Year: 2024

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Using AI as a helper for SysAdmin

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I’ve used a lot of various AI’s over the last year, and I have to say that I’m actually kind of digging the Microsoft AI “Copilot” as a top contender.  I love the dedicated Windows App, the interface is nice and clean, and it’s validated most of the System Admin stuff I’ve been attempting of late. 

The key to using AI is to remember that it’s not a magic solution that will fix all of your problems.  Do not ask it an open-ended question unless you have an evening to kill going down all the various dark rabbit holes on the internet that it’s likely going to send you down.

Let me know via Discus if you have a favorite AI, and what you use it for.

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Unable to avoid IOMMU after all

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So it turns out that using TrueNAS is entirely dependent on accessing the Host Bus Adapter (HBA) directly, so the TrueNAS installation has hit a roadblock for now.  It also turns out after installing the Ipolex card that while I can set it to match the telco Gateway’s NBase-T Ethernet port, it won’t actually pass that traffic at a faster speed because of the way that Proxmox handles it’s Virtual Bridges (VMBRs),   So in both cases, in order to even access my NAS Hard Drive array, or really be able to pass traffic through the Ipolex 10G card (well, 5G for my purposes) at a faster speed, I will indeed have to cave-in and re-enable IOMMU after all…

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Settled on IPOLEX 10G network adapter

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Been doing quite a bit of research on finding the right card that will support NBase-T, the standard that my Telco is employing for the Ethernet Handoff from their Residential Gateway to my home network. 

I found plenty of cards that worked at the 10G side, and a lot claimed to support it, but when checking the base chipset their cards used, most of them were much older and could not possibly support this newer standard.  But Ipolex uses Intel’s X550-T2 Chipset, and Intel is an early supporter of that standard, so it would ostensibly work with the NBase-T standard.  I spent a few days chatting with the Vendor’s Tech Support team to ensure that they natively supported NBase-T, and they confirmed it’ was 100% compatible, so I’ve finally settled on that NIC for my pfSense installation.  Hopefully I’ll start to see the faster download speeds once I get that delivered.and installed!