[Wylug-discuss] Btrfs home server

[Scott Hodgson]

Hi John

Thanks for the info. Yes I think a separate OS disk would be best. BTRFS is quite a complex beast when you use it for more than a basic setup. I have been trying lxd with dockers in them and took me ages to figure out that an unprivileged container was the issue with docker getting permissions.

I ended up getting 2 used server disks on eBay Seagate es sata3, so will see how they workout for me. SMART says they both have over 2 years left in them.... We will see.

Where did you get the ssd's from, any feedback of a good brand to look out for?

Thanks

Scott

PS I found irc #btrfs handy for problems, specifically someone irc nickname darkling - really knowledge on it.

On 21 September 2017 15:52:09 BST, John Leach via Wylug-discuss <wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk> wrote:
>On Tue, 2017-09-19 at 16:23 +0000, Scott Hodgson via Wylug-discuss
>wrote:
>> Hi
>> 
>> Wanting to know what peoples thoughts are on setting up the
>> filesystem on a home server.
>> Got a 2 x 1tb hard drives setup for raid1. 
>> I want to use Linux containers for some websites so tried BTRFS. I
>> used sda2 for uefi sda2 as BTRFS for /. Sda2 was then put in raid
>> with BTRFS and sub volumes added.
>> To test, I unplugged one of the drives but upon a reboot it went
>> straight to initramfs shell. I sorted that by adding degraded to
>> fstab and grub, however even though the partitions have the same
>> uuid, it doesn't boot for one of the drives which makes me fear I
>> could lose the information.
>> Now I want the function of Btrfs but a bit more easy to use FS. My
>> options are have a root partition and a /var partition and then make
>> them BTRFS or other suggestions of a FS. Though do I use mdadm raid
>> or btrfs raid or zfs raid? What are my options? Anyone have a
>> solution? All opinions welcome.
>> 
>> 
>
>I've been running a home server using btrfs raid1 for several years now
>without any problems.
>
>I run it under Debian, but I avoided the kinds of boot problems you
>mentioned by actually booting from a small cheap 32GB SSD, which holds
>the OS. Which means, given a problem with btrfs, I can always boot and
>sort it out.
>
>Obviously the SSD could fail, but it doesn't handle very many
>reads/writes and doesn't hold any important data so is easy to replace
>and reinstall given a problem (I backup the configs to the btrfs :)
>
>A bit of a cop-out I know, but still, it's worked nicely for a long
>time.
>
>For your case, it's worth noting that, to be able to boot from both
>disks directly (i.e: if one fails) they need the right boot sector
>stuff and grub installation on both disks. I had the same problem with
>the standard md raid1 setup. I never found a very satisfactory solution
>for this - it was always a very complicated manual process to ensure
>both disks were setup for boot. And it (usually) needs redoing any time
>you upgrade grub.
>
>
>The most annoying thing about this is, neither of my disks have
>actually had a single problem. Not a single bit flipped. I run a btrfs
>scrub every week and never had even one checksum problem or bad read.
>That's with almost 4TB of data, millions of files, constantly churning.
>
>I think I won the hard disk lottery. They'll go eventually and then
>I'll be thankful for btrfs :)
>
>John.
>
>
>
>
>
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