Thoughts on server/network racks?
https://lemmy.world/post/1494880
Thoughts on server/network racks? - Lemmy.world
Every couple months I get the urge to organize my lab/home office equipment into
a rack/cabinet, but never follow through on it. I ocassionally look on
craigslist for deals, but everything is either too far away or too big. I’d
rather pay more for a smaller rack that doesn’t go all the way to the ceiling
and will just show up on my doorstep. A 6U would fulfil my current requirements,
12U is probably more than enough in reality but as an engineer I find myself
eyeing 15-18U to be conservative. This iteration of the search has me eying
these options: * sysracks 18U server rack
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B082YJVBTV/?coliid=I3NT2EN7YX0XES&colid=3E8TPEGQ105CM&psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_lv_ov_lig_dp_it]
- slightly bigger than I want, but still reasonable. Some questionable reviews
on manufacturing/shipping quality, but this seems like a solid cost/value ratio:
fully enclosed, room to grow, wheels, accessories like shelves and such I’d want
anyway. Feels like maybe overkill, but for the price… * NavePoint 15U Portable
Rolling Network Rack
[https://www.amazon.com/dp/B08HWGKPWF/?coliid=I3TO1OGGRHCC1D&colid=3E8TPEGQ105CM&psc=1&ref_=list_c_wl_lv_ov_lig_dp_it]
- closer to the size I want (12/15U options), cheaper but no accessories, like
shelves, I’d need bringing it closer in price to the sysrack. Similar
manufacturing/shipping concern reviews. I like this one, but hard to feel like
it’s a worse deal than the sysrack. * some startech variant - these seem
generally higher build quality (sturdier) but higher cost and more “bare bones”
looking. also often adjustable depth making it potentially more future proof.
but I’m not sure either of these make up for the increased cost. What do you
think? Any advice or wisdom you can share? I’m feeling like finally following
through this time because my office is a tiny mess. Leaning toward the NavePoint
currently.
Kubernetes and SSD Read Cache - Beautiful Silence
https://lemmy.world/post/1117290
Kubernetes and SSD Read Cache - Beautiful Silence - Lemmy.world
So I run a small Kubernetes cluster (k3s) backed by MariaDB hosted on a Synology
NAS with only HDDs rather than etcd colocated on the control nodes. For
resiliency purposes it’s been great, nodes are basically pure compute resources
I can wipe out and recreate with ease and not worry about data loss. However,
for over a year now I’ve lived with the constant chatter of active hard drives
in my office. The Kube DB workload is extremely read heavy and very active: many
thousands of selects per minutes with only a handful of writes.
Clickclickclickclickclickclick. Seems like a good case for caching, and luckily
my NAS has 2 NVMe slots for an SSD cache. I bought a couple data center drives
with PLP (Kingston DC1000B, probably overkill, but not crazy expensive), pop
them in, set up a read/write cache for the database and Kube NFS volumes
and…silence, wonderful silence. It’s almost constantly at 100% cache hits. Bonus
points if things are faster as well. I’m very happy. Never optimized an
application for noise levels before 😁.
Looking for 64-bit RPi4 Server OS Distro suggestions
https://lemmy.world/post/380874
Looking for 64-bit RPi4 Server OS Distro suggestions - Lemmy.world
So I’ve been running a little 2 node rpi kubernetes cluster for over a year now,
bootstrapped with Ansible and Helm (source
[https://github.com/macgregor/homelab]). I picked Ubuntu Server at the time
because I think the official 64-bit Raspbian OS was still young or maybe not
even out at the time (can’t quite remember) but I’ve found myself fighting with
Ubuntu an awful lot culminating in a major version upgrade to “jammy” last night
that has wrecked one of my nodes. It even tried to delete the running kernel
during the upgrade but caught itself and asked me to confirm, wtf. I’ve never
experienced a Linux upgrade this bad. Yeah, “jammy” is right. Luckily I use a
separate NAS for persistence. So I’m breaking up with Ubuntu, which I think is
the cool thing to do these days anyway, and using this as an opportunity to
rebuild and clean up my IaC. I am most familiar with Red Hat distros
(Fedora/CentOS daily drivers for years now, RHEL servers at work) though I’m not
familiar with the ARM ecosystem there. Ive also been wanting to try NixOS for a
while but looking at some of the rpi config last night had me a little concerned
because it felt unfamiliar. Then of course there’s the Official Raspbian OS, 64
bit support should be solid by now. What OS are you using for your Raspberry Pi
servers? Any I should definitely avoid?
