I thought I was being real smart when I hooked up an eBay-bought 802.11af-compliant 12v POE extractor to my Unifi Security Gateway. The whole idea was to get rid of all the power-warts and AC-DC conversion devices hanging off my UPS to make the makeshift rack in my parent’s basement cleaner, in addition to making my router power-resettable through the Unifi control panel.

I’ve been a FreeNAS user since the 8.x days, having decided to ditch a self-hosted file server based off Fedora with a pretty basic MDADM + ext3fs storage setup. Running on commodity hardware, the prior setup was fine, but little other than an extensible NAS that was somewhat of a hassle to manage and keep updated. FreeNAS and it’s plugins jails promised to do most of what I was doing beforehand, in an appliance format that is much easier to maintain.

I’ve been deploying Ubiquiti’s Unifi gear for a while and I absolutely love it. While the development cycle of firmware and software is somewhat uneven, the products are great, inexpensive, run off a self-hosted management portal and don’t have any licensing costs attached to them.

Bien peu de gens y verrons un problème à ce que Rona soit défait en cour. La défenderesse est une compagnie, un monstre sans visage ayant comme seule motivation le profit; dans un cas traitant d’évasion fiscale, son opposition est suspecte au mieux. Pourtant, l’enjeux me semble plus large: devrais-t-on imposer à grand coûts le travail d’être un délateur fiscal? Au-delà de l’information habituellement contenue dans le rapport d’impôt, quelle information le fisc peut-il nous exiger de remettre? Si un de mes proches est sujet d’un audit, quelle sorte de “renseignements ou documents” serais-je contraint de fournir? Combien d’heures non-rémunérés m’obligeront-ils à travailler pour faire le recensement de ces renseignements? Voulons-nous vraiment d’une société de snitch?

By virtue of being a very multi-functional appliance in most settings, a FreeNAS machine has the potential to be a very sensible part of your rack. Even if you don’t use jails or VMs to host anything, it’s still a fileserver at the bare minimum, which means it hosts your data. I don’t think I need to emphasize that protecting your data is important. FreeNAS being built on ZFS, the appliance integrates robust encryption from the get-go, but disk encryption alone leaves several attack vectors wide-open.