[Wylug-discuss] Btrfs home server

[Rob Speed]

I'm just going to chip in with a recommendation for the Samsung 950's 
that CCL (cclonline.com) are trotting out for quite a decent price.

R.


On Friday 2017-09-22 12:26, Scott Hodgson via Wylug-discuss wrote:

>Date: Fri, 22 Sep 2017 12:26:21
>From: Scott Hodgson via Wylug-discuss <wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk>
>Reply-To: Scott Hodgson <linux at sh2515.plus.com>
>To: John Leach <john at johnleach.co.uk>,
>    John Leach via Wylug-discuss <wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk>,
>    wylug-discuss at wylug.org.uk
>Subject: Re: [Wylug-discuss] Btrfs home server
>
>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.
>
>
>--
>Sent from my Android device with K-9 Mail. Please excuse my brevity.
>