Posts tagged with "cluster"

New USB drives arrived for my Ceph cluster, and they’re not reporting SMART data. Again. After solving this problem in my October 2025 article, I need to update the configuration with new device IDs and share the lessons learned from running this solution across my entire cluster.

The bottom line: This was absolutely the right decision. SMART monitoring has already caught failing drives before they damaged data, and the performance trade-off is negligible compared to the stability benefits.

The Ceph Dashboard is incredibly useful for monitoring your cluster’s health, but setting it up on Proxmox isn’t as straightforward as the documentation suggests. After wrestling with SSL certificates and password policies, here’s how to get it working properly.

Why You Want the Ceph Dashboard

The dashboard gives you a web interface to monitor your Ceph cluster without SSH’ing into nodes and running CLI commands. You can see OSD status, pool usage, performance metrics, and cluster health at a glance. It’s essential for any serious homelab running Ceph. Or if you are doing something unusual like use USB Drives for your storage media and want additional metrics for performance evaluation. I also have fast SSDs for my DB/WAL with the USB Drives for Data.