ZFS Boot Mirrors on Proxmox 8 for the Homelab - Part 2
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 on Proxmox 8 for the Homelab - Part 1
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.
Hybrid Ceph Storage: SSD WAL/DB Acceleration with USB Drive Data
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.
When ZFS and Ceph Problems Collide: Diagnosing Overlapping Failures on Proxmox
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.
Ceph OSD Recovery After Power Failure: SAN Switch Was Dead the Whole Time
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.
Monitoring ZFS Boot Mirror Health in Proxmox 8 Clusters
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.
Optimizing Jellyfin on Proxmox: Moving Metadata to CephFS and Shrinking LXC Footprints
A comprehensive guide to resolving Jellyfin LXC disk space issues by migrating metadata to CephFS and optimizing container size for faster HA failovers.
USB Drive SMART Updates: Fast-Track to the GRUB Solution
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.
Homelab Storage Economics: Ceph vs Single Drive Costs
Real-world cost-per-GB analysis of distributed Ceph storage versus single-drive solutions in a homelab — the same infrastructure investment framework applies at any scale.
Enabling SMART Monitoring on Seagate USB Drives
Seagate USB drives hide SMART data behind UAS quirks. Disabling UAS via GRUB boot parameters unlocks full health monitoring without sacrificing stability.
Dell Wyse 3040 eMMC Storage Health Monitoring
eMMC storage doesn't support SMART, but the JEDEC health reporting built into mmc-utils gives you life time estimation and pre-EOL status for Dell Wyse 3040 boot drives.
Managing Ceph Nearfull Warnings in Proxmox Homelab
Ceph's nearfull warnings are capacity planning signals, not emergencies — if you understand the thresholds and respond before the cluster goes read-only.
Proxmox 8 Lessons Learned in the Homelab
Hard-won lessons from running Proxmox since version 7.4 through 8.2.2 — upgrade gotchas, Ceph integration tips, and the patterns that apply at any scale.
Ceph Cluster Complete Removal on Proxmox for the Homelabs
How to completely remove a broken Ceph cluster from Proxmox — every service, package, config file, and orphaned mount point — so you can start fresh.
Linux Disk I/O Performance in the Homelab
Quick disk I/O benchmarks comparing eMMC and USB3 storage on Dell Wyse 3040s — understanding the performance characteristics of your storage tier before making capacity decisions.
Proxmox Ceph settings for the Homelab
Tuning Ceph scrub and deep-scrub intervals to reduce wear on spinning rust drives in a homelab cluster — spreading daily scrubs over 7 days and weekly deep scrubs over 28 days.
Hard Drives for the Homelabs
Storage has hit a penny per GB. A 20TB renewed drive for $200 and a 20TB USB-C enclosure for $220 make the math work for a Ceph offsite backup strategy.
ProxMox 8.2 for the Homelabs
Building a Proxmox 8 + Ceph HA cluster on decade-old Dell OptiPlex 990 hardware with Seagate USB drives — the background, the hardware inventory, and why Ceph beat a Synology NAS.
Thinkpad T480 WWAN SSD
Adding a 1TB NVMe SSD to the ThinkPad T480's WWAN M.2 slot using a 2230-to-2242 B+M key adapter — a cheap way to get a separate data volume for LLM models.
Ceph Cluster rebalance issue
Fixing a severely imbalanced Ceph cluster where OSDs added in batches left the first three drives at 75-85% while newer ones sat nearly empty — by tuning backfill and recovery parallelism.