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.
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)
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.
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.