One on One help needed

[Saxophone]

I am trying to setup a proxmox cluster with ceph storage to hold all of my photos, documents, home movies, Hollywood movies, music, book ... etc. I want to be able to access the storage from my home computer over a 10g network. Forums are no help. People don't answer questions they just suggest you use zfs or true nas or to watch more youtube videos on the topic.

I am looking for someone that has a proxmox cluster and is using ceph to help me. I am not an idiot but I am getting very frustrated over the process.

If you think you can help please get ahold of me it will be greatly appreciated.

 

[BobhWasatch]

Do you have at least 3 computers? Have you read the manual?

ETA: Have you ever used Linux before?

 

[intrax]

Why don't you hire a consultant to help you? Too greedy ?
It's all about the learning process, but you don't recognize that apparently!
Cheers...

 

[tjh]

Hi Saxophone.

If you are not even sure how to setup a ceph storage cluster and it's causing you confusion, I really would not recommend using ceph for storage of your personal stuff just yet. It's wonderful, it really is, but if you're not careful with it you'll put your lifes work on it, something you don't understand will happen/go wrong and you'll be even more upset and frustrated when you don't know how to fix it.

I would suggest you setup a lab first, something you can break over and over without consequences. You can experiement here, learn how to setup ceph, practise on it, learn how to admin it etc, test what happens when you break your 10G network, when you lose a node/disk etc. Then when you're 100% confident in how it works, its failure modes, how to admin it properly etc, setting up your "Production" ceph cluster will be something you know how to do in your sleep and you can be confident it will work as you expect.

I know this is not the "get up and running quickly" you're looking for, but my personal opinion is you're only setting yourself up for failure if you don't figure out every single step yourself.

 

[Saxophone]

Do you have at least 3 computers? Have you read the manual?

ETA: Have you ever used Linux before?

4 computers for cluster, yes, no.

 

[Saxophone]

Why don't you hire a consultant to help you? Too greedy ?
It's all about the learning process, but you don't recognize that apparently!
Cheers...

Thanks for being no help at all.

 

[Saxophone]

Hi Saxophone.

If you are not even sure how to setup a ceph storage cluster and it's causing you confusion, I really would not recommend using ceph for storage of your personal stuff just yet. It's wonderful, it really is, but if you're not careful with it you'll put your lifes work on it, something you don't understand will happen/go wrong and you'll be even more upset and frustrated when you don't know how to fix it.

I would suggest you setup a lab first, something you can break over and over without consequences. You can experiement here, learn how to setup ceph, practise on it, learn how to admin it etc, test what happens when you break your 10G network, when you lose a node/disk etc. Then when you're 100% confident in how it works, its failure modes, how to admin it properly etc, setting up your "Production" ceph cluster will be something you know how to do in your sleep and you can be confident it will work as you expect.

I know this is not the "get up and running quickly" you're looking for, but my personal opinion is you're only setting yourself up for failure if you don't figure out every single step yourself.

This is what I am trying to do. I've re-installed proxmox enough times now that I can do it in my sleep. While I plan to have my stuff on the cluster It will also be backed up to where it is now on a synology nas, and also on cold storage. This is why I am asking questions to find out if my network is set up correctly. I want to learn this. I have read the proxmox instructions. I have read the ceph instructions. I have watched videos. All are great and have helped me get to this point. But I still have questions and I am looking for someone to help.

 

[t.lamprecht]

Why don't you hire a consultant to help you? Too greedy ?
It's all about the learning process, but you don't recognize that apparently!
Cheers...

While I personally don't mind a bit of sarcasm, "though love" can be easily misinterpreted, especially on the Internet without in-person clues to interpret responses, and thus turn people off.
This is the official Proxmox community support forum, of course people will ask here for advice and help on all sorts of problems they encounter, whether due to inexperience with Proxmox projects or technology in general, or actual hardware/software bugs.

While no one is entitled to a definitive answer (or even a full-blown personalized learning course) that solves their problems, if that's even possible, it's definitely always okay to ask questions, as long as the posts adhere to our terms and rules.

However, what OP could definitely have done better to make it easier to help them is to ask specific questions or state more specific problems, (network) setup details, and what has already been tried to fix issues. As it's rather hard to help with a general "cannot access something" question without having any details. Stating that in a more civil form might be more fruitful though.

This is why I am asking questions to find out if my network is set up correctly.

For starters, it would be good to provide your network setup and details about your network, what's between the 10g network and the home network, a simple diagram might help.

Further it would be good to know how you want to access the ceph storage.
I.e. either directly, like mounted as filesystem through CephFS or accessing it as block storage through RBD? In that case it would be good to know what OS runs on the hosts that need to access that storage (a Linux distro, Windows, ...) as that non-Linux OS have limited feature sets that e.g. do not natively support Ceph RBD and even CephFS IIRC.
Or maybe you want to access the Ceph storage more indirectly by creating a VM that has their disks on Ceph and exposes the storage to your home network?

In short, without more details about your setup and how you want to use the storage it's rather hard to provide help to you.

 

[esi_y]

Why don't you hire a consultant to help you? Too greedy ?

Obviously, this is not a business use he is after, so how do you calculate his ROI to consider him greedy?

It's all about the learning process, but you don't recognize that apparently!

That's a matter of opinion, you helped him with nothing at all.

This is what I am trying to do. I've re-installed proxmox enough times now that I can do it in my sleep. While I plan to have my stuff on the cluster It will also be backed up to where it is now on a synology nas, and also on cold storage. This is why I am asking questions to find out if my network is set up correctly. I want to learn this. I have read the proxmox instructions. I have read the ceph instructions. I have watched videos. All are great and have helped me get to this point. But I still have questions and I am looking for someone to help.

I think you got a really good answer from @tjh. As for the reason why people "do not answer questions" or suggest you to use something else, I would just point out that e.g.:

1) I would not want to assist someone with 4 node CEPH cluster, it is not a professional setup and if it is for the sake of learning, then it should be really more of a lab, not like what you describe.

2) It is much much easier to answer specific questions, i.e. this is what I have done, these are steps to reproduce, this is my current pain point, logs and error messages enclosed. You can't expect a tutorial that is both generic, but also for you.

3) You will not have much joy, but only frustration, if you are not willing to do (2) above, for your own sake, but also in order to help others to help you (including having a good title of your post).