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I recently received a 13″ MacBook Pro with an internal 512GB SSD. I support a lot of different products and need to virtualize many different environments to do so. Naturally, 512GB fills up pretty fast when creating a bunch of virtual machines so I started shopping for decent external SSDs. It seems silly to waste my money on SSDs based on USB 3.x interfaces as they generally top out between 500MB/s to 1050MB/s when we now have Thunderbolt 3 which is 4 times faster at 40Gbps.

The Sticker shock of these new TB3 SSDs is a bit much as at the time I’m writing this, the Samsung X5 2TB SSD is a whopping $699.99. I just couldn’t justify this purchase and started doing a bit of research. Turns out you can buy the enclosure and an M.2 2280 SSD and save yourself over $300. I just booked the order at Amazon and will update this when the parts arrive and I’ve put it together and tested.

Here are the parts for reference and calculated savings:

ineo Thunderbolt 3 SSD Enclosure, PCIe Thunderbolt 3 (40Gbps) to NVMe M.2 SSD Case – (SSD not Included) [C2604]129.99
Sabrent Rocket Q 2TB NVMe PCIe M.2 2280 Internal SSD High Performance Solid State Drive R/W 3200/2900MB/s (SB-RKTQ-2TB)249.99
m.2 Thermal pad， 70x20x1mm for M.2 2280 SSD NVMe Heatsinks (4PCS Pack)8.99
Amazon Coupon (Not sure why but I’ll take it)-13.00
Roll Your Own Grand Total375.97
SAMSUNG X5 Portable SSD 2TB – Up to 2800MB/s -Thunderbolt 3 NVMe External Solid State Drive, Gray/Red (MU-PB2T0B/AM)699.99
Roll Your Own Savings324.02

Update: Mar 11 19:56:26 EST 2021

I’ve been using this little speed demon for some time now and I must say I’m impressed.

I’d buy this one again as the prices for the Samsung X5 2TB are still $599 @ Amazon.

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I recently had the need to update my shiny new FreeBSD jailed server because I wanted to migrate to WordPress. I didn’t want to bring down the existing server while I did the install and converted my content so I managed to clone my existing jailed server using warden:

 warden export name_of_jail --dir=/directory_for_warden_file

This will take a while… Once done, you can import the warden file creating a new jail:

 warden import jail_warden_file.wdn --host=jailbird --ipv4=192.168.1.105/24

You’ve now got a cloned jail and a template for creating other jailed servers.

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If you’re like me and prefer the command line to the GUI, here’s a trick and script to help you manage your Solaris VMs.

  1. Enable a serial port for the VM.
    1. Enable Port 1
    2. Port Number COM1
    3. Port Mode: Host Pipe
    4. Create Pipe
    5. Port/File Path: /tmp/vb-VM-NAME-console
  2. Perform a reconfiguration boot on the VM.

  3. Install socat on the host system

    sudo apt-get install socat

  4. Change the eeprom console device for the VM:

    eeprom console=ttya

  5. Change the /boot/grub/menu.lst for the VM:

    ...
# To enable grub serial console to ttya uncomment the following lines
# and comment out the splashimage line below
# WARNING: don't enable grub serial console when BIOS console serial
#       redirection is active!!!
serial --unit=0 --speed=9600
terminal serial
#
# Uncomment the following line to enable GRUB splashimage on console
#splashimage /boot/grub/splash.xpm.gz
#
# To chainload another OS
...

  6. Bring down the VM:

    init 5

  7. Once this is done, we can now tell VirtualBox to boot the VM headless and connect with socat

    VBoxManage startvm node1 --type headless && socat -,raw,echo=0 /tmp/vb-node1-console

    I wrote a perl script to handle booting and connecting the console. Feel free to download: vb.pl


    $ vb.pl -h
    usage:

    vb.pl -l
    vb.pl -n VM -b
    vb.pl -n VM -p
    vb.pl -h

    -l : list VirtualBox machines
    -n : name of the VirtualBox machine
    -b : power on and boot machine
    -p : power off machine
    -h : this message.