By Michael McGarrah ·
35 min read
Nine of my fifteen Ceph OSDs use WAL-only acceleration while six use DB. I set out to measure the performance gap and discovered the real story isn't WAL vs DB — it's the USB 3.0 hardware ceiling that dominates everything. The matched-hardware comparison shows DB is 5-15% faster on reads, not the 32% that naive cross-node testing suggested.
By Michael McGarrah ·
5 min read
Typing passwords every time you SSH into a Proxmox node gets old fast — especially with a six-node cluster. Here's how to set up SSH key authentication and an SSH config so you can just type 'ssh harlan' and be in.
By Michael McGarrah ·
16 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.
By Michael McGarrah ·
9 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.
🇪🇺 This site uses cookies to improve your experience and for analytics. As an EU visitor, you can control your privacy preferences. Read our Privacy Policy