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.
Is the drive totally dead? Curious what SMART would report.
My gut feeling is that it’s probably cheaper to buy a replacement m.2 than the hours of time to get netboot working but it could be a fun project!
I might be able to hook it up to a usb NVMe reader, but when I initially tried I barely got any recognition of the drive from the OS. My primary system is windows, so I might get more info from one of my linux systems, just haven’t had the fucks to give to the dead drive. As for a replacement drive, funds are scarce and time/learning is (comparatively) free. Someone else suggested kubernetes, so I might look into that to see if that can accomplish what I’m looking for.