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Vertiv rPDU - A reasonably priced, 120v, individually switched and metered PDU.

For years- I have been using a combination of Sonoff S31 Plugs and a Kasa HS300 Strip to monitor, and measure my power consumption.

This- allowed me to fully visualize my rack's power consumption, into a sankey diagram.

However- the form-factor of neither solution was ideal, and as my rack has become nearly full, I needed a better solution as PDUs filled with smart-plugs, isn't exactly ideal.

The issue is, there are not many 120v PDUs, for a 24U rack. As a matter of fact, there are not many zero-U PDUs at all for 24U racks.

But- I finally found an option, for a fully managed PDU, with INDIVIDUALLY metered and switched outlets, which CAN2 plug into a standard 120v outlet.

Synology Multipath SMB, and iSCSI

So... normally when you want faster networking, you can just upgrade to faster NICs (10g, 25, 40, 50, 100g.. etc...).

However, in the case of my Synology DS423+, you get, two 1G ethernet ports with no expansion.

You would think the best course of action, would be to leverage LACP- however that is NOT the case.

Enabling Multichannel can double the amount of bandwidth per client, where as LACP, depending on hashing, only gives benefit up to the performance of one port.

This post details how to enable multipath for SMB, and how to configure iSCSI on linux with multiple paths.

Proxmox - Solutions to random errors.

This- is a short post which details how to resolve a few random errors you may experience with proxmox.

This post is for you, IF, you are experiencing any of these errors:

  • "System booted in EFI-mode but 'grub-efi-amd64' meta-package not installed! Install 'grub-efi-amd64' to get updates."
  • "Couldn't find EFI system partition. It is recommended to mount it to /boot or /efi."
  • "/etc/kernel/proxmox-boot-uuids does not exist."

Detecting a weird packet loss issue.

So- I recently installed a Quad 100G Mikrotik CRS504-4XQ-IN Router into my lab recently and moved a few servers over to 100G NICs.

Around the time I did this- I also started experiencing tons of random, hard to pinpoint instances of latency across my network.

I validated flow-control was enabled for the network- and I checked various port counters to look for errors.

This- issue took me around a week or two to finally pinpoint.... this post- is going through a bit of the steps taken.

Proxmox - Setup Debian Cloud-Init Templates

This post documents the steps needed to create a minified debian cloud image template, which you can easily clone, and have a running VM in seconds with no configuration needed.

This includes common packages, ssh-keys, IP information.

The end result of this project is...

  1. You clone a template, and start it.
  2. The cloned VM automatically starts up, updates itself, and starts running, with common packages installed, and your ssh details pre-configured.
  3. A slimmed down distribution, without excess (My end result was a 400M image.)
  4. No need to edit the VM after cloning, other then adding CPU/RAM, or other hardware as needed.

Proxmox - Import OVA

A random thing I recently came across while testing out LibreNMS-

I discovered they have a published .ova, which I wanted to import into Proxmox. However, proxmox as of this post, does not have a easy option to support importing this.

This- is a quick post, containing the commands you need, to import the ova.

Removing a stripe from a zfs pool

In my quest to optimize on power usage, One of my servers has a zfs pool consisting of 4x 8T disks, in striped mirrors configuration.

For this particular pool, IOPs and performance is not needed. As well, I am using barely 10% of the available space in this particular pool.

So- I decided to remove a pair of disks, to save a miniscule amount of energy.

Reusing EMC Drives in other systems

So, I picked up a EMC-branded 1.92TB PM1633 SAS drive off of ebay, to toss into my ceph cluster.

After acquiring it, I slapped it into my Dell MD1220, and was surprised that it was not appearing in proxmox.

This is a short post to help correct this issue.

Building a ceph cluster

My adventures in building out a small clustered ceph environment for redundant VM / Container storage.

Quote

Ceph is a great way to extract 10,000 IOPs from over 5 million IOPs worth of SSDs! -XtremeOwnage

2023 Prime Day Deals

Interested in home automation? Here are a few of the prime day deals I would personally recommend.

Note, this is not a kitchen-sink post full of non-relaxant links, but, rather, a list of things I have hands on experience with.

Every single product linked below, will work with Home Assistant, 100% LOCALLY, without any required cloud services or subscriptions.

If, you need reasons as to why required cloud services are bad, see Reasons to avoid cloud products