What’s going on on your servers?

I had to bite the bullet and buy new drives after the old ones filled up. I went for used enterprise SSDs on eBay and eventually found some that had an okay price, even though it’s been much more than last time I got some. Combined with Hetzner’s hefty price increase some month ago, my hobby has become a bit more expensive again thanks to the ever growing appetite of companies building more data centers to churn more energy.

Anyways, the drives are in, my Ansible playbook to properly encrypt them and make them available in Proxmox worked, so that was smooth (ignoring the part where I disassembled the Lenovo tiny from the rack, open it, SSD out, SSD in, close it and put it back in only to realize I put in the old ssd again).

Any changes in your hardware setups? Did the price increase make you reconsider some design decisions? Let us know!

  • rtxn@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    6 hours ago

    Right at this moment, I’m rebuilding my homelab after a double HDD failure earlier this year.

    The previous build had a RAID 5 array of three 1TB Seagate Barracudas that I picked out of the scrap pile at work. I knew what I was getting into and only kept replaceable files on it. When one of the drives started doing the death rattle, I decided to yank some harder-to-acquire files to my 3TB desktop HDD before trying to resilver the entire array. Guess which device was the next to fail. I could mount and read it, but every operation took 2-5 minutes. SMART showed a reallocation count in the thousands. That drive contained some important files that I couldn’t replace, which were backed up to the (now dead) server. Fortunately ddrescue managed to recover damn near everything and I only lost 80 kilobytes out of the entire disk. That was a very expensive lesson that I’ve learned very cheaply.

    The new setup has a RAIDz1 pool of 3x 4TB Ironwolf disks (constrained by the available SATA sockets on the motherboard), plus a new SSD for the OS and 16GB RAM (upgraded from literally the first SSD I ever bought and 10GB mis-matched DDR3).

    Mounting it was a bit of a dilemma. The previous array was simply mounted to the filesystem from fstab and bind-mounted to the containers. I definitely wanted the storage to be managed from Proxmox’s web UI and to be able to create VDs and LXC volumes on it. Some community members helped me choose ZFS over LVM-on-RAID5. Setting up the correct permissions wasn’t as much of a headache as last time. I’ve just managed to get a Samba+NFS+HTTP file server and Jellyfin running and talking to each other. Forgejo and Nextcloud will be next.