Solar Cluster: RIP hydrogen

Well, it had to happen some day, but I was hoping it’d be a few more years off… I’ve had the first node failure on the cluster.

One of my storage nodes decided to keel over this morning, some time between 5 and 8AM… sending the cluster into utter chaos. I tried power cycling the host a few times before finally yanking it from the DIN rail and trying it on the bench supply. After about 10 minutes of pulling SO-DIMMs and general mucking around trying to coax it to POST, I pulled the HDD out, put that in an external dock and connected that to one of the other storage nodes. After all, it was approaching 9AM and I needed to get to work!

A quick bit of work with ceph-bluestore-tool and I had the OSD mounted and running again. The cluster is moaning that it’s lost a monitor daemon… but it’s still got the other two so provided that I can keep O’Toole away (Murphy has already visited), I should be fine for now.

This evening I took a closer look, tried the RAM I had in different slots, even with the RAM removed, there’s no signs of life out of the host itself: I should get beep codes with no RAM installed. I ran my multimeter across the various power rails I could get at: the 5V and 12V rails look fine. The IPMI BMC works, but that’s about as much as I get. I guess once the board is replaced, I might take a closer look at that BMC, see how hackable it is.

I’ve bought a couple of spare nodes which will probably find themselves pressed into monitor node duty, two Intel NUC7I5BNHs have been ordered, and I’ll pick these up later in the week. Basically one is to temporarily replace the downed node until such time as I can procure a more suitable motherboard, and the other is a spare.

I have a M.2 SATA SSD I can drop in along with some DDR4 RAM I bought by mistake, and of course the HDD for that node is sitting in the dock. The NUCs are perfectly fine running between 10.8V right up to 19V — verified on a NUC6CAYS, so no 12V regulator is needed.

The only down-side with these units is the single Ethernet port, however I think this will be fine for monitor node duty, and two additional nodes should mean the storage cluster becomes more resilient.

The likely long-term plan may be an upgrade of one of the compute nodes. For ~$1600, I can get a A2SDi-16C-HLN4F, which sports 16 cores and takes full-size DDR4 DIMMs. I can then rotate the board out of that into the downed node.

The full-size DIMMS are much more readily available in ECC format, so that should make long-term support of this cluster much easier as the supplies of the SO-DIMMs are quickly drying up.

This probably means I should pull my finger out and actually do some of the maintenance I had been planning but put off… largely due to a lack of time. It’s just typical that everything has to happen when you are least free to deal with it.