[Wylug-discuss] Btrfs home server

[John Leach]

On Sat, 2017-09-23 at 09:29 +0000, Scott Hodgson wrote:
> Just ordered an SSD. Does yours have btrfs on or other filesystem on
> the OS disk.

I went with a nice standard not easily broken, easy to rescue
filesystem on the ssd (ext4 :)

To answer your earlier question (late now I know) I just bought the
smallest/cheapest available SATA SSD at the time. I think it was 32GB
for around £30/40 iirc, but it was years ago.

John.

> 
> On 21 September 2017 15:52:09 BST, John Leach via Wylug-discuss <wylu
> g-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.
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> > 
> 
> 
`