7
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
7 points (81.8% liked)
Selfhosted
39677 readers
164 users here now
A place to share alternatives to popular online services that can be self-hosted without giving up privacy or locking you into a service you don't control.
Rules:
-
Be civil: we're here to support and learn from one another. Insults won't be tolerated. Flame wars are frowned upon.
-
No spam posting.
-
Posts have to be centered around self-hosting. There are other communities for discussing hardware or home computing. If it's not obvious why your post topic revolves around selfhosting, please include details to make it clear.
-
Don't duplicate the full text of your blog or github here. Just post the link for folks to click.
-
Submission headline should match the article title (don’t cherry-pick information from the title to fit your agenda).
-
No trolling.
Resources:
- selfh.st Newsletter and index of selfhosted software and apps
- awesome-selfhosted software
- awesome-sysadmin resources
- Self-Hosted Podcast from Jupiter Broadcasting
Any issues on the community? Report it using the report flag.
Questions? DM the mods!
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
Thanks, I've had Redhat/Fedora and Ubuntu/Mint systems, so this should not be an issue. What flavor of Linux are you running?
I'd like to set up RAID1 or 10 with SATA drives so btrfs sounds doable. Although Ars gave btrfs a pretty good drubbing here a few years ago: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2021/09/examining-btrfs-linuxs-perpetually-half-finished-filesystem/
If you are using fedora (with a recent install) you are using btrfs right now. 😉
My desktop and laptop run fedora. For my servers I run Debian 12 with everything in docker.
As for that article yah. Btrfs has had some rough points in its past. It’s true. Can’t deny it. This being said I would hold that the way btrfs treats raid definitions in unconventional ways is a design advantage.
Btrfs raid1 is more like “replica 2”. If you have one 12TB drive and two 6TB drives you get 12TB of useable space. Because btrfs will work to ensure there are two replicas behind the scenes. In a traditional raid 1 you could not use the space from the mismatched drives. It’s not traditional raid1 but I think it’s preferable.
I think the main advantage for btrfs for home lab is that you can toss in any drive regardless of size and btrfs will use it. You can remove any drive and btrfs will auto rebalance. These are btrfs exclusive features. You can also change the raid type on the fly too. Once I get kernel 6.2 I could live convert my btrfs raid1 pool into a raid 5 pool while the pool is live and mounted. You can do any such live mounted conversions on the fly.
For me home lab is being flexible and working with what you can get. And I feel btrfs is a great fit for that.
That and since btrfs if a native part of the kernel you won’t ever have to worry about updating your kernel and breaking the ZFS shim or dkms.
Good point. I'm leaning toward running the RAID as part of the OS rather than having either a dedicated NAS OS like xigmaNAS or TrueNAS, since I'd like to still use the computer for things outside just the NAS specialty that those offer. I'm still looking into the snapRAID which is more of a backup rather than RAID option. I have 4 HDs right now and have room up to 6, and that's all I really need. With btrfs RAID, if my motherboard fails or if I have to reinstall or change the OS, will any new system with a different motherboard and operating system that recognizes btrfs still be able to read the existing RAID array on the drives, without needing previous hardware/firmware/OS info?
The only thing you need to do if you run a standard Linux distro is to set up scheduled scrubbing and smart alerts. Nas OSes do that by default. But if you set it up as a cronjob or systemd timer you can achieve the same result.
The advantage of running a Linux distro over a Nas OS is that you could add virtual machines on top via kvm or run appliances via docker. It’s just a sever with a lot of storage added on top.
As for btrfs raid. Yes. If you motherboard fails or you have to reinstall the OS you can reimport it with no prior existing knowledge. It’s simple mounting it like a normal Linux file system because it is one. The kernel will locate all members of the raid pool.
You seems prepared on the topic so I'll jump in with a question: what do you think about SnapRAID? What are the advantages of birds? I've tried SnapRAID because it seems so malleable and easy, but (~~maybe~~ for my luck of knowledge) I don't feel safe with it because I don't know what's going on, when it should do scarubs and sync and when it did do them. How do you see btrfs drives for OMV in Proxmox?
Hey. I’m not an expert in SnapRAID but all of these specialized systems used one of the following under the hood
As long as the system is widely used, send you alerts when things go wrong, and uses 1-4 it should be ok. Just don’t go proprietary and make sure you get alerts when a drive fails and you should be ok.