Sysadmin

The idea was simple: give a second life to two battle-hardened Seagate IronWolf 2TB drives (with over 6 years of continuous uptime) as a high-speed Media Server. The chosen “brain” was a Mini PC running the rock-solid FreeBSD. All I needed was a Dual Bay USB 3.0 external enclosure (DAS) to connect the drives. What I didn’t expect was that this simple premise would turn into a full-blown saga against haunted firmwares and terrible hardware quality — until I finally reached the perfect setup. ...

It all started with a simple relocation. I needed to reposition my MikroTik RouterBOARD to make room for a DAS (Direct Attached Storage) that was on its way. Simple operation: disconnect the fiber, move the equipment, reconnect. Except when I removed the cable, the SC/APC connector ferrule got stuck inside the GBIC module. Simple problem, simple solution — or so I thought. The setup A quick context before diving into the saga: instead of using the standard HGU provided by my ISP, I use a GBIC module connected directly to the RouterBOARD, cloning the original equipment’s information. This approach gives me much more control over the network, superior stability, and proper IPv6 support — something generic ISP-provided HGUs in Brazil still struggle with. ...