Tag: SSD

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Manual rebuild of Proxmox

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So once the server failed to boot, I lost access to everything that I had stored on that box.  Classic case of keeping all of my eggs in one basket.  No one to blame but myself. 

Thankfully, I was able to pivot to using the local telco’s “Residential Gateway” as my DHCP Server, and had the network back up and working again within 30 minutes.  Obviously, no access to our personal shares on the NAS, no blocking of Ads via PiHole, and worse, now our personal data gathered by the local telco on our usage and DNS

I’ve been giving it a lot of thought since the SSD in the server went kaput last month, and decided that I was going to approach this build a little differently.  Not much mind you, but enough to hopefully keep this kind of a problem from happing to me again. I’m not going to deal with the whole IOMMU config at this time (I’ll expound on that in another post), and a few other minor changes.  I’ve already installed the base Proxmox OS (using EXT4 FilesSystem of course!), and will be starting to install pfSense and PiHole with it’s “Recursive DNS” option in the next day or so.

Going to spend the next few weeks fine-tuning things…

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So it’s official. I killed SSD w/ZFS FileSystem choice.

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So today I had to power down the server to perform some maintenance.  It was also the day that my local electric utility decided to replace a pole in my neighborhood.  They were kind enough to warn us that power would be down, so I took the opportunity to power down the server in the morning before they began their work.  I went to work, and when I got home, I did some moving around of equipment around the Server that I had been wanting to do for a while.  Unfortunately, when I powered the server back on, it started-up just fine but threw the dreaded “no bootdrive detected”.  

SSD’s by their very nature are perfect for most every situation, EXCEPT WRITE INTENSIVE applications.  Turns out that I was NOT paying attention when I originally installed Proxmox on the SSD with ZFS format.  Or more specifically, I wasn’t aware of the bad choice I was making. I should have gone with EXT4 as the type of FileSystem instead of ZFS.  Bad sysadmin!

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Pricing on SAS 2.5″ TB Drives is crazy expensive!

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The one part that I neglected to fully research properly when I bought the Dell PowerEdge R610 Server was the pricing of the SAS 2.5 inch drives.   So of course that’s going to be the part that comes back to bite me in the ass.    And today, it did!

Today I found out the pricing on 2.5 inch SAS drives is crazy expensive the higher the capacity you try to go!  I had originally planned on sourcing some 2TB drives, as those are the highest capacity available for my existing PERC (PowerEdge RAID Controller) 6/i, but those are $180 to $220 each!   So I’ll need to research that further and see what my options are…

In the meantime, I’ve already found at least one solid option to help get this server off the ground!

A workaround that I can use is to pull the optical drive and hookup a 2.5 inch SSD to the cable instead.  The system will recognize this as a boot drive and I can load Proxmox onto that.   I’ll still need to get some drives for the backplane, but this will buy me some breathing room so I can take my time to find a good deal somewhere.