Nice. Thanks 👍

Interesting. I’ve been using “.home.arpa” for a while now, since that’s one of the other often used ways.

Yeah. I’ve no need to change to anything else. pf/OPNsense 4life.

That’s how I’ve got mine set up, with OPNsense.

I’ve been using it a few years and I only know about half the stuff that pfSense/OPNsense can do. So I would advise newbies to just make small changes at a time because there’s a whole lot of stuff you can change. It’s worth learning, though. I wouldn’t use anything else for my main firewall/router nowadays.

PfSense and OPNsense are both killer router “out of the box” distros built on BSD. I say this as a Linux user, with little interest in running BSD for my applications, but… Respect to BSD. ✊

ZFS kicks arse. It’s worth learning enough to get a basic array going, with a couple of datasets and encryption. Once you get acquainted with that, you’ll be using it for years to come.

And the ASRock Deskmini range. I’m currently using one with an older Kaby Lake i7 as my Docker host.

You could (carefully) run a dd command to blast the partition data off the drive, in Linux or any Unix based system.

Let’s say your drive was recognised as /dev/sdc when you plugged it in.

First, make sure it’s unmounted:

1. sudo umount /dev/sdc

Then blast a gigabyte of zeros over the partition information: 2. sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sdc bs=1G count=1

The partition information is usually stored on the very first couple of megabytes on the drive, so blasting a gig’s worth of zeros linearly onto it should make it show up as an empty device next time you unplug and plug it in.