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I stumbled across LTT long time ago when I was looking for an educational video and found one of your TechQuickie vids. Thanks for all your hard work!

I'm in the middle of the process of changing from my current Silverstone FT03 to the Bitfenix Phenom M (Nvidia Edition).

The N5550 has only space for 5 drives and eSATA/USB expansion just isn't suitable for a NAS solution and the CPU is only an Atom D2550. Scalability, Stability, security and performance doesn't meet my requirements. My current solution holds 11 drives with space on the mainboard for additional 3 drives.. With some DIY one could fit the additional three drives into the chassis and still maintain an acceptable air flow. In other words, the same amount of drives, minus one, as three N5550's.. With that in mind, my current solution is a lot cheaper ;-) Another factor is the software. FreeNAS is more versatile than any current proprietary software solution. Regarding drive size.. First, I don't have the need for that much storage at the moment. Second, from my work, my experience with > 3TB drives is that the fail ratio is too high for my taste at the moment.

Due to the shortcomings of Synology DS1010+ (General poor performance), I have wanted to build a new NAS for some time now. A fatal power outage a couple of weeks ago, ended up killing two discs in my old DS1010+ (Thankfully without causing loss of data). The incident forced me to speed up the process and this is what I came up with.. Chassis: Silverstone DS380 (The Silverstone DS380 is a well-designed case. Small, yet easy to build in.) PSU: Silverstone SFX 450w 80+ Bronze (non-modular) Cooling: 3 x 120mm Noctua NF-P12 (Silverstone includes three fans but I swapped them for Noctua for the most quiet operation possible) Motherboard: SuperMicro A1SRi-2758F (I have used SuperMicro for SOHO solutions the last ten years and I have nothing bad to say. SuperMicro's quality and support is legendary.) Memory: 16 GB Kingston SO-DIMM 1600Mhz ECC (4 x 4 DIMM) Controller: LSI 9211-8i (IT-mode) Drive: 8GB Sandisk Cruzer Fit (For the OS... I know I know.. 2 GB is plenty for FreeNAS but the 8 GB version was on sale and cheaper than the 4GB version. \o/) Storage: 8 x 2TB Western Digital RED (Raid-Z2, for media files) Storage: 3 x 120GB Kingston SSDnow (Raid-Z, for personal files) OS: FreeNAS 9.2.1.5 The finished build Almost done... Test run... All the parts and some extra stuff..

Approx 450 DKK monthly (Roughly 80 USD) Except my workstation, all my builds (test-server, NAS, firewall, router, HTPC etc), are based on Atom which has a low energy consumption.

At the moment I use ovh.com, digitalocean.com and servage.net Servage is cheap and good for non-essential hosting where you don't need 99.9% uptime. At the moment I use Digital Ocean to host my OpenVPN server. No complains so far. OVH hosts my seedboxes. The support staff can be a bit arrogant but the price is great and they don't really care if you use their servers as seedbox.. Running on my third year and no problems so far.

The keyword is 'try'.. Due to the nature of network and protocols there is only so little one can do. It's pretty easy to block any changes made by the good folks at TOR just by updating the signature database of the DPI system. The never ending cat-after-mouse hunt.

OpenVPN handshakes has an atypical fingerprint, which can easily be identified with DPI (Deep Packet Inspection). Same approach can be used against TOR. That said, I don't think many schools have the expertise nor the hardware/software to do so.

I've used StrongVPN.com (OpenVPN lite) for around three years now. Only serious problem i've had was when hurricane Sandy went ashore in 2012 and flooded one of their data centres in New York. Since then I've moved to one of their servers in Washington D.C. which has been rock solid. I pay $90,-/yr for my package. I use my connection for access to U.S. streaming services like Netflix and Pandora, movie torrenting and just to keep my movements private. Never had a DMCA complaint by the way.. At the moment I only have access to a 4G connection at home which provides me with ~40Mbit down and ~25Mbit up. Due to overhead, I usual 'only' gets 34-35 Mbit down and around 20 Mbit up when using StrongVPN.

@ToBy_2028: Super flot arbjede og rart at se andre danskere herinde :-) Der var noget med at vi havde en aftale næste weekend? Jeg finder materialer, øl og grillmad frem og du medbringer tegninger og godt humør! :-D

That way no one can sneak up on you when you're watching p0rn ... ;-)

Instead of a traditional office desk, which can be quite expensive, I went with a countertop from Ikea. It's a lot cheaper than a traditional office desk of this size and also strong enough to support a triple monitor setup. Countertop: http://www.ikea.com/dk/da/catalog/products/50202171/ Legs (x6): http://www.ikea.com/dk/da/catalog/products/90217972/#/70217973 My monitor arm is the NewStar FPMA-D700D3 I also have one of these mounted in my desk: http://www.delock.com/produkte/F_247_extern_61989/merkmale.html