I stuck with a D-Link DIR-625 wireless router doing all my routing for entirely too long. I had an old P4 2.66 GHz PC laying around with a 40GB hard drive so I decided to try out pfSense. I was hooked, the overall performance and features of this open source FreeBSD firewall/router were impressive. My old P4 machine was using too much electricity for something that was on 24 x 7, though. I decided to custom build something that was 1. powerful enough for my home network and virtual environment lab 2. low power draw 3. quite. ...

SSH Tunnel for web traffic Where “myserver.com” is a server you operate with SSH setup. Now you need to configure your browser to use the tunnel. In OS X you can go to Network -> Advanced -> Proxies -> Check SOCKS and input localhost:9998 or whatever port you used. Directly from Chrome you can also select Preferences -> Under The Hood -> Change Proxy Settings… -> and it will go directly to your OS X Network/Proxies tab. ...

Here are the steps to install Linux Integration Services v3.2 to a CentOS 6.2 VM in Hyper-V. Add the Linux IC v3.2.iso to a CD-Rom attached to your CentOS 6.2 VM. Create a directory, for example, mkdir /home/LinuxServices

My whitebox ESXi build did not go as well as I had hoped. Even though my ASUS M4A88T-M/USB3 motherboard has the IOMMU setting available under Secure Virtual Machine, it does not appear to work. Secure Virtual Machine should allow the motherboard and a compatible AMD-V CPU to passthrough devices directly to the VM using VMWare DirectPath I/O. I needed this since I have 2 x 2 TB hard drives with all of my data that I wanted to use for my fileserver VM. These drives already have data on them and I needed to pass them to the VM without putting any VMFS on the disks. ...

I needed to make a USB bootable drive of pfSense and being an OS X newb, had to Google it. Here’s what I found. Run these commands from Terminal. Find your USB drive in the list, mine was /dev/disk2. Unmount the drive if it is currently mounted, umount /dev/disk2 ...

TRIM is only officially supported by Apple for the SSDs that they install on their Mac line. If you install your own SSD you can still enable TRIM with Terminal and some commands or use a program called TRIM Enabler. I used beta 4 version of the program on my Intel X25-M G2 160GB SSD and it worked perfectly. The author just released version 2.0. Below is a short write up from Anandtech. ...