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.

  • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
    5·
    3 days ago

    You could boot over the network and use the NAS for storage, but that’s going to be a lot of work to get running properly, and it’ll be pretty slow too.

    Honestly, if you want to run a read-only service from it, it could work, but anything more than a light, immutable host is going to be unpleasant.

    • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
      1·
      3 days ago

      Realistically, I just want to have a system that can act as the hardware end point for a coral processor to do image recognition. I don’t need to write a lot on demand, and what was being written previously was all to the NAS (other than the app’s database)

      • catloaf@lemm.eeEnglish
        5·
        3 days ago

        That could work, then! You’d have to set up the boot image or reconfigure it each time (maybe cloud-init and/or ansible), but as a mostly compute node it could work.

        • Passerby6497@lemmy.worldOPEnglish
          1·
          3 days ago

          My ideal is something more like a netboot-able image that I can modify/recreate and have it pull on next boot. But those options aren’t a bad thought either. I’d just need to have the bootable image configured with the info needed to bootstrap it. I’ve got another VM that’s got a different automation platform running (Powershell Universal), but it would give me an excuse to learn another well known automation platform.