A person with way too many hobbies, but I still continue to learn new things.

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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • But why doesn’t it ever empty the swap space? I’ve been using vm.swappiness=10 and I’ve tried vm.vfs_cache_pressure at 100 and 50. Checking ps I’m not seeing any services that would be idling in the background, so I’m not sure why the system thought it needed to put anything in swap. (And FWIW, I run two servers with identical services that I load balance to, but the other machine has barely used any swap space – which adds to my confusion about the differences).

    Why would I want to reduce the amount of memory in the server? Isn’t all that cache memory being used to help things run smoother and reduce drive I/O?


  • And how does cache space figure in to this? I have a server with 64GB of RAM, of which 46GB is being used by system cache, but I only have 450MB of free memory and 140MB of free swap. The only ‘volatile’ service I have running is slapd which can run in bursts of activity, otherwise the only thing of consequence running is webmin and some VMs which collectively can use up to 24GB (though they actually use about half that) but there’s no reason those should hit swap space. I just don’t get why the swap space is being run dry here.





  • Yep, that’s exactly what I was looking at (https://github.com/searx/searx). As I said, it was a QUICK dive but the wording was enough to make me shy away from it. For all the years I’ve been running servers, I won’t put up anything that requires the latest/greatest of any code because that’s where about 90% of the zero-days seem to come from. Almost all the big ones I’ve seen in the last few years where things that made me panic until I realized that oh, if your updates are more than a year old then none of this affects you. And the one that DID affect me had already been updated through a security release.


  • I just did a quick dive into this and have some concerns. SearX appears to no longer be maintained and was last updated three years ago. SearXNG was forked to use more recent libraries but there were concerns that those are not always stable or fully vetted. There were also concerns that SearXNG did not follow the same concerns for user privacy. It’s a shame that SearX shut down, that one actually sounds like a project I would have jumped on.



  • I read this as a sign that his lack of action during COVID was in fact intentional. He also confirmed his intent for the 25% tariffs on Mexico (which will raise food prices) and on Canada (continuing the problem with new housing being unaffordable). Plus he signed another bill today demanding that US history taught in schools be white-washed of those “troublesome” notions like slavery. Taken all together, it’s obvious that the oligarchy wants the working class to be broke, hungry, homeless, and stupid enough to vote for his type again.

    Your king has spoken. Long live the king.

    [Edit] More news on the health care front… He’s blaming WHO for his own gross mismanagement of the COVID-19 pandemic, and he has pretty much gutted every program that aims to keep health care and medication prices manageable. Isn’t it funny how someone who ran for office on the idea of making things more affordable for everyone has already in his first day made costs skyrocket? https://www.statnews.com/2025/01/20/trump-executive-orders-health-care-drug-pricing-aca-covid-gender-discrimination/


  • More drives also equals larger power consumption so you would need a larger battery backup.

    It also means more components prone to failure which increases your chance of losing data. More drives means more moving parts and electrical connections including data and power cables, backplanes, and generated heat that you need to cool down.

    I’d be more concerned over how many failures you’re seeing that makes you think smaller drives would be the better option? I have historically used old drives from ebay or manufacturer refurbs, and even the worst of those have been reliable enough to only have to replace drives once every year or two. With RAID6 or raidz2 you should be plenty secure during a rebuild to prevent data loss. I wouldn’t consider using a lot of little drives unless it’s the only option I had or if someone gave them away for free.



  • Are you sure about that? Ever hear about this supposed predictable network names in recent linux versions? Yeah those can change too. I was trying to set up a new firewall with two internal NICs plus a 4-port card, and they kept moving around. I finally figured out that if I cold-booted the NICs would come up in one order, and if I warm-booted they would come up in a completely different order (like the ports on the card would reverse which order they were detected). This was completely the fault of systemd because when I installed an older linux and used udev to map the ports, it worked exactly as predicted. These days I trust nothing.


  • OP – if your array is in good condition (and it looks like it is) you have an option to replace drives one by one, but this will take some time (probably over a period of days). The idea is to remove a disk from the pool by its old name, then re-add the disk under the corrected name, wait for the pool to rebuild, then do the process again with the next drive. Double-check, but I think this is the proper procedure…

    zpool offline poolname /dev/nvme1n1p1

    zpool replace poolname /dev/nvme1n1p1 /dev/disk/by-id/drivename

    Check zpool status to confirm when the drive is done rebuilding under the new name, then move on to the next drive. This is the process I use when replacing a failed drive in a pool, and since that one drive is technically in a failed state right now, this same process should work for you to transfer over to the safe names. Keep in mind that this will probably put a lot of strain on your drives since the contents have to be rebuilt (although there is a small possibility zfs may recognize the drive contents and just start working immediately?), so be prepared in case a drive does actually fail during the process.


  • That is definitely true of zfs as well. In fact I have never seen a guide which suggests anything other than using the names found under /dev/disk/by-id/ or /dev/disk/by-id/uuid and that is to prevent this very problem. If the proper convention is used then you can plug the drives in through any available interface, in any order, and zfs will easily re-assemble the pool at boot.

    So now this begs the question… is proxmox using some insane configuration to create drive clusters using the name they happen to boot up with???







  • If you want to do it right, try to get a static IP (you may need to get a business account). If your provider doesn’t provide IPv6 to static IPs, go to some place like Hurricane Electric and get a free IPv6 range pointed to your IPv4 static address.

    Alternatively, you might do a search for any DDNS services that provide IPv6 (I’m not sure if any do?), then that service will fllow your residential address when it changes. Either way I think you’ll have some additional costs you need to weigh against your current hosting provider.