Ceph is… fine. I feel like I don’t know it enough to properly maintain it. I only went with 10gbe because I was basically told on a homelab reddit that Ceph will fail in unpredictable ways unless you give it crazy speeds for it’s storage and network. And yet, it has perpetually complained about too many placement groups.

1 pools have too many placement groups

Pool tank has 128 placement groups, should have 32

Aside from that and the occasional falling over of monitors it’s been relatively quiet? I’m tempted to use use the Synology for all the storage and let the 10GbE network be carved up into VM traffic instead. Right now I’m using bonded USB 1GbE copper and it’s kind of sketchy.

To be fair - both synologies are running big spinny NAS drives - I could reduce my capacity and my power usage by going with SSDs, but shockingly, I can’t seem to figure out what to cull in the 35TB combined storage.

I am debating moving my Vault cluster from a Clusterhat to pods on my fresh kubes deployment - and if I virtualize Pihole, that would also reduce some power consumption. Admittedly, I’m going overboard on my “homelab” - it’s more of a full blown SMB at this point with Palo firewall and brocade 48p switch. I do infosec for a living though, and there’s reason to most of my madness.

Unfortunately, no - not specifically. I want to get a kilawatt monitor at one point. The best I can do is share my UPS’s reported power output - currently at around 202-216W, but that includes both my DS1618 and the DS415+ along with my Ubiquiti NVR and two of my Lenovo M920Qs.

I should probably look at what adding the 5 bay external expansion would take power wise and maybe decommission the very aged 415

Edit: this is also my annual reminder to finally hook up the USB port on my UPSs to… something. I really wanted to get some smart - “Oh shit there’s a power outage and we’re running low on reserves, intelligently and gracefully shut things off in this order”, but I never got around to it.

This is basically my homelab. Synology 1618 + 3x Lenovo M920Q systems with 1TB names. I upgraded to a 10gb fibre switch so they run Proxmox + Ceph, with the Synology offering additional fibre storage with the add on 10gb fibre card.

That’s probably a few steps up from what the OP is asking for.

Splitting out storage and computer is definitely good first step to increase optimization and increase failure resiliency.

Look at maybe a game pad + portable mouse? I use a Planck ortholonear kb for my steam deck, but you probably don’t need a 45%kb.

Back in the day I used a nostromo game pad. This looks similar? https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0B84QHPDW

I started back up again with Lidarr + Plexamp, with the noted exception that I’ve actually tried to buy music from Bandcamp.

1. Not everything I want is available on the high seas
2. I’m at a place financially where I can drop $40 on something like Lagwagon’s back catalog.

Honestly? It’s way better than Spotify - the Plexamp DJs work really well, I can offline download albums for runs/work (where I’m in the basement and have zero cell coverage).