Hybrid Ceph Storage: SSD WAL/DB Acceleration with USB Drive Data

By Michael McGarrah · April 16, 202616 min read

Running Ceph on USB drives sounds crazy until you put the WAL and DB on an SSD. Here's how separating metadata onto a Crucial MX500 transformed my 15-OSD homelab cluster from sluggish to surprisingly capable — at a fraction of all-SSD costs.

When ZFS and Ceph Problems Collide: Diagnosing Overlapping Failures on Proxmox

By Michael McGarrah · April 15, 20269 min read

A routine ZFS scrub alert on harlan turned into a multi-hour debugging session when a hostid mismatch fix collided with a pre-existing Ceph OSD failure from a dead USB drive. Here's how overlapping storage problems can mask each other and how to untangle them.

Ceph OSD Recovery After Power Failure: SAN Switch Was Dead the Whole Time

By Michael McGarrah · April 14, 202611 min read

A power outage knocked my Ceph cluster from 15 healthy OSDs down to 4. The recovery took days of debugging — heartbeat cascades, a ceph.conf misconfiguration, and a dead SAN switch hiding behind NO-CARRIER flags on every node.

Integrating Jekyll-Pandoc-Exports Into a Real Project - Part 3: Bugs, Fixes, and HTML Cleanup

By Michael McGarrah · April 13, 202611 min read

What happens when you integrate your own Jekyll plugin into a real project: three patch releases, a Ruby language gotcha, and the surprising difficulty of converting themed HTML into clean documents.