So I had a micro PC that was running one of my core services and it only supports NVMe drives. Unfortunately, this little guy cooked itself and I’m not in a position to replace the drive. The system is still good and is fairly powerful, so I want to be able to reuse it.
I’m thinking I want to set up some kind of netboot appliance on another server to be able to allow me to boot the system without ever having a local disk. One thing I want to is run some docker images (specifically Frigate) but i wont be able to write anything to persistent storage locally. NFS shares are common in my setup.
Is it even possible to make a ‘gold image’ of a docker host and have it netboot? I expect that memory limitations (16GB) will be my main issue, but I’m just trying to think of how to bring this system back into use. I have two NAS appliances that I can use for backend long term storage (where I keep my docker files and non-database files anyway), so it shouldn’t be too difficult to have some kind of easily editable storage solution. I don’t want to use USB drives as persistent storage due to lifespan concerns from using them in production environments.
I can’t speak to the netboot part personally but I’ve had Docker data folders mounted via an NFS share for a while now, and while it worked fine, I’ve just in the last week or so swapped them all back to local storage for performance reasons (typically anything involving a SQLite database), so depending on what services you’re running via Docker, check that your network speeds aren’t going to be a bottleneck for it. (My home network is only 1G for reference so might not be a problem for you).
Yeah, NFS bind mounts aren’t an issue. The issue I run into is database lock errors when I try to write a database file to the NFS share. I’ve got 1G networking as well and haven’t seen issues accessing regular files from my containers via the bind mounts.