tonysan’s blog – Things I do for fun

Dual-boot Steam Deck with Ubuntu 24.04 and Windows

The hardware

I’ve always been a fan of handheld form factor. In the 2000s, Sony’s VAIO UX and Fujitsu Lifebook U were my dream gadget, but the hefty price tag were very out of reach for a college student.

Now, the Steam Deck is a gaming PC that fits in the palm of your hand, A 7″ 15W TDP AMD APU that goes for 3-12 hours battery life, depending on usage – it is just too good to be true for my younger self who is still stuck in 2000.

Setting up a PXE boot environment – Part 1: TFTP Server & DHCP Server

Disclaimer: Regardless part 0 is more or less around Raspberry Pi, in this post, I am only implementing a bare-minimum version of PXE, it will only handle single architecture (x64) and either UEFI or BIOS, not a general purpose PXE environment. some of the PXE boot environment mentioned should also work with Raspberry Pi 3B+ or above, here’s the official Raspberry Pi documentation.

TrueNAS (FreeNAS) – 7 years later

7 years after the original FreeNAS, It has changed a lot. Guess it’s time to write some recap and experiences along the additions and modifications to my NAS. It’s gonna be a long one, for those impatient, here is the TL;DR:

Maxed RAM to 128G
Added a PCIe NVMe expansion card, and
- Upgraded mirrored boot device to NVMe drives
- Added another NVMe drive for L2ARC
Upgraded disks from 4TB to 8TB
- Shucking and SATA power pin hack
- Disk burn-in with smartctl and badblocks
- Resilvering
Upgraded switch to MultiGig (10G/2.5G) – Not directly related to the NAS itself
Peak CIFS get a nice bump, from 3.5Gbps to 5.45Gbps

自從組 FreeNAS 已經過了七年，特別寫一篇 blog 詳述中間各種變化與升級，下面條列升級重點，給沒時間細讀的人參考。

記憶體加滿 – 128G
加了一張 PCIe NVMe 擴充卡
- 把開機 USB 換成 NVMe
- 再多加一張 NVMe 當成 L2ARC
硬碟就地升級成 8TB
- 拆外接硬碟，改 SATA 電源接頭
- 用 smartctl 跟 badblocks 壓力測試硬碟
- 陣列重組 (resilvering)
升級區網，終於讓主機板上的 10G 網卡解除限制器
CIFS 效能從 3.5Gbps 提升到 5.45Gbps

If you are still interested, keep going…

對細節有興趣的請繼續往下看…

Setting up a PXE boot environment – Part 0

Upon learning that Raspberry Pi 3 and above has PXE boot capabilities, I pulled out my dust gathering, poor Raspberry Pi 3B… My motive is NOT to re-image that MicroSD card every time I want to tinker stuff, simply plug-in, power up, and viola, at least ideally.

Building stuff

When I was 12, a relative lend me a set of PC, I vaguely remember it was a Pentium 133, has a turbo button in its case, and a fairly large, 400MB hard drive. He lend it to me so I can take it apart and put it back, see if everything is still working.