Testing VM immutability, secrets storage again, and a brief ode to ZFS

I’ve had my dev VM upgraded to Debian 11 for a few months, and have fiddled with from time to time. It’s not that I distrust Debian stable in the slightest to not be stable, but I also am not going to just throw prod a sudo apt full-upgrade (yes, with updating sources first…) and hope for the best. As I didn’t experience any issues with workflow with the upgraded VM, I decided it was time to bake some new images....

2021-12-23 · 3 min · Stephan Garland

Reluctant Servers

I may have mentioned this before, but I have two nearly identical Supermicro 2Us. One is the main server that hosts VMs under Proxmox to do various tasks - a NAS, a Docker host, jumpbox, etc. The other came about because I discovered that its motherboard hardware revision level was too old to support Xeon v2 (Ivy Bridge), even with an updated BIOS. I wanted the lower thermals that v2s offered, so I bought a newer motherboard, and then got another 2U case to throw the old motherboard and CPU into....

2021-10-16 · 4 min · Stephan Garland

Failed NVMe drive? Better change your upstream DNS resolver.

This is not entirely an “it’s always DNS joke,” I promise. But for the record, it is always DNS. I have an (three, actually - two are boot drives/VM storage) NVMe drive in my server that serves multiple functions - a Plex cache, a ZFS Intent Log (I should get rid of that, as it’s shown to have 0% gains for me), and a general scratch disk for anytime I need a fast disk....

2021-02-03 · 3 min · Stephan Garland