Posts tagged with "monitoring"

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.

In Part 1 of this series, we covered the foundational optimizations for Jekyll sites on GitHub Pages. Part 2 dives into advanced analytics, performance monitoring, and the lessons learned from running a technical blog with 100+ posts.

After years of managing Linux systems - from my Dell Wyse 3040 Proxmox cluster to various VMs and containers - I’ve accumulated a collection of command-line tools that I reach for constantly. These aren’t exotic utilities, but rather the practical tools that help me figure out what’s actually happening when systems misbehave.

Most of these came from those “why is this server slow?” moments where you need to quickly diagnose CPU, memory, storage, or network issues. Here’s what I actually use and why.

USB drives are notorious for hiding their SMART data behind finicky USB-to-SATA bridges. If you’ve ever tried to check the health of a Seagate USB drive and gotten frustrated with “unsupported field in scsi command” errors, you’re not alone.

After wrestling with several Seagate drives in my homelab, I finally figured out the magic incantations needed to get SMART data working. Here’s how to do it properly.

Update (2026-02-03): This article has been superseded by USB Drive SMART Updates: Fast-Track to the GRUB Solution which includes updated device IDs and production experience from my Ceph cluster deployment.

Note: The decision to not allow this in Linux as a default was done for good reasons. You are playing with fire as some drives behave erratically. I have not experienced this with recently purchased USB drives, but older ones did have quirks and issues. So buyer beware.

I found out awhile ago that eMMC storage is a different thing entirely when it comes to health monitoring. This is especially true when you’re booting from it like on the Dell Wyse 3040s of which I have several in my homelab. The goal is to get some status information on the eMMC storage health, but the usual SMART utilities don’t work on eMMC.

root@pve1:~# smartctl -H /dev/mmcblk0 -d auto
smartctl 7.3 2022-02-28 r5338 [x86_64-linux-6.8.12-1-pve] (local build)
Copyright (C) 2002-22, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org

/dev/mmcblk0: Unable to detect device type
Please specify device type with the -d option.

Turns out eMMC has its own health monitoring system that’s actually pretty useful once you know how to access it. I figured I would share my experience since it took some time to figure out. Maybe this will help someone else.

When running Ceph in a homelab environment, especially on resource-constrained hardware like my Dell Wyse 3040 cluster, managing storage capacity becomes critical. Understanding Ceph’s Nearfull warnings and how to respond to them can prevent your cluster from going read-only unexpectedly.

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.