rtxn

I recently decided to rebuild my homelab after a nasty double hard drive failure (no important files were lost, thanks to ddrescue). The new setup uses one SSD as the PVE root drive, and two Ironwolf HDDs in a RAID 1 MD array (which I'll probably expand to RAID 5 in the near future).

Previously the storage array had a simple ext4 filesystem mounted to /mnt/storage, which was then bind-mounted to LXC containers running my services. It worked well enough, but figuring out permissions between the host, the container, and potentially nested containers was a bit of a challenge. Now I'm using brand new hard drives and I want to do the first steps right.

The host is an old PC living a new life: i3-4160 with 8 GB DDR3 non-ECC memory.

• Option 1 would be to do what I did before: format the array as an ext4 volume, mount on the host, and bind mount to the containers. I don't use VMs much because the system is memory constrained, but if I did, I'd probably have to use NFS or something similar to give the VMs access to the disk.

• Option 2 is to create an LVM volume group on the RAID array, then use Proxmox to manage LVs. This would be my preferred option from an administration perspective since privileges would become a non-issue and I could mount the LVs directly to VMs, but I have some concerns:

  • If the host were to break irrecoverably, is it possible to open LVs created by Proxmox on a different system? If I need to back up some LVM config files to make that happen, which files are those? I've tried following several guides to mount the LVs, but never been successful.
  • I'm planning to put things on the server that will grow over time, like game installers, media files, and Git LFS storage. Is it better to use thinpools or should I just allocate some appropriately huge LVs to those services?

• Option 3 is to forget mdadm and use Proxmox's ZFS to set up redundancy. My main concern here, in addition to everything in option 2, is that ZFS needs a lot of memory for caching. Right now I can dedicate 4 GB to it, which is less than the recommendation -- is it responsible to run a ZFS pool with that?

My primary objective is data resilience above all. Obviously nothing can replace a good backup solution, but that's not something I can afford at the moment. I want to be able to reassemble and mount the array on a different system if the server falls to pieces. Option 1 seems the most conducive for that (I've had to do it once), but if LVM on RAID or ZFS can offer the same resilience without any major drawbacks (like difficulty mounting LVs or other issues I might encounter)... I'd like to know what others use or recommend.

"Is this the one?"
"Yeah, that's the one."
Yank!

As the last of the servers died with a pathetic beep, I think I heard the poor electrician, still holding the unlabeled end of the rack's power line, invoke the name of Jesus.

(Obviously dramatized, but mostly accurate.)

The virtualization servers came back online with some fuss, but they at least look functional. My tasks for the day are set: wade through about 400 error messages, verify the functionality and integrity of 117 virtual machines, restore backups as needed, and verify the SMART status on every physical hard drive.

(edit 1) High Availability tried to migrate all of one host's VMs to the other, but it isn't worth much if both HA hosts are on the same circuit and die within seconds of each other. Now all but a few VMs are running on a single host.

(edit 2) Some of the PhDs are angry because their long-running ML projects got interrupted. They didn't set up checkpoints or live backups, so entirely their fault.

(edit 3) Five hours later, only one VM needed manual intervention (apart from migrating the VMs back to their original hosts), and all the hard drives are in good condition for their age. This turned out to be a really boring disaster.

I mean all the unnatural, wireframe-like features. It's a fascinating design and I was hoping that some quests would elaborate on the lore of how that area came to be like that. I'm caught up on the archon quests and have just finished Nightingale's Song... not a word so far.

Is there a world quest that at least mentions it? Or was there some limited event that I missed?

Obviously things didn't turn out like that, and I'd love to know if any quest touches on the topic, because the wacky geometry is just way too cool of a detail to just drop and never elaborate.

Archived article: https://archive.md/HONwC

They'll release one more update (my guess is whatever release-ready content they've already got), then the servers will shut down next Thursday.

"We don't need player counts to be super huge in order to be successful" is starting to ring hollow.

I've found the solution, and it's exactly as stupid and obvious as I was expecting.

The classroom computers were deployed using Clonezilla from an image that had the VirtualBox VM pre-configured. As a result of this, every VM had the same MAC address, which probably caused a lot of ARP collisions, since all the hosts and VMs were essentially on the same broadcast domain.

The solution was to simply randomize each VM's MAC address. After that, ICMP, SSH, and HTTP worked as expected. Thanks for the suggestions, but it was caused by my own oversight in the end.

(edit) I got around to reading the comments just now, @maxy@piefed.social was totally correct.

I know this isn't "selfhosting" as most people imagine it, but it is about hosting services on own hardware, hence why I'm posting in this community.

I'm supposed to help a teacher set up a networking exercise where pairs of computers are connected directly on a crossover cable and can access services (echo, HTTP, SSH, FTP) on each other. Every computer is identical: Windows 10 host, one VirtualBox VM running Linux Mint with a bridged adapter in promiscuous mode. Each host and VM has its own static link-local IP address.

The problem is, the VMs can't talk to each other, and I don't know why.

From one VM, I can ping itself, its host, and the remote host, but not the remote VM. Each host can ping itself, the local VM, the remote host, but not the remote VM. I've tried connecting both hosts to a layer-2 switch, with the same result.

Can someone point me at the one thing that I'm obviously doing wrong?

(edit) I've also tried to set the default gateway to the host's, remote host's, and remote VM's address, but nothing changed.

Running Linux on metal isn't an option. In the past, the classroom computers used to dual boot Windows and Ubuntu, but the Windows install got so bloated (the software too, not just Windows) that it needs the full SSD.

An interesting and important look at the development of Factorio's Linux-native port from an actual developer: the platform in general, Wayland, GNOME's bullshit, and dependencies.

Somebody accidentally deleted most of the system. There were no executables for any shells, text editors, or utilities. All they had was a single terminal that was still logged in as root. I think they had to manually type in some executable's machine code and echo it into a file.

I've been reading a lot about massive stellar objects, degenerate matter, and how the Pauli exclusion principle works at that scale. One thing I don't understand is what it means for two particles to occupy the same quantum state, or what a quantum state really is.

My background in computers probably isn't helping either. When I think of what "state" means, I imagine a class or a structure. It has a spin field, an energy_level field, and whatever else is required by the model. Two such instances would be indistinguishable if all of their properties were equal. Is this in any way relevant to what a quantum state is, or should I completely abandon this idea?

How many properties does it take to describe, for example, an electron? What kind of precision does it take to tell whether the two states are identical?

Is it even possible to explain it in an intuitive manner?

I'm getting this error that says Error. I can't tell if I fat-fingered the community name in the URL, or it got removed, or it doesn't exist in the first place, or maybe there's a legitimate issue with the software, but I hope it's useful!

I need to clarify because some people apparently never encountered the error page: it used to show the actual error. It was later changed to not do that.

(apologies for the atrocious aspect ratio)

Minecraft and Factorio ain't shit next to Conway's Game Of Life.

Low effort meme while flatpak update finishes.

I understand why having eight very specific versions of the same library is important. Doesn't mean it isn't annoying.

This image is no longer available on nasa.gov.