October 2023 Bits#

October 24 - Creating a RAIDZ-1 Drive in Proxmox#

https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/ZFS_on_Linux

RAIDZ-1 is a variation of RAID5, which needs at least 3 drives to work. This means that a third of that drive space will be used for parity. In the Proxmox web interface, this is just referred to as RAIDZ.

  • Serial ending in 0L is Manta 1

  • Serial ending in TZ is Manta 2

  • Serial ending in 3D is Manta 3

With this information, I can order the drives on the “Create: ZFS” screen.

Now I need to figure out what compression to use. For a drive that needs to be accessed fast, I would definitely choose lz4, however I can afford to have accessing this drive be a little slower. Now, I did debate using a different compression, as here are some advantages and disadvantages. lz4 averages 2.1:1 and gzip averages 2.7:1 compression. Now I learn about zstd, which is better than gzip, with slightly less performance tradeoffs compared to gzip. This TrueNAS post has convinced me that it’s the way to go for this particular drive. This Reddit post has me convinced that it won’t help much for video files, but I think I’ll go with zstd anyway.

I will choose zstd for compression Once again, I’ll keep ashift at the default of 12.

After it’s created, the size is bigger than I expected, but I ran across someone experiencing the same thing, so I’m not worried about it.

# (Some information redacted)
root@bigger-fish:~# zpool list
NAME      SIZE  ALLOC   FREE  CKPOINT  EXPANDSZ   FRAG    CAP  DEDUP    HEALTH  ALTROOT
manta    21.8T   912K  21.8T        -         -     0%     0%  1.00x    ONLINE  -
root@bigger-fish:~# zfs list
NAME                         USED  AVAIL     REFER  MOUNTPOINT
manta                        607K  14.4T      128K  /manta

So zfs list shows the correct available space. Yay!

Giving part of the drive to shork#

I have the option of just passing through /manta manually, but I think I’ll let proxmox handle this this time. Inside the resources tab in shork, I’ll create a mount point and give it 14 TB (14336 GB). I’ll temporarily give it a path of /srv/lavender_drive2, and I don’t want this to be part of the backup job. Now the folder /manta/subvol-100-disk-0 exists in my Proxmox host, which is good.

Now I can run sudo rsync -a --partial --progress /srv/lavender_drive1/media /srv/lavender_drive2/ in the background on shork and be good!

October 24 - Multiple OPNsense WAN Ports#

In theory, I should be able to register multiple MAC addresses through the MyResNet router and each MAC address should gets its own bandwidth limitations. This means that unlike most cases for having multiple WAN ports in OPNsense, I only need a single physical connection. Remember that my OPNsense is running inside of Proxmox, and I already have the necessary interfaces passed through.

We will follow https://docs.opnsense.org/manual/how-tos/multiwan.html. I’ll follow the first step to add a monitor IP address to my WAN. Followed the rest of the tutorial down to “Configure Load Balancing”. Awesome! Everything seems to still be working! However, I only added a single gateway to the gateway group. I need to create some more WAN interfaces. Interface configuration tells me that I can go to Interface > Assignments > New Interface to create a new interface. I would create another interface that uses the same network port as WAN, but it won’t let me do that! Time to pass through another virtual interface in Proxmox!

I add another network device that bridges to wmbr1 just like the original WAN port I passed in does. This now becomes net3. I’ll add a few more identical network devices (identical except for the randomly generated MAC address). Now I have net1, net3, net4, net5 as network devices in Proxmox. After adding the corresponding assignments in OPNsense, I now have WAN, WANvtnet3, WANvtnet4, WANvtnet5. For each interface, I configure these:

  • Enable

  • Check block private networks, check block bogon networks

  • IPv4 Configuration Type: DHCP

Apply the changes after saving these configurations for each newly added WAN interface. Navigate to System > Gateways > Single. Now add a monitor IP for all the new WANs. You’ll have to use different monitor IPs, so I used some from here: https://developers.cloudflare.com/1.1.1.1/ip-addresses/. Remember, these aren’t used for DNS, so you can really choose any of them.

Now navigate to System > Gateways > Group, edit the group we made, and set the new WANs as Tier 1s (to be the same as the original WAN). That completes the load balancing part of the tutorial, so it should work now.

Annndd… it doesn’t seem to work (I can ping, but I cannot access any non-DNS IP addresses). I guess I’m not logged into MyResNet properly, which is a task for another day. I can undo everything I just did by going into the LAN rules and not using the WAN Group in that default rule.