So I had a micro PC that was running one of my core services and it only supports NVMe drives. Unfortunately, this little guy cooked itself and I’m not in a position to replace the drive. The system is still good and is fairly powerful, so I want to be able to reuse it.
I’m thinking I want to set up some kind of netboot appliance on another server to be able to allow me to boot the system without ever having a local disk. One thing I want to is run some docker images (specifically Frigate) but i wont be able to write anything to persistent storage locally. NFS shares are common in my setup.
Is it even possible to make a ‘gold image’ of a docker host and have it netboot? I expect that memory limitations (16GB) will be my main issue, but I’m just trying to think of how to bring this system back into use. I have two NAS appliances that I can use for backend long term storage (where I keep my docker files and non-database files anyway), so it shouldn’t be too difficult to have some kind of easily editable storage solution. I don’t want to use USB drives as persistent storage due to lifespan concerns from using them in production environments.
You must log in or register to comment.
How about running the OS from a USB stick? Put all images you want on it and mount NAS drives at boot.
I’m leery about using a USB for long term persistent OS storage due to lifespan issues I’ve seen when just running a hypervisor from one. A ‘real’ usermode OS is probably going to have a worse lifespan than what I was seeing at work.
I have a raspberry pi running from a microsd (which uses the same kind of tech as a usb stick) for over 5 years with dietpi.
But considering that you think you chewed through an nvme somehow, you may be right.
Run a livecd of whatever Linux distro you like, and get a USB drive. Store persistent files on the USB stick.
I don’t want to use a USB for storage, because those aren’t going to have a great lifespan in my experience. I’ve used them as the install media for something like ESX, but I’d rather not run a ‘real’ OS from a disk because I wasn’t impressed with overall lifespan on some of the systems we managed at work.
You mention frigate specifically. Were you running this on the system when the drive failed, or is this a future endeavour?
I bring this up because I also use frigate, and for some time I was running with a misconfigured docker compose that drove my SSD wearout to 40% in a matter of months.
Make sure that the tmpfs is configured per the frigate documentation and example config. If misconfigured like mine was, all of that IO is on disk. I believe the ramdisk is used for temp storage of camera streams, until an event occurs and the corresponding clip is committed to disk.
Good luck!
Interesting, it was running on this system, so it may actually have been wear that killed the drive. I’ll have to look into that config and see if it’s worth getting a new nvme to throw into the cook box.
Thanks for that info!
It’s possible, but I recommend more RAM because you won’t have any swap.
But adding a network boot is a hassle, I recommend buying another drive, it’ll be cheaper than RAM esp since you don’t need much storage.
I do it with k3s right now on fedora. I like it personally.
Nice thing if you use k8s settings up persistent net storage with something like longhorn is an option too.
Do you have any resources on that kind of setup? I appreciate that constructive advice!