Posts in category "proxmox"

Migrating a Proxmox ZFS boot mirror from large spinning rust HDDs to smaller SSDs — why a fresh install with a UEFI upgrade is the practical path.

When both drives in your ZFS boot mirror fail simultaneously, you can't resilver your way out. Here's the full procedure for a Proxmox fresh install that preserves your Ceph OSDs and rejoins the cluster — based on a real harlan node recovery.

ZFS boot mirrors saved my homelab cluster more than once. Here's the complete procedure for replacing a failed drive in a Proxmox ZFS boot mirror — including the mistakes I made so you don't have to.

Nine of my fifteen Ceph OSDs use WAL-only acceleration while six use DB. I set out to measure the performance gap and discovered the real story isn't WAL vs DB — it's the USB 3.0 hardware ceiling that dominates everything. The matched-hardware comparison shows DB is 5-15% faster on reads, not the 32% that naive cross-node testing suggested.

Typing passwords every time you SSH into a Proxmox node gets old fast — especially with a six-node cluster. Here's how to set up SSH key authentication and an SSH config so you can just type 'ssh harlan' and be in.

Running Ceph on USB drives sounds crazy until you put the WAL and DB on an SSD. Here's how separating metadata onto a Crucial MX500 transformed my 15-OSD homelab cluster from sluggish to surprisingly capable — at a fraction of all-SSD costs.

A routine ZFS scrub alert on harlan turned into a multi-hour debugging session when a hostid mismatch fix collided with a pre-existing Ceph OSD failure from a dead USB drive. Here's how overlapping storage problems can mask each other and how to untangle them.

A power outage knocked my Ceph cluster from 15 healthy OSDs down to 4. The recovery took days of debugging — heartbeat cascades, a ceph.conf misconfiguration, and a dead SAN switch hiding behind NO-CARRIER flags on every node.

Automated SMART monitoring and cost planning for ZFS boot mirrors across a six-node Proxmox homelab cluster with mixed SSD/HDD hardware. Track drive health, plan replacements, and manage homelab storage costs effectively.

A comprehensive guide to resolving Jellyfin LXC disk space issues by migrating metadata to CephFS and optimizing container size for faster HA failovers.

New Seagate USB drives arrived for the Ceph cluster and predictably won't report SMART data. After months of production use, GRUB boot parameters are the only method that reliably survives kernel updates and cluster reboots.