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Joined 5 months ago
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Cake day: June 9th, 2024

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  • I mean, recovery from parity data is how all of this works, this just doesn’t require you to have a controller, use a specific filesystem, have matching sized drives or anything else. Recovery is mostly like any other raid option I’ve ever used.

    The only drawback is that the parity data is mostly equivalent in size to the actual data you’re making parity data of, and you need to keep a couple copies of indexes since if you lose the index or the parity data, no recovery for you.

    In my case, I didn’t care: I’m using the oldest drives I’ve got as the parity drives, and the newer, larger drives for the data.

    If i were doing the build now and not 5 years ago, I might pick a different solution but there’s something to be said for an option that’s dead simple (looking at you, zfs) and likely to be reliable because it’s not doing anything fancy (looking at you, btrfs).

    From a usage (not technical) standpoint, the most equivalent commercial/prefabbed solution would probably be something like unraid.


  • A tool I’ve actually found way more useful than actual raid is snapraid.

    It just makes a giant parity file which can be used to validate, repair, and/or restore your data in the array without needing to rely on any hardware or filesystem magic. The validation bit being a big deal, because I can scrub all the data in the array and it’ll happily tell me if something funky has happened.

    It’s been super useful on my NAS, where it’s the only thing standing between my pile of random drives and data loss.

    There’s a very long list of caveats as to why this may not be the right choice for any particular use case, but for someone wanting to keep their picture and linux iso collection somewhat protected (use a 321 backup strategy, for the love of god), it’s a fairly viable option.



  • I just uh, wrote a bash script that does it.

    It dumps databases as needed, and then makes a single tarball of each service. Or a couple depending on what needs doing to ensure a full backup of the data.

    Once all the services are backed up, I just push all the data to a S3 bucket, but you could use rclone or whatever instead.

    It’s not some fancy cool toy kids these days love like any of the dozens of other backup options, but I’m a fan of simple and well, a couple of tarballs in a S3 bucket is about as simple as it gets since restoring doesn’t require any tools or configuration or anything: just snag the tarballs you need, unarchive them, done.

    I also use a couple of tools for monitoring the progress and a separate script that can do a full restore to make sure shit works, but that’s mostly just doing what you did to make and upload the tarballs backwards.


  • I’m finding 8 years to be pretty realistic for when I have drive failures, and I did the math when I was buying drives and came to the same conclusion about buying used.

    For example, I’m using 16tb drives, and for the Exos ones I’m using, a new drive is like $300 and the used pricing seems to be $180.

    If you assume the used drive is 3 years old, and that the expected lifespan is 8 years, then the used drive is very slightly cheaper than the new one.

    But the ‘very slight’ is literally just about a dollar-per-year less ($36/drive/year for used and $37.50/drive/year for new), which doesn’t really feel like it’s worth dealing with essentially unwarrantied, unknown, used and possibly abused drives.

    You could of course get very lucky and get more than 8 years out of the used, or the new one could fail earlier or whatever but, statistically, they’re more or less equally likely to happen to the drives so I didn’t really bother with factoring in those scenarios.

    And, frankly, at 8 years it’s time to yank the drives and replace them anyways because you’re so far down the bathtub curve it’s more like a slip n’ slide of death at that point.


  • I went and whacked the scan library button on a 30tb library collection and it didn’t read all that much data (looks like under 100gb) and seemed to be pretty quick - maybe 45 seconds. Local drives and all that, so the speed of the scan doesn’t matter as much as the relatively small amount of data. If all you had was 1tb of media, I’d expect it to just be a couple of gigabytes, not huge amounts of data.

    I’d probably double-check that however you’ve mounted the WebDAV share is supporting partial reads, since that really feels to me like the first place that something could be wrong that would cause excessive amounts of file transfers.


  • I mean, WebDAV is basically just HTTP.

    Accessing a file over WebDAV will result in the file being downloaded, so it makes sense that trying to scan terrabytes of files will result in terrabytes of downloads.

    You probably want to use nfs/smb instead, since that’s more designed for random-access type situations, though you’d STILL end up pulling all the data down since iirc jellyfin scans the entire file so you’d still be in the situation of having to download all the data even there.


  • I’m going to get downvoted to hell for this but uh, I usually tell clients Squarespace is what they want these days.

    Self-hosting something like Wordpress or Ghost or Drupal or Joomla or whatever CMS you care to name costs time: you have to patch it, back it up, and do a lot of babysitting to keep it up and secure and running. It’s very much not a ship-and-forget - really, nothing selfhosting is.

    I’m very firmly of the opinion that small business people should be focused on their business, not their email or website or whatever, because any time you spend fighting your tech stack is time you could have been actually making money. It’s all a cost, it just depends if you value $20 a month or your time more.

    If I had someone come to me asking to setup this stuff for their business, I’d absolutely tell them to use gSuite for email, file sharing, documents, and such and Squarespace for the website and then not worry about shit, because they’re both reliable and do what they say on the tin.




  • You know, I think I did the thing I always do and forget how bad the idle power for Ryzen cpus are due to how they’re architected.

    Like, my home server is a 10850k, which is a CPU known for using 200+w… except that, of course, at idle/normal background loads it’s sitting at more like 8-15w. I did some tweaking to tell it to both respect it’s TDP and also adjusting turbo boost to uh, don’t, but still: it’s shockingly efficient after fiddling.

    I wouldn’t have expected a 5500u to sit at 30w under normal loads, but I suppose that depends on the load?






  • So don’t take this as rude, but if none of you have experience running email for a business, you’re probably better off contracting that part out.

    It’s a lot of work to get working, keep working, and is prone to exploding for no particular reason so if this is a business-critical component, it’s worth the $20 a month to get it hosted where making your email actually deliver to people’s inbox is someone else’s problem.

    Same for the business website: if it being down is going to cost money, a simple static page like that is hostable for literally free with cloudflare or netlify or any of a couple of other providers, and that’s probably what I’d do. (And, frankly, is what I do with a lot of stuff I host.)

    As for storing and accessing remote documents, if you pay for gsuite or office365, you’ll get that included in the price, so like uh, that might be the best way to go.

    I know this is literally not what you asked, but…


  • If you have a credit card and can pass their validation, Oracle offers a shockingly good set of free cloud options.

    4 core, 24gb ram ARM instance, two potato epyc instances, 200gb of disk space and 10tb of transfer and various other little bits and pieces for the grand total of $0.

    Some people have had their accounts closed for “no reason”, but I’m closing in on 2 years of free shit with no problems, so ymmv.

    (I strongly suspect no reason has a reason and a huge number of these people were running VPNs, so I’d wager they either did something stupid/illegal, or someone they gave access to did something stupid/illegal.)