One of the switches in my #basementrack broke. Since both of them haven’t been super reliable, I just replaced them both with a tp link 24 ports now. So far I’m happy with it. 🤞

#PSA: You can have a degraded zraid without #ZFS actually showing a problem. I had a raid with a really, really bad write performance and an even worse read performance for the whole raid. Thankfully /var/log/messages hinted to a problem with one of the drives. Nothing serious, just some caching timeout. So I replaced that drive to check if that would change something. And thankfully it fixed the problem. Oh, and btw: Always keep spares around!
#freebsd #basementrack

My NAS got a proper 19” case. Not yet mounted in the rack, but hopefully soon! #basementrack

When your computer lab is below ground level and you have 35 l/m² rain, then you might need to have a strategy! Could be the most simple one, but you need one.

https://brejoc.com/2020-06-28-35-liters-are-no-fun/

#blog #blogpost #basementrack

Last weekend the two rack servers of my #basementrack where finally reinstalled with #Proxmox and now form a small cluster with shared storage from my NAS (via NFS). This means that I can freely move VMs between the two nodes. I'm still amazed how fast booting and working with VMs from NFS shares is.

It was a bit tricky to get Proxmox working with DHCP, because it's not supporting this out of the box. Pro tip: Pin the IPs for the interfaces first. Then you don't have to edit config files later.

Every wondered how broken RAM looks like? You are welcome!
#basementrack

This is Oscar. Oscar is a #ThinkPad t410 and part of my #basementrack setup. I’m mainly using it for SSH connections and to search for stuff on the internet. So no heavy workloads. Sadly Oscar became painfully slow with the latest releases, so I decided to replace the HDD with an SSD. Boy is that thing fast now. 🚀
And the best part: Replacing the HDD couldn't be simpler. There should be more laptops like the ThinkPad t series!

All servers but the NAS in my #basementrack now get powered down in the evening and one even started again in the morning. The IBM servers even get cut off from the power grid completely with smart plugs from AVM. Otherwise they would consume 20 watts while being powered off, because the fans are still running. All of this with a little help from Salt and two cron jobs.

And here is the next addition to the #basementrack: A trusty old HP600, which will primarily be use for containers. LXD, Docker, and Kubernetes.

Took me 45 minutes to figure out that AppArmor prevented qemu from accessing my NFS share. 🤦‍♂️
Guess I'll have to update the profile.
#basementrack

Setting up KVM is a no-brainer. Just installing the packages is enough. Really couldn't be easier. And since I don't want to do everything via CLI, you can see libvirt in combination with virt-manager here in action.
Next thing on the list is making this reproducible with #Saltstack.

#basementrack

Since I'm really curious, I'd like to ask everybody to also post their #basementrack. Come on boys, girls and everything in between above and beyond. That would be really awesome! 👍

And since I won't be in the basement all the time, this is the view I'll have most of the time. The performance is really good of course. If they only had a little bit more RAM! Next thing is the setup of KVM and LXD.
#basementrack

Apparently I can't typo anymore. 😆 The NAS (it) is of course *on* top.
However, at first I thought about installing Proxmox, but then went for @opensuse Leap 15 for various reasons. Installation was pretty smooth. Only odd things was that openSUSE tried to install the bootloader to MBR and not to the boot partition. But that was easy to fix.
#basementrack

Good news form the basement. I was finally able to do the wiring. One of the rack server is already running and the NAS has also moved there. Unfortunately the NAS is not 19", but there is enough space to just put in in top for now.
#basementrack

Everything got a bit delayed because of sickness, but soon the wiring will also be finished. At least the two cables are now in the cable duct.
The first image shows the office room and the second one the basement.

#basementrack

Looks like I've got everything for the cabling now. Although it looks like I can fit two cables into the cable duct (is it actually called like that?) instead of only one. So I might need two more keystones. But this has to wait until the weekend anyway.
#basementrack

Alright, those switches should be enough for my little #basementrack. Not 19″, but I’ll place them on a shelve. Now I’m only waiting for the Cat7 cable to finish the wiring.

The inside of one of the pizza boxes. Nearly everything can be replaced easily. This is how it should be. 👍
#basementrack

Here we've got the fully assembled rack in the first picture and the two installed main servers in the second. After the wiring is finished in the coming days my NAS will also move into the rack.
#basementrack