macgregor

Every couple months I get the urge to organize my lab/home office equipment into a rack/cabinet, but never follow through on it. I ocassionally look on craigslist for deals, but everything is either too far away or too big. I'd rather pay more for a smaller rack that doesn't go all the way to the ceiling and will just show up on my doorstep. A 6U would fulfil my current requirements, 12U is probably more than enough in reality but as an engineer I find myself eyeing 15-18U to be conservative.

This iteration of the search has me eying these options:

• sysracks 18U server rack - slightly bigger than I want, but still reasonable. Some questionable reviews on manufacturing/shipping quality, but this seems like a solid cost/value ratio: fully enclosed, room to grow, wheels, accessories like shelves and such I'd want anyway. Feels like maybe overkill, but for the price...
• NavePoint 15U Portable Rolling Network Rack - closer to the size I want (12/15U options), cheaper but no accessories, like shelves, I'd need bringing it closer in price to the sysrack. Similar manufacturing/shipping concern reviews. I like this one, but hard to feel like it's not a worse deal than the sysrack.
• some startech variant - these seem generally higher build quality (sturdier) but higher cost and more "bare bones" looking. also often adjustable depth making it potentially more future proof. but I'm not sure either of these make up for the increased cost.

What do you think? Any advice or wisdom you can share? I'm feeling like finally following through this time because my office is a tiny mess. Leaning toward the NavePoint currently.

So I run a small Kubernetes cluster (k3s) backed by MariaDB hosted on a Synology NAS with only HDDs rather than etcd colocated on the control nodes. For resiliency purposes it's been great, nodes are basically pure compute resources I can wipe out and recreate with ease and not worry about data loss. However, for over a year now I've lived with the constant chatter of active hard drives in my office.

The Kube DB workload is extremely read heavy and very active: many thousands of selects per minutes with only a handful of writes. Clickclickclickclickclickclick. Seems like a good case for caching, and luckily my NAS has 2 NVMe slots for an SSD cache. I bought a couple data center drives with PLP (Kingston DC1000B, probably overkill, but not crazy expensive), pop them in, set up a read/write cache for the database and Kube NFS volumes and...silence, wonderful silence. It's almost constantly at 100% cache hits. Bonus points if things are faster as well.

I'm very happy. Never optimized an application for noise levels before 😁.

I run a baremetal Kubernetes cluster on a couple raspberry pis (though that detail isn't super important to this question). I am familiar with Kubernetes metrics/alerting tools such as grafana, Prometheus, Loki, ELK stack, etc. I am also familiar with the node metrics exporter for gathering node level resource metrics like CPU, memory, file system, temps, etc. All that's great and gets me like 99% of the way there. The last 1% that I am looking for are things like available updates (e.g. 56 packages with available updates), reboot required, system component status, etc and for whatever reason I sttuggle to find good search results for this specific problem area.

I can and do use things like dnf-automatic/unattended-upgrades and systemd to maintain the minimal system level health (so 99% -> 99.8%) but I haven't been able to find a solution that provides a bit more insight depth into underlying system health, probably because that's usually handled by cloud providers/hypervisors. I am sure I could come up with some custom, not too hacky solution for myself (off the top of my head: a pod/job with access the underlying system to run whatever commands I want to gather state and make it available to the Kube space general monitoring solution, feels dirty though) but it feels like an obvious hole I'm just missing the wrong Google incantation to find.

Any ideas or experience you can provide? Please don't suggest kube metrics node-exporter, unless I am missing something it doesn't provide what I am asking about.

So I've been running a little 2 node rpi kubernetes cluster for over a year now, bootstrapped with Ansible and Helm (source). I picked Ubuntu Server at the time because I think the official 64-bit Raspbian OS was still young or maybe not even out at the time (can't quite remember) but I've found myself fighting with Ubuntu an awful lot culminating in a major version upgrade to "jammy" last night that has wrecked one of my nodes. It even tried to delete the running kernel during the upgrade but caught itself and asked me to confirm, wtf. I've never experienced a Linux upgrade this bad. Yeah, "jammy" is right. Luckily I use a separate NAS for persistence. So I'm breaking up with Ubuntu, which I think is the cool thing to do these days anyway, and using this as an opportunity to rebuild and clean up my IaC.

I am most familiar with Red Hat distros (Fedora/CentOS daily drivers for years now, RHEL servers at work) though I'm not familiar with the ARM ecosystem there. Ive also been wanting to try NixOS for a while but looking at some of the rpi config last night had me a little concerned because it felt unfamiliar. Then of course there's the Official Raspbian OS, 64 bit support should be solid by now.

What OS are you using for your Raspberry Pi servers? Any I should definitely avoid?