Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1.2 – x: Flashing an LSI 9211-8i/9220-8i / Dell Perc H310 / IBM M1015 to LSI IT firmware

Don’t have enough ports available in your (Storage/ESXi) server? Even though modern motherboards come with 6 onboard port now a days, maybe it’s not enough for you. Or you are using a little bit older hardware and don’t have enough 6G ports (Only important to SSD’s really). A quick and easy way is adding a PCIe based storage controller. And while True Hardware RAID can be good to have, on lower end controllers it’s often more of a hindrance then a benefit. Especially when using something life software RAID or ZFS.

This guide will show you how to flash an LSI 9211-8i or 9220-8i / Dell Perc H310 / IBM M1015 to LSI IT firmware. IT stands for “Intergrated Target”. This way the disks get presented to the OS is a raw form, much like your motherboard ports would do. This enables complete control, SMART data for your OS and Power Management such as spindown. It will also help you if you encounter the “Failed to initialize PAL” error while flashing.


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Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1.1 – x: HDD Preperations

I have been building private servers for over 12 years now, as written before my current server is incarnation/version 8 with several even having minor revision numbers between the big numbers. During this time I have accumulated some best practices for myself and one of them is to always perform a full surface scan on (new) disks I receive. Read more about it in this article!

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Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 3 – x: ZFSguru Hardware and Layout (ZFS using FreeBSD)

This third part will be a hardware and design overview of the Storage server that I am using. This server combines a NAS with some secondary functions for me such as SabNZBd, Sickbeard, Couchpotato, FTP, CrashPlan, etc. I know that kind of taints it’s pure function (serve me storage) but since I used a pretty hefty machine for it, all seems to be working quite well and since this is not a company installation I believe the otherwise wasted CPU power can be put to good use! This article will be one of the most complex because it will hold the configuration I made and also partially the reasons why.

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Home Server/Storage/Lab Setup Part 1 – x: The General Setup

This will be a series of posts about the renewing and current setup I have done upgrading my home Server/Storage/Lab setup. I will go into the hardware I decided to use, and also a bit of the reasoning behind it. Included will be some tips and tricks and maybe the articles will help you make your own setup!

 
Setup Requirements:

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New TimeLapse Method for TI DaVinci DM368/DM365 DSP based cameras

After creating a timelapse method using FFmpeg and after that using VLC a new method was discovered by one of my commentators. He dissected the firmware files and found that you can access an URL which then gives you a picture. This of course is the ideal way of generating pictures with a set time interval and I’ll walk you through the process in this post.

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Passive POE for use with Outdoor IP Cameras

For a while now I have been writing about the TI DaVinci DM368 DSP based cameras. And while these chinese cameras work very well in most situations, they always come with only a small amount of cable in which you need to plug your UTP and power cable. And while the camera might be weatherproof, this connection certainly isn’t. I have a cheap solution which I use for this, read on inside!

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