android apps for a client. Needless to say I work on a variety of things which I like and find it hard to call myself solely a .NET Developer. As for hobbies, I've been dabbling in a lot of different things that span the spectrum of topics. I have always been very interested in hardware and electronics so after building a respectable workbench, I have filled it with a soldering iron and drawers of electronic components. I recently added to the workbench a 3D printer in order to build respectable enclosures for my "research and development" department.

At the other end of the spectrum I have been working on my own aquaponics system in order to grow a small amount of vegetables inside. It was a very interesting build and I learned a lot about construction, plumbing, biology, and chemistry.

I will have to admit that I am notorious for starting a project and not finishing it so I was quite happy with myself when I completed this little functioning ecosystem. Unfortunately, after several months I have yet to eat anything that has grown in it, except 3 leaves of some random plant that definitely was not romaine lettuce. (As a side note, pay attention to where the seed comes from that you are buying off Amazon. Skip the stuff from China.). I'm still alive though and I hope to have the system providing us with some lettuce and maybe even some cherry tomatoes this coming winter. Until then at least the 4 goldfish are happily swimming around. Anyways, if anyone is actually reading this blog or randomly comes across it then you can expect to see any one of these upcoming topics appear in a post as this blog begins to evolve in the coming months.

What does it mean???? Could some actual content be forth coming????