For the last few years I have been paying for a dedicated server. It was zero cost as I would receive a small payment from friends for hosting websites/emails. I had been receiving a great deal from the provider anyway so we’re talking about £15 per month.
I recently wrote in relating to this server that I had ditched ispconfig and upgraded the stack, well that was only half of the story.
I knew that I would in the near future be granted a free 2U slot in a data centre (it’s not what you know, it’s who you know) and consolidating everything down to a simple docker setup was step 0 of this plan.
I had a spare Dell R520 lying around from a project a few years ago, that client had gone out of business so never wanted the hardware back. It contained a H710p Mini raid card, which some months ago I had flashed into “IT Mode” (HBA mode)
Back to the present – In preparation of its new home I populated the server with 6x450GB 15k and 2x3TB 7200 disks and installed proxmox in zfs raid z1 on the 15k disks. I rebooted only to find that the server wouldn’t boot, it was then I remembered that flashing the H710p mini means that you can no longer boot from it due to wiping out the boot sector of the card.
To remedy this I thought about installing proxmox on a USB stick (thankfully the r520 has an internal USB port) but decided against this due to write-wear on the usb stick, however the idea lingered that I could have the /boot partition on the usb stick which would be rarely read or written to.
There are a number of ways to achieve this, however I went with the most simple option which is to install proxmox once on the 15k disks (as above) and then rebooted into a live partition editor (I use a medicat USB as my live media, including netboot.xyz) and erased the small partitions that had been left on each 15k disk.
I then booted proxmox iso again and installed – this time to the internal USB drive. Once this installation had completed I once again booted into the live partition editor and this time removed the large partition from the USB stick.
I set the first boot device to be the internal USB stick and rebooted, to my surprise it booted first time. I upgraded the system and rebooted. this time it did not boot and I was stuck at an initramfs screen which told me what to do – I had to import the configs (the commands were given on screen)
I rebooted again and the system successfully booted, to make my changes permanent I ran two commands
> proxmox-boot-tool clean
> proxmox-boot-tool init /dev/sdj1 (the small partition on my internal usb stick)
I ran an update against the kernel and it built correctly, stored itself on the USB stick and the system could now update and reboot without intervention.