software

NAS time!

Current Projects

I’ve wanted to set up my own Network Attached Storage for quite a while now. Well, I found a sweet deal on this 5-bay NAS on Prime Day on October, and I finally sat down and got it up and running this week!

I put two 4T WD Red drives in it (also on sale Prime Day!), and put a price watch on those drives in camelcamelcamel so I can hopefully fill the other 3 bays over the next year or so.

Here’s what I’ve learned so far:

  • It was actually really easy to set up. I put the drives into the bays, plugged it into my network and the wall. Then I installed the management software on my iMac and stepped through the drive setup. I want to say that within 30 minutes it was ready to go.
  • I know very little about servers.
  • Things that I hear about that sound intimidating (Docker anyone?) are usually not that hard once you get into it.
  • Google is my best friend. (OK, I knew that one already!)

The one thing it did without asking me was set up the drives on a RAID array with RAID 1. I wasn’t planning on doing it that way, but I’m going to leave it for now. I think once I add a couple more drives I’ll rebuild the array using a higher RAID… I feel like for my purposes mirroring the data isn’t the best use of drive space.

Here’s what I have installed on it so far. Of course I started by looking for an anti-malware, and Clam Antivirus is the one recommended by the OS so I figured I’ll try that out. (It’s part of Cisco so right away I feel like it’ll probably be good!) And right off the bat I knew I wanted to set up a VPN server (there was one by Terramaster ready to install), and learn a little more about Docker. I also set up a Plex server to see what that’s all about (not sure if we’ll actually use it or if I’ll end up taking that one down in the end).

Oh, and I set up an Apache Guacamole instance in Docker but don’t have any machines to connect it to yet–guess that should go on my project list!

So many things to serve = so much to learn!

Wireshark

Project Ideas

Network packets. They’re like magic. And I want to learn all the spells.

I remember this one day at the tech support job that helped put me through college (we’re talking 2000-ish, so tech was a little different back then…), a co-worker and I were trying to figure out a communication issue with a particular PCI card. We set up two of these PCI cards to communicate with each other through TCP/IP. I loved orchestrating the communication process from the back end and watching it succeed!

As I’ve been studying for Network+ exam and learning about network communication and IP packets, I installed Wireshark on my computer and captured a set of packets to look at. It’s crazy how much information is there and I want to learn how to decode and make sense of all of it!

Some resources I plan to use through the process:

  • Lynda.com courses (library access is the best!): Wireshark Essential Training, Wireshark Network Troubleshooting, Wireshark Advanced Tools and Techniques
  • Wireshark User’s Guide

I’ll let you know how it goes!

Wireshark, Part 2

Courses

In the fall I discovered Wireshark and honestly it’s been an amazing tool!

The following courses on LinkedIn Learning were awesome! Check your local library for access to LinkedIn Learning courses, it’s a great way to get amazing content for free!

I’ve learned that there’s a lot of detail in each packet, and a tool like Wireshark can help unlock the magic! If you haven’t tried it out, I’d definitely recommend it.