Category Archives: NT IT Reviews

ASRock B450M/AC Motherboard Review

Motherboard reviews

 

ASRock B450M/AC Motherboard has a great performance and it is a fairly cheap motherboard. This motherboard only costs $61.99 on newegg.com. This motherboard can be used for any home PC. This motherboard has a 4.8/5 eggs on newegg. I think that is a good rating.

This motherboard has the maximum memory it can support is 128GB. This is helpful when you need to hold a lot in the memory. There are 4x288pin memory slots. the 4 slots and hold DDR4 memory card. The maximum O.C. memory it can hold is DDR4 4000. The most non-O.C. it can hold is DDR4 2800.

This motherboard is good since it is just for a home PC. Since it has a 4,8/5 rating on NewEgg that means that 86% of people like this motherboard. It is a very cheap motherboard with how many people like it. I think that it is a good home PC motherboard. I use it all the time.

Work cited:

“ASRock B450M/AC R2.0 AM4 Micro ATX AMD Motherboard – Newegg.Com.” Newegg, 2000, www.newegg.com/asrock-b450m-ac-r2-0/p/N82E16813157974.

Note: This review is part of a classroom project

ASUS prime B760M-A AX

Motherboard reviews

The ASUS prime B760M-A AX is a great motherboard for gaming or using for personal use I would rate it a 4/5 because I think it’s a little overpriced but i would still get it because of its features and how well and smooth it runs.$131.99 Is the total price for this motherboard. this motherboard is also good for if you wanted to use it for business. This motherboard comes with 128GB for its max memory it also supports dual channel and it has 6 x SATA 6Gb/s . The motherboard has 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 2 ports (2 x Type-A ) 4 x USB 2.0 ports (4 x Type-A)1 x DisplayPort 2 x HDMI ports 1 x Wi-Fi Module 1 x Realtek 2.5Gb Ethernet port 3 x Audio jacks 1 x PS/2 Keyboard/Mouse combo port and has 7.1 audio channels and Wi-Fi 6 2×2 Wi-Fi 6 (802.11 a/b/g/n/ac/ax) Supports 2.4/5GHz frequency band which is pretty good to have come with a motherboard.  The onboard usb has 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 headers support additional 4 USB 3.2 Gen 1 ports 2 x USB 3.2 Gen 1 connector (supports USB Type-C) 2 x USB 2.0 headers support additional 4 USB 2.0 ports.

 

For any other things you wanna know about this motherboard can be found at https://www.newegg.com/p/N82E16813119640R?Item=N82E16813119640R

 

NOTE: THIS IS FOR A CLASS PROJECT

ASUS AMD B650-A Motherboard review

Motherboard reviews

Today we will be reviewing the ASUS ROG-STRIX B650-A Gaming motherboard. I choose this motherboard to reviewing this motherboard today because it is an amazing motherboard with great capabilities for gaming.

The reason I pick this specific motherboard is because AMD has been the leading manufacturer in CPUs these past few years. They also have their own GPU series (I would not recommend using it) but they have expanded horizons that specialize in CPUs which makes them a great choice to pair with ASUS because ASUS is an amazing motherboard manufacturer. I am extremely biased towards them because I have had so many amazing experiences with them in the past.

It also holds a maximum of 128 GB of RAM (Random access memory) This is where the CPU uses the memory in the RAM to store temporary storage that leaves once you turn off the PC this si what we uses typically to run games.

the rest of the specs can be found here

Note:  This review is part of a classroom project

Creating a Big Blue Button Virtual Machine

Moodle, NT IT Reviews

Assumptions:

  • You have a Linux 20.04 VM that had root enabled and available for login.
  • The VM is able to have the minimum specs required for Big Blue Button.

Prerequisites:

  1. You have an email available to use for Big Blue Button
  2. You have a subdomain available to use for Big Blue Button

1.1 Starting Off

  • Log in with root by hitting the not listed icon and inserting root in the username field then enter the password. After logging in, you will want to navigate to the following website: https://docs.bigbluebutton.org/administration/install/
  • (Note: The following steps are optional, however, every time that something went wrong with the installation I had not done these.) You will want to do the following pre-installation steps to check the requirements:
    • In terminal, use the following commands:
      • cat /etc/default/locale
      • systemctl show-environment
      • free -h
      • uname -m
      • ip addr |grep inet6
      • uname -r
      • grep -c ^processor /proc/cpuinfo
      • ufw allow 80
      • ufw allow 443                             
    • The responses you should get are as follows:
      • LANG=”en_US.UTF-8″
      • LANG=”en_US.UTF-8″ PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin
      • total used free shared buff/cache available
        Mem: 15G 3.1G 1.0G 305M 11G 12G
        Swap: 0B 0B 0B
      • X86_64
      • inet6 :: 1/128 scope host
      • 5.4.x-xx-generic (Note mine did not exactly match this and it still worked.)
      • 8

1.2 Installation

  1. Download the script from the following website: https://github.com/bigbluebutton/bbb-install/blob/v2.7.x-release/bbb-install.sh
  2. Enter cd ~/Downloads into terminal. (This changes the active directory to the Downloads folder)
  3. Next, you want to make the script executable use this command: chmod +x bbb-install.sh
  4. This command runs the script: ./bbb-install.sh
  5. You should see a bunch of information regarding the script pop up.
  6. We are then going to navigate back to the website that you downloaded the script from and go to the page titled “READ ME”                     
  7. Located in the README document is the command for installing Big Blue Button, along with Greenlight. Scroll down until you see the heading titled “Installing on a Private Network”.
  8. Right above that heading, there is a command that is available to copy, copy this command and paste it into terminal.
  9. Once pasted, delete the “[options]” part and instead put in “-g”. This is to install greenlight along with Big Blue Button. You will also need to enter that email and domain that I mentioned earlier. 
  10. Once pasted, click enter and it will run the command, it will take a little while to install everything.
  11. Once done, you should see a link to the domain that you entered into the command, click on it and if you see the following screen, you have successfully installed Big Blue Button.
  12. If using with Moodle, you will need to obtain the “Secret” along with the domain. You will obtain both of these using the following command: bbb-conf –secret.

Adding a NAS Drive to a Windows 2016 Server

NT IT Reviews

We recently acquired 3 IceBreaker 4936 servers from DoDCFL (for free) and were looking for the best use for these bad boys.  We landed on our CCTV setup.

They are all 36-thread servers with 256GB of RAM and 216TBs of HDDs.  While the storage isn’t blazing fast by today’s standards, it is great archival storage.

Our CCTV system is Milestone, which requires the storage drives to be local.  We decided to try and set up TrueNas on the Icebreaker to allow us to greatly enhance our storage longevity.  The RAID and TrueNAS install are covered in a separate post by my excellent Miami intern (Maverick Peck), that completed that part of the process.

After TrueNas was installed we had to first setup iSCSI on the NAS.  We tried other solutions but in the end, the only one that worked with Milestone was having the drive on the recording server connect with iSCSI Initiator.

Step 1 – On the server that is connecting to the NAS, install iSCSI Initiator.  By typing iSCSI in the start bar you will get the best match of iSCSI Initiator, simply click on it.  Click the Yes button to make it a service that starts automatically in the future.

 

Step 2 – Set up the iSCSI Share you will be using on TrueNAS.  This YouTube video capture covers the process of:

  • Setting up the Zvol storage pool
  • Configuring the iSCSI Block Share
  • Enabling the TrueNAS iSCSI Service
  • Connecting the NAS Volume to iSCSI Initiator on your server
  • Finally, setting up the new disk in Disk Management

Hopefully this helps anyone else looking to setup a NAS and getting drives mapped as local drives on their server.

Cleaning Up BSOD NTFS Issue

NT IT Reviews

Occasionally a Windows system will decide to bother us with a blue screen of death.  There are a few things we can do that may (and usually does) fix the issue.

  1.  Open Powershell as an administrator and run: sfc /scannow
    • This will search for bad windows files and replace them.
  2. Now run : DISM /Online /Cleanup-Image /RestoreHealth
    • This will really do the same but replace them from Microsoft services if the above command could not fix them.
  3. Lastly, run: chkdsk /r /f
    • This will do a checkdisk on your OS drive and attempt to repair the errors.  You technically could do this first, but I got the BSOD when I did it in that order, and fixed my issue when I did it in this order.
    • You will have to do a restart to allow the chkdsk to run on the OS drive.

Neo Forza 2TB MLC NVMe 1.4 PCIe SSD Review

Hard Drive Reviews

I recently purchased this SSD for my gaming rig. This has been a really good and reliable SSD. The motherboard for this rig is the MSI Mag B50 Tomahawk. This is a 2TB M.2 PCIe SSD from the company Neo Forza. I got it because it has many qualities of a good SSD. As an example, this M.2 is about 2 cents per byte. This SSD is currently 134.99 on Newegg.  It’s currently rated 4.6 out of 5 eggs on Newegg

.

Many of the reviews have pointed out how it’s really fast but may not be as fast as advertised. There is also the fact that it’s MLC which means it’s cheaper and will last longer than a TLC or QLC.  It may not be as fast as an SLC but this is also very cost-efficient.  I think this SSD would be a good investment for your gaming system. It may be an upgrade to the current storage devices you use. Some of the reviews also talk about how you can use all 2TBs of this drive and it’s actually 2TBs. Here is a list with some of the specs of this SSD.

As you can see in the photo the MTBF is 2 million hours, That’s relatively 228 years now that’s a long time.  With a max sequential read of 7000MBps and a max sequential write of 6850MBps, this seems to be a pretty good drive. I would personally recommend this drive and I would suggest that you purchase this SSD for your gaming rig.

 

Note: This is part of a class project

https://www.msi.com/Motherboard/MAG-B650-TOMAHAWK-WIFI

https://www.newegg.com/neo-forza-2tb-nfp400/p/0D9-007T-00038?recaptcha=pass

Western Digital WD_BLACK SN770

NT IT Reviews

The WD_BLACK SN770 is a M.2 hard drive, that was made by Western Digital Corporation. The Western Digital Corporation is a company that makes computer drives, data storage, and data center systems, and cloud storage services. Their Headquarters are in San Jose of California. So the WD_BLACK SN770 is a Solid State Drive meaning it can only last for so long, how long? It’s Mean Time Between Failure last for 1.75 million hours, meaning this would last 199.7716895 years.

Now for speed and other stats, it’s read speed is 5000MBps and write speed is 4000MBps. it’s gigabyte is 500 and PCle is a Gen4 16GT/s, and can be up to 4 lanes. The 4KB Random reading is 460,000 and it’s 4KB Random writing is 800,000. and getting a WD_BLACK SN770 also comes with 3-year warranty, but this SSD does not come with a buffer and does not specify if it’s a TLC, MLC, or even a QLC. But the price isn’t that bad for a Solid State Drive, using this SSD was pretty decent, it had plenty of room and lasted for quite a while. So if you want one the link is right here Newegg.com only for $39.99.

Note: This review is for a classroom project.

Samsung SSD M.2 Hard Drive PM981a NVMe

Hard Drive Reviews

Recently, I got this hard drive and installed it into my motherboard. So far I have had no problems with it at all. The price of the Hard Drive is only $182.13 according to Newegg. If you really think about it, that is a great deal for 1 terabyte of storage. After I installed it into my motherboard, I noticed a change that was much better than the last SSD hard drive that I recently had installed in my motherboard.Specifications:

  • Size 2280 GB
  • transfer rate 2900 MB
  • MTBF 1.5 million
  • Compacity 1 TB
  • Warranty 5 year
  • Read speed 3500 MBps
  • Write speed 2900 MBps

NOTE THIS IS PART OF A CLASSROOM ASSIGNMENT

References: https://www.newegg.com/p/0D9-0009-00AH8?