Systems & Networking

A few days ago I did what most people would call an impulse buy for a very expensive wireless mechanical "gaming" keyboard. Even though the desire for this hardware has been prevalent for many years, this kind of keyboard has only recently started to become a reality. A year ago you'd have a lot of difficulty finding a keyboard with this combination of features. Razer is the latest to come out with there attempt at satisfying the needs of the market.

This is mostly going to be a visual post.  I will unbox my newest server, my first high powered ARM64 (aarch64) system.  It's a Cavium/Marvell 56-core ThunderX2 put together by Gigabyte and sold by ThunderXForums.  I have lots of experience with inexpensive ARM based single board computers.  The PineBook Pro, all types of Raspberry Pi's (including the 400), Pine64, Rock64, Orange Pi, Banana Pi, and even the ASUS Tinker Board.  Those are all fine low powered devices good for... well...

This is a complement to a related post on how to turn any printer into a network printer, but for a scanner. Using the same low-cost Raspberry Pi hardware you can scan over Ethernet or Wifi.

Share any folder from your host computer on to your FreeBSD guest using the shared folders feature.

GlusterFS (GFS) is the open source equivalent to Microsoft's Distributed Filesystem (DFS). It's a service that replicates the contents of a filesystem in real time from one server to another. Clients connect to any server and changes made to a file will replicate automatically. It's similar to something like rsync or syncthing, but much more automatic and transparent. A FreeBSD port has been available since v3.4, and (as of this post) is currently at version 8.0 with 9.0 being released soon.

This is a technology demonstration and tutorial for deploying GlusterFS on FreeBSD. As a bonus this is an opportunity to play with Bhyve.