Re: Living in NGL: was: [gentoo-user] NAS and replacing with larger drives

[William Kenworthy <billk@iinet.net.au>]

On 19/12/22 21:30, Rich Freeman wrote:
> On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 7:51 AM Wols Lists <antlists@youngman.org.uk> wrote:
>> On 19/12/2022 12:00, Rich Freeman wrote:
>>> On Mon, Dec 19, 2022 at 12:11 AM Dale<rdalek1967@gmail.com>  wrote:
>>>> If I like these Raspberry things, may make a media box out of one.  I'd
>>>> like to have a remote tho.  😉
>>> So, I've done that.  Honestly, these days a Roku is probably the
>>> better option, or something like a Google Chromecast or the 47 other
>>> variations on this them.
>> Where do you put that 2TB drive on your Roku or Chromecast?
>>
>> I'm thinking of building a media server, not to drive the TV, but to
>> record and store. I thought that was what a media server was!
> So, he said "media box," which I assumed meant the client that
> attaches to the TV.  There are some canned solutions for media servers
> - I think the NVidia Shield can run Plex server for example.  However,
> in general server-side I'd go amd64.
>
> My current solution is:
> 1. Moosefs for storage: amd64 container for the master, and ARM SBCs
> for the chunkservers which host all the USB3 hard drives.  With a
> modest number of them performance is very good, though certainly not
> as good as Ceph or local storage.  (I do have moosefs in my overlay -
> might try to get that into the main repo when I get a chance.)
> 2. Plex server in a container on amd64 (looking to migrate this to k8s
> over the holiday).
> 3. Rokus or TV apps for the clients.

Very similar to what I have (intel/arm for moosefs) - I am effectively 
using moosefs as a distributed NAS (fuse mount onto whatever system(s) I 
am using) with built in data protection and redundancy.  LVM and similar 
pooling is discouraged as it defeats some of the built in data 
protection. To increase storage, just add a disk, format, add to the 
config and reload - it automatically redistributes the data.  Similarly, 
you can add/remove storage or whole storage systems while live with no 
risk to your data (within limits!!!) With LVM, if a drive fails, you are 
SOL and offline until you can recover and restore the data.  On a recent 
holiday, an SD card failed and a moosefs arm SBC in AU went offline - 
discovered the next morning when doing status checks from a ship in the 
Mediterranean(!) - it had already backfilled and protection was back at 
normal, moosefs was just missing 2Tb of storage space.  5 weeks later 
when I got home, I replaced the SD card, rebooted and readded the system 
all with no risk to the data.

Dale, I was where you are about 10 or so years ago and was forced to 
move on when that design hit its limits - forget LVM etc, these days 
there are lots of better ways to do what you want with less risk to your 
data.  Another factor is power - moosefs is currently 1 intel and 7 arm 
SBC's that use 90-110w (most of which is due to using ancient WD and 
Seagate hard drives) - where as my intel desktop is 90w when idle, or 
over 300 w when compiling etc. so its off unless its being used. Power 
is important to me as its expensive!!

BillK