A little over a year ago I finally bought the parts to build myself a NAS. My plan was to install FreeNAS and use ZFS. I had hardware troubles from the get-go and seemingly inconsistent results. I was never able to get FreeNAS to a point that I liked (I think I had issues doing the install and/or CF card) and eventually had OpenSolaris running on it, thinking I’d get at least half of what I wanted. But that wasn’t good enough and eventually the project was sidelined and my current drives sat, and my new drives sat until I found a deal on a SATA enclosure and just loaded them in there and hooked up straight to my laptop.
Today’s trouble is with the original hardware for the NAS which I’m repurposing as a virtual machine testbed. I seem to be plagued with loose connections or something. A few days ago when I went to install ESXi the system refused to boot from the CD. Went to the BIOS and there was no CD drive, whereas a week before, as was well, and I hadn’t touched the hardware. I remember this also happening constantly during my initial NAS setup.
So what got this post started was ESXi not liking the built-in network card, I went out and purchased an add-on card which was coming up in searches and appeared to be compatible, and now it is not. So I’ll probably be returning this one (which by the was already opened by someone) and head out to Best Buy since I feel like they’d have the better quality cards in stock.
Hardware Issues
