My super lean Proxmox 8.3 testbed cluster running Ceph occasionally just decides to lockup a node based on it being incredibly limited on RAM and CPU. As much as I hate rebooting Linux/UNIX systems, this is a case where a nightly reboot of the nodes might help with reliability.

My past write up for a Backlog of Posts had all the things that I wanted to write about in mid-2024. It has been updated with links to the released posts that covered each as I finished up in 2024. I got a lot of them written but the backlog of drafts and things I wanted to write about also grew as I picked off drafts and added new posts.

I want an extra ~350w of power available for a GPU that cannot run off PCIe bus power of 75w or 25w in some very old Dell Optiplex 990 Mini Tower nodes in my Proxmox cluster.

When one of my power supplies died earlier and I bought on eBay a NEW 750W Dell OptiPlex 9010 990 790 Power Supply Replace / Upgrade that was ~750w and the same form factor as those nodes PSU. This was just fast purchase to grab something that would ship the next day with no plan for an upgrade but I did pay attention that was both better and newer with a warranty.

So I have one machine that has the extra wattage available for a much better GPU like a Nvidia GeForce RTX 3060 12Gb.

My test Proxmox Cluster is used for testing and along the way I broke the Ceph Cluster part of it badly while doing a lot of physical media replacements. The test cluster is the right place to try out risky stuff instead of on my main cluster that is loaded up with my data. Fixing it often teaches you something but in this case I already know the lessons and just want to fast track getting a clean ceph cluster back online.

I need it back in place to test the Proxmox 8.2 to Proxmox 8.3 upgrade of my main cluster. So this is a quick guide on how to completely clean out your Ceph Cluster installation as if it never existed on your Proxmox Cluster 8.2 or 8.3 environment.