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Joined 1 year ago
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Cake day: June 23rd, 2023

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  • Zabbix can do everything you’re asking and can be connected to Grafana if you want custom visualisations. Most importantly, it contextualises what you need to know on the dashboard, as in it only tells you about things that require your attention.

    You’re of course able to dive into the data and look at raw values or graphs if you wish, and can build custom dashboards too.

    I’ve used it in both home lab and production scenarios monitoring small to mid size private clouds, including windows and linux hosts, docker, backups, SAN arrays, switches, VMware vSphere, firewalls, the lot. It’s extremely powerful and not terribly manual to set up.

    If metrics is all you want and aren’t too fussed on the proactive monitoring focus, Netdata is a great option for getting up and running quickly.









  • Sure, I’ve used it both in Server and NAS scenarios. The NAS was where we had most issues. If the maintenance tasks for BTRFS weren’t scheduled to run (balance, defrag, scrub and another one i can’t recall), the disk could become “full” without actually being full. If I recall correctly it’s to do with how it handles metadata. There’s space, but you can’t save, delete or modify anything.

    On a VM, its easy enough to buy time by growing the disk and running the maintenance. On a NAS or physical machine however, you’re royally screwed without adding more disks (if its even an option). This “need to have space to make space” thing was pretty suboptimal.

    Granted now I know better and am aware of the maintenance tasks, I simply schedule them (with cron or similar). But I still have a bit of a sour taste from it, lol. Overall I don’t think it’s a bad FS as long as you look after it.


  • This for sure. As a general rule of thumb, I use XFS for RPM-based distros like Red Hat and SuSE, EXT4 for Debian-based.

    I use ZFS if I need to do software RAID and I avoid BTRFS like the plague. BTRFS requires a lot of hand holding in the form of maintenance which is far from intuitive and I expect better from a modern filesystem (especially when there are others that do the same job hassle free). I have had FS-related issues on BTRFS systems more than any other purely because of issues with how it handles data and metadata.

    In saying all that, if your data is valuable then ensure you do back it up and you won’t need to worry about failures so much.





  • I might cop some flack but I use Cisco, they’re rock solid, last for years and just work with minimal issues and I’ve not run into problems with hardware under performing or firmware bugs like I have on others.

    That said, Ubiquiti makes fantastic hardware, I believe Mikrotik does too.

    You can absolutely buy open hardware that allows you to install custom switching OS; Dell and Mellanox make them as do many other manufacturers (I think even Facebook has a hardware switch, not that I’d buy it lol). One of the more common OS to install on them is Cumulus Linux and a lot of these use “spine leaf” topologies.