This is a story about how I moved my server between locations 250 kilometers apart. The primary reason for making this move was to perform the initial backup to a new off-site storage location on a faster connection than what I have available at home. The second and better reason was, of course, curiosity. The server in this case is my Thinkpad T430. The setup This is what my setup looks like:

About a year ago I decided to revamp my personal cloud. Main objectives were to make it more manageable and use as much pre-made software suites as possible instead of maintaining my own. This article is about what software I chose, which software it replaced as well as reasons why this was done. Oh and of course, I’ll start with hardware. Hardware and Performance Considerations old solution: Thinkpad X200 + ultrabase

With ZFS on Linux, it often happens that zpool is created using disk identifiers such as /dev/sda. While this is fine for most scenarios, the recommended practice is to use the more guaranteed disk identifiers such as the ones found in /dev/disk/by-id. This blog post describes 3 methods how to change the disk identifiers in such zpool after it has been created. All this without migrating data, adding disks or having physical access to the machine.