About Nasdev

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Why NASDEV exists

NASDEV — Network Attached Storage DEVice — kicked off back in 2007 with a pretty simple plan: build myself a decent home storage setup, and use it as an excuse to actually learn Solaris. The storage bit got sorted years ago. The learning never really stopped — and somewhere along the way the box quietly grew from a NAS into a full home server that's still going, still getting rebuilt, and still catching me out with something new.

Solaris was the foundation from day one, and it's stayed that way ever since. ZFS, zones, the whole mindset of building something that expects to run for years instead of months — that shaped everything. Honestly, a lot of what's on this site traces straight back to that one stubborn decision.

The person behind it

Day job? RF and embedded IoT — radio systems and small, purpose-built hardware. Nights and weekends? More often than not I'm buried in a Solaris server that really has no business still being this much fun after all these years. This site is where the two halves collide: the serious professional stuff and the personal project I can't seem to finish — and don't really want to.

How I work

I'm far more interested in how systems actually behave than how they're meant to behave on paper. So I build things, break them, poke at them until they make sense, and every now and then find out the documentation and reality went their separate ways ages ago. When you catch me writing about something failing, that's usually because the failure was the most useful part of the whole exercise.

Build it. Break it. Understand it. Improve it. NASDEV is where I write it all down.

Why share it

Partly it's selfish — a system this old builds up a lot of history, and writing it down is honestly how I remember what I did and why. And partly it's because a NAS that turned into a home server is exactly the kind of thing someone else might fancy building. If any of this saves you some time — or nudges you into starting your own — that's about the best result I could hope for.

Welcome to Nasdev

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NASDEV — Network Attached Storage DEVice — started out in 2007 as a home storage box running Solaris. It's still running Solaris, and it's still growing. What began as "somewhere to dump my files" turned into a home server, a test bench, and a project I've been quietly tinkering with — and writing up here — ever since.

Fair warning: this isn't a site full of neat, step-by-step tutorials. It's more of a running logbook — real systems, real problems, and the honest version of how they got sorted. The stuff that worked, the stuff that blew up in my face, and what each one taught me. If a page looks half-finished, that's usually because the thing it describes is still running and still changing.

What you'll find here

NASDEV — The Build is the good stuff: the machine itself. How it came to be, why I stubbornly keep it on Solaris, and the tech holding it together — ZFS, zones, and everything that keeps a decade-old box genuinely useful instead of just old.

RF Technologies and Embedded & IoT are the day job — radio systems and the little purpose-built hardware that's quietly running more of the world than most people realise. Notes from the field, basically.

Opinions & Commentary is where I stop explaining how things work and start arguing about why. Engineering's rarely about one "correct" answer — usually the fun part is working out which answer actually makes sense.

The idea

Build it. Break it. Understand it. Improve it. That's been the whole approach since 2007. Hardware has limits, software has bugs, old systems have baggage — and the interesting bit always happens right where the tidy plan meets the messy reality in the rack.

Anyway — have a poke around. Some sections are fuller than others, and that's fine; the site fills out as I do the work and find time to write it up.

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