These are my configuration notes on using a PiKVM V4 Mini to connect to my four Ceph nodes via a cheap 4-port KVM switch.

When I built my Ceph cluster in March 2020, I used old SATA HDDs I still had on the shelf. It was always clear that at some point these old consumables would die and need replacing. That time has come and I went with 3x 2TB SATA SSD OSD per node.

Just a short write-up on the state of my TerraMaster F5-433 Ceph cluster now that it has been in use for about 3 years.

This is my braindump on installing cephadm on CentOS Stream 9.

While I use a QNAP TS-473A for my tests plus 2 VMs, the below applies to any machine or VM running CentOS Stream 9 FWIW: My installation and initial configuration is described in the post QNAP TS-473A with CentOS Stream 9.

I want a playground for Ceph’s cephadm that was introduced with Octopus and is also present in Pacific.

So I cleanly took my QNAP TS-473A out of my existing Ceph Nautilus cluster again (because I have enough combined capacity on my F5-422 nodes to be able to remove the OSDs in the TS-473A) and installed Fedora Server 35 plus cephadm from upstream.

I added a QNAP TS-473 to my Red Hat Ceph Storage 4 (Nautilus) cluster.

This is my braindump.

While for my virtualisation needs I am firmly in the Red Hat camp, an article in ix 9/2021 piqued my interest.

Since I was on a week of ‘staycation’ and the T7910 was not in use, I decided to test Proxmox VE 7.0 on a Dell Precision T7910 tying in my existing Ceph Nautilus storage for both RBD and CephFS use.

This is a quick braindump of setting up our home GitLab instance (on CentOS 8) to backup to an existing Ceph Object Gateway using the S3 API.

user@workstation tmp $ s3cmd  --access_key=FOO --secret_key=BAR ls s3://gitlab-backup/
2020-09-09 19:28    686305280  s3://gitlab-backup/1599679709_2020_09_09_13.3.5-ee_gitlab_backup.tar

this is my braindump on setting up NFS-Ganesha to serve 3 separate directories on my CephFS using 3 separate cephx users.

This is a quick braindump of setting up our home GitLab instance (on CentOS 8) to backup to an existing CephFS but with access limited to the directory /GitLab_backup.

[root@gitlab ~]# df -h /mnt/cephfs-GitLab_backup/
Filesystem      Size  Used Avail Use% Mounted on
ceph-fuse       5.3T  175G  5.1T   4% /mnt/cephfs-GitLab_backup

I made some hardware changes to my Ceph Nautilus cluster.

While previously I used one SSD shared between the operating system and Ceph, I did want a clean setup where the OS and Ceph are on separate devices.

After installing RHEL 8, I started building a Ceph Nautilus cluster with my four TerraMaster F5-422 nodes.