Some context shots. This is in my garage which is directly below my living room. Everything leads back here and the cat cable from the fibre ONT leads here from the other side of the garage also. I have 2 redundant gig links to a switch in the living room where it was weirdly easier to go outside the garage, up the outside wall and then back in to the house.

There is a rack mount standard desktop with a 4 port Intel NIC and an IT mode HBA, 6 spinning HDDs, an SSD and 2x NVME drives. This is my main Proxmox server running Opnsense and a whole host of other services, including email. On to of it I have a monitor, 3 external HDDs used for backups and another desktop I picked up cheap which runs as the Zoneminder CCTV box.

At the very top there is a cheap POE dumb switch that powers the CCTV camera and then a Netgear 24 port switch with VLANs configured for various networks - Main, IoT, VoIP, CCTV… I have the same switch up in the living room also.

At the very bottom almost invisible is a Belkin UPS and a strip adapter that has several smart plugs in which I use to power my backup drives. That way my backup drives are off, not just unmounted unless a backup is running. The aim was to avoid any attacker / system wide issue taking down the backup drives. I sleep a smidgen better at night for that.

Not pictured is an Odroid HC2 that lives upstairs and that I had hoped to rig up as a remote backup device, but I’ve never really got around to setting it up properly or putting anything other than a small capacity HDD in. It does run HomeAssistant though so that’s pretty useful.

A bit more context

More guts showing the mess.

Lets just appreciate how damn lucky I was when I picked up this server rack. It doesn’t fit with the carpet down, so had to peel that back. Millimetre perfect.

That was my point

20 years ago there were 2000000000 fewer people in the world.

I haven’t paid anything for it

As long as there are no problems with the btrfs code? Hahahahaha!! There are.

It was forked but somehow lacked a huge amount of functionality that Emby had (and still has) Like I think it only supported films, not music or TV shows. The app infrastructure was awful across fire stick, Roku and android and wasn’t backward compatible with the Emby apps. I just didn’t see the point of forking it if you’re just going to make it worse or only address the server side and neglect the clients. The whole thing has to work together with good clients and server.

I can’t use VPN on my work PC so I have some services open on sub domains that aren’t in my DNS. Follow some basic rules and it’s fine. My phone is always connected to my Wireguard running on Opnsense. It’s simple, fully self hosted and works great.

Last time I tried it it was a much worse experience than Emby across all devices and for all media types. I don’t understand all the love it gets.

Everyone saying it’ll be fine is speaking theoretically. Practically I can attest to full and total file system corruption under this scenario.

Pluck a nostril hair: “Please stop! I have a wife and kids! Take them”

Careful. You might get hit by a bus.

It stole all my data. It’s a bit of a clusterfuck of a file system, especially one so old. This article gives a good overview: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linuxs-perpetually-half-finished-filesystem/ It managed to get into a state where it wouldn’t even let me mount it readonly. I even resorted to running commands of which the documentation just said “only run this if you know what you’re doing”, but actually gave no guidance to understand - it was basically a command for the developer to use and noone else. It ddn’t work anyway. Every other system that was using the same disks but with ext4 on their filesystems came back and I was able to fsck them and continue on. I think they’re all still running without issue 6 years later.

For such an old file system, it has a lot of braindead design choices and a huge amount of unreliability.

I gave up trying to setup a Mastodon server in docker. Lemmy was pretty tricky at the time as the docs were wrong. My email server was a bit tricky, but I’ve not really done much to tinker with it in the proceeding 6 years, so was worth it.

Why fake serial numbers?

I used btrfs once. Never again!

Are you saying SSDs are faster than HDDs?

I was thinking Proxmox would add a layer between the raw disks and the VM that might interfere with ZFS, in a similar way how a non IT more HBA does. From what I understand now, the passthrough should be fine.

The server runs Proxmox and one of the VMs runs as a fileserver. Other VMs and containers do other things.

I won’t be running ZFS on any solid state media, I’m using spinning rust disks meant for NAS use.

My desire to move to ZFS is bitrot prevention and as a result of this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l55GfAwa8RI

Good point. Having a small VM that just needs the HBA passed through sounds like the best idea so far. More portable and less dependencies.