Matt Capranos Home of Matt Capranos

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Matt
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There's two sayings that I'm fond of. 

"It's better to have it and not need it, then to need it and not have it" and "One is none, two is one" 

Both saying's fit perfectly when it comes to backups. 

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Matt
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One of the last articles I posted before taking a long hiatus from posting here, was in regards to a new (old) server that I bought to use for my backups.  The plan for that classy chassis 'ass traffic new' was to use it as a cold backup / archive server for my home network.  I'll go into more detail about my home network, it's evolution from 7 or 8 years ago, to what I'm running now, keep an eye out over the next few months with various articles, however, when I bought this server I was running predominately a windows environment. 

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As you may (or maybe you don't) know, one of my favorite things in this world, is driving...not in GTA traffic, but driving in general. I love road trips, booting around in the back country and just open roads.

I bought my truck back in March of 2006 and in the 17 years of driving it, I've accumulated over 500,000 km on my GMC Canyon. The picture was taken in March of 2022 and I broke 500K Km in just outside of Snowball Ontario.

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Matt
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One of the perks of my former employers Q9 Networks & Bell National Hosting, was free employee colocation services. 

Being able to rack & stack your equipment in a 24/7 climate control & secure facility with unlimited power and bandwidth utilization was fantastic. 

I'll be the first to admit, I heavily exploited the service in order run my home network / server labs offsite. I had equipment racked in 2 locations - Q9 Brampton and Q9 Toronto, with VPN tunnels setup between home and to each of the sites. It allowed me to have backups in place offsite, host internet facing services, setup virtualization labs, building out new VMs and again free power & bandwidth. 

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Matt
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As you've probably notice, it's been a long gap between updates. 

This is normal for me, I would work on this blog for a bit, abandon it, then come back a couple of years later.

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Matt
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I just realised, I haven't provided an update to my drive replace / upgrade story for my NAS (file server) Storage from earlier this year. Back at the beginning of the year, I planned to swap out / upgrade the RAID controller as well as the all the drives in the RAID group on the server storage with newer hardware. Well I'm happy to report that the project is done....well sort of done. 

The first drive swap began back in August of 2016, the first step in the upgrade process was to add additional redundancy to my RAID group. After swapping out the old RAID controller and replacing it with a new (old) LSI 9650SE-16ML, I put the first of the Western Digital 3TB Reds into the server and began the migration from a RAID5 container to RAID6. 

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Matt
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When will I learn, that Seagate drives suck! 

So the last thing I want to do this weekend is spend time swapping hard drives in my file servers and making backups of my data just in case. But, Seagate drives that I've been rocking for the last few years decided it would be a great time to start causing me headaches. I should have learned by now. 

In the server I call resource, I had not one, but two 1.5 TB drives decide to crap out on me, one was a complete failure, the other started throwing S.M.A.R.T time out errors when trying to poll the drive, so I had to do an emergency swap there. The shit bit (kind of) this is part of a RAID0 disk set, which is a backup of my server Storage, so a quick drive to Canada computers and $230 bux later, the two drives are swapped and as of this post I'm in the process of copying 5.3 TB +/- a few GB of data from Storage to Resource. About 1.3 TB has finished copying over thus far. 

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Matt
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It's been a couple of years since I last looked at my blog / website. I figured it's about time that I give it a revamp, and start posting content to it. Over the next couple of weeks, I'm going to tediously go through the process of migrating the old data (it's not much, but I'm lazy) from my old word press form to a new joomla site. I'll be making some tweaks along the way, so it's possible that things may break as I go. 

Here's what the old site used to look like, for archival reasons, I'll keep it around. You can find it at http://oldmatt.capranos.com . 

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Matt
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I'm looking to build a new NAS, my current server I call storage is starting to fill up again and I'm meeting hardware limitations. The current RAID controller in the chassis is a 3ware 9500S-8 port controller. It's been a rock solid card for me, but it only supports disks up to 32 bit LBA, which was great when drives were no bigger then 2 TB, however to support newer drives that are larger then 2 TB, I need a new RAID controller that has support for 48 bit LBA. Since I'm currently running 8 x 2 TB Seagate ST2000DM001 drives in this machine and I can't install any drives bigger then 2 TB while using this controller, it's time to plot a new course of action.

So I have a couple of options:
option 1 - buy a new controller and buy newer 8x 3TB (or bigger) drives and migrate all my data over.
option 2 - build a new server, use a similar 9500S-x raid controller with 16 ports instead of 8 and with the 2 TB drives, build one large file server
option 3 - do both.

I've decided to go with option 3.  And this is where the classy chassis (sounds like a porn name) comes into play.

   

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Matt
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While my channel hasn't been active as of late, it's been taking a back seat to things happening in my life. With the results of tonight's Federal election, I will say I am disappointed by the election results. I was hoping it would be at least a CPC minority, since the election results are not exactly in the favour of gun owners, I may start deleting all my gun related videos, pictures, and social media accounts.

Since I don't trust Trudeau won't bring back in a gun registry or out right ban certain firearms, especially with Adam Vaughan, Mark Holland and Bill Blair being elected (notable anti-firearms ownership) I don't want to make it easy for any gun grabbing politicians to know what I own. My youtube channel and other social media accounts are a shopping list of what I own, and since I was willing to post videos and pictures using my real name, I don't want to make it any easier for gun grabbers to take what I spent a large sum of my hard earned money on.

***update***

I've decided that I won't delete my content, but will do my best to post even more! 

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Matt
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This morning my little pick up truck hit a huge milestone, she crossed the 333333 Km mark. I hit this achievement coming into work early to help cover for part of a night shift as we're short staffed. I don't mind the bit of extra OT money since I'm planning on a Vancouver trip with Cullen in a couple of weeks, plus I did just get home from my Road Trip not too long ago and need to build back up the saving again. How long did it take me to hit this Goal? I purchased my truck in March of 2006 after my Chevy Cavalier's ignition coil went. Since then, my pick up and I have driven cross country 3 time, been to Ottawa, Montreal, and well just about every imaginable in Ontario. I'm avg about 3000 km a month or about 36,000 Km a year. My goal is to roll the odometer over, at this rate, it should only take about 15 more years :)  

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Matt
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I've been scouring Ebay for the last few months, trying to find some new managed switches for my environment at home. Currently, I'm rocking a pair of Cisco 2950 switches for my layer 2 infrastructure. I came across an Ebay ad, that appeared to be too good to be true. A guy was selling a pair of Cisco 2960s switches, with the work stack models for $250 bucks! I pounced on the ad, arranged a time to drive out to Whitby and picked them up, I brought them into work to make sure they worked and I can't believe it, no dead ports, all interfaces came up 1000 Mbps full duplex and it came with a set of the work stack modules with the cable.

They're going to be standalone switches, so no need for them to be clustered, but still it's a hell of a good deal! Time to schedule a maintenance window, where I drink beer and cut my old switches over to my new ones.

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Matt
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My buddies (Roland, Jason) and I were up north for our annual hunting trip, for Roland and I this is our 3rd year and the 2nd year that our buddy Jason has joined us. We spent most of our time out on the woods sitting at our blinds hoping we would see some activity from the bush, sadly, nothing was stirring this year. We ended up coming home empty handed, but still I enjoy hunting for more then just the hunt, in fact I'm just as happy not filling my tags as I am bagging our limit. For me our week long hunting trips are about spending time with my friends, getting up early every morning, spending just about the entire day outdoors, only coming back to the house for lunch, before heading back out the blind for the rest of the afternoon. Then when the sun sets, heading back to the house, getting warm by the fire, having a couple of beers, telling the same old stories and doing it all over again the next day. 

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Matt
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Similar to what I did for my last road trip, I put together a time lapse video of the drive out west and back. Using my Go Pro Hero 2, I mounted it to the windshield and took a picture every 60 seconds. I think it turned out pretty good, I hope you enjoy!

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Matt
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I would have posted some pics for the day, if we has stopped for the night. But I ended up driving through the night to get home. You probably know that feeling, you're a long way from home, and suddenly the distance doesn't see that far away. So you decide to just push through and make it the last few....well in our case 100's of Km's down the road.

The drive from Dryden, Ontario back to the GTA was about 23 hours including stops to use the washroom, grab a bite to eat, get out and stretch our legs, gas up, etc. My god, I still can't get over how long of a drive it is!

We left Dryden, I think around 9 ~ 10 am, gassed up and grabbed a coffee. our first stop was at the plaque for the timezone change. We're finally back in Eastern Time! 

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Matt
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And we're back into Ontario.

It's been a lot of driving and we're finally back in our home province, but not in the Eastern time zone yet. I think people still have a hard time fathoming just how big Ontario...make that Canada is. You can drive for 12 ~ 16 hours a day and only cross a portion of the country. It feels good knowing in a day or two, we'll be back home in the GTA, I'm starting to miss the comfort of my bed and it will be nice to see my family.

Sadly, we didn't back track to Regina today, I felt bad for not stopping in and seeing Bill, but I had a goal of making it into Ontario tonight and if we had, for sure we would have been camping out in Manitoba for the evening. I'm sure he'll understand and I promise next year to stop by and pay him a visit. If he doesn't mind, maybe I'll stay for a week or so.

On our drive back east, we made an important stop today, we finally got to visit Wolverine Supplies. They're located near Virden, Manitoba, a less then an hours drive into the province (coming east from Saskatchewan). I didn't end up buying much, a couple of magazines and a crate of Czech surplus 7.62x39, I'm starting to run dangerously low on funds, at this rate, I'll have to start doing OT when I get back to work. 

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Roland splurged a bit more then I did, he bought some mags, ammo, as well as some optics.

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Matt
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Like all good things.....our Road Trip is getting closer to coming to an end.

Today Roland and I left my families place in Lacombe to start the long drive back to Ontario. Before heading back east we stopped in at my families new place, which is just starting to be built. My uncle mentioned they're way behind schedule, but the layout of the house (from peering outside) and the view from the backyard of a small lack, it's going to look nice when it's done.

I was hoping to stop by my Cousin's place in Moose Jaw on the way back out. But the route we took, had us drive from Lacombe to Saskatoon to Regina. By the time we got into Regina it was way to late to back track to Moose Jaw. We'll see how I feel in the morning.

I wouldn't mind seeing Bill, we saw him last year for a bit and stopping in for an hour would be nice before we head back to Ontario. Not much to report during the drive, the roads were clear good weather, but at night it does get dark.

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The open prairies do make for some spectacular photos.

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