Is it possible to run a docker host that has no harddrive?

Submitted ⁨⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago⁩ by ⁨Passerby6497@lemmy.world⁩ to ⁨selfhosted@lemmy.world⁩

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.

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.

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catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
You could boot over the network and use the NAS for storage, but that’s going to be a lot of work to get running properly, and it’ll be pretty slow too.

Honestly, if you want to run a read-only service from it, it could work, but anything more than a light, immutable host is going to be unpleasant.

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- Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  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)
  
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  - catloaf@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    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.
    
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mosiacmango@lemm.ee ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Id be pretty wary of using any system that “cooked” an nvme. That not the sign of an actual healthy system.

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- Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m actually not 100% what killed the drive. It could have been an issue with the drive wearing out, but my services didn’t write much locally and it wasn’t super old so I assume its a heat issue with a fanless micro system. I try to write everything important to my NASs so I don’t have to worry about random hardware failures, but this one didn’t have backups configured before it failed. Other than the drive issue its been solid for 1.5-2 years of near constant uptime.
  
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  - loganb@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
    Is the drive totally dead? Curious what SMART would report.
    
    My gut feeling is that it’s probably cheaper to buy a replacement m.2 than the hours of time to get netboot working but it could be a fun project!
    
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just_another_person@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Run a livecd of whatever Linux distro you like, and get a USB drive. Store persistent files on the USB stick.

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- Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I don’t want to use a USB for storage, because those aren’t going to have a great lifespan in my experience. I’ve used them as the install media for something like ESX, but I’d rather not run a ‘real’ OS from a disk because I wasn’t impressed with overall lifespan on some of the systems we managed at work.
  
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scrubbles@poptalk.scrubbles.tech ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
Kind of, but probably not. I started writing this and was like “totally it could be stateless”. Docker runs stateless, and I believe when it starts it is still stateless (or at least could be mounted on a ramdrive) - but then I started thinking, and what about the images? Have to be downloaded and ran somewhere, and that’s going to eat ram quickly. So I amend to you don’t need it to be stateful, you could have an image like you talked about that is loaded every time (that’s essentially what kubernetes does), but you will still need space somewhere as scratch drive. A place docker will places images and temporary file systems while it’s running.

For state, check out docker’s volume backings here: docs.docker.com/engine/storage/volumes/. You could use nfs to another server as an example for your volumes. Your volumes would never need to be on your “app server”, but instead could be loaded via nfs from your storage server.

This is all nearing into kubernetes territory though. If you’re thinking about netboot and automatically starting containers, and handling stateless volumes and storing volumes in a way that are synced with a storage server… it might be time for kubernetes.

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- Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  
  So I amend to you don’t need it to be stateful, you could have an image like you talked about that is loaded every time (that’s essentially what kubernetes does), but you will still need space somewhere as scratch drive. A place docker will places images and temporary file systems while it’s running.
  
  Putting the image somewhere is easy. I’ve got TBs of space available on my NAS drives, especially right now with not acquiring any additional linux ISOs.
  
  For state, check out docker’s volume backings here: docs.docker.com/engine/storage/volumes/. You could use nfs to another server as an example for your volumes. Your volumes would never need to be on your “app server”, but instead could be loaded via nfs from your storage server.
  
  I’ll check that out. If that allows me to actually write databases to disk on the nfs backing volume, that would be amazing. That’s the biggest issue I run into (regularly).
  
  This is all nearing into kubernetes territory though. If you’re thinking about netboot and automatically starting containers, and handling stateless volumes and storing volumes in a way that are synced with a storage server… it might be time for kubernetes.
  
  I don’t think I’ve ever looked into kubernetes. I’ll have to look into that at some point… Any good beginner resources?
  
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- umami_wasbi@lemmy.ml ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I guess you can also use NFS/iSCSI for images too?
  
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uranibaba@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
How about running the OS from a USB stick? Put all images you want on it and mount NAS drives at boot.

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- Passerby6497@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨year⁩ ago
  I’m leery about using a USB for long term persistent OS storage due to lifespan issues I’ve seen when just running a hypervisor from one. A ‘real’ usermode OS is probably going to have a worse lifespan than what I was seeing at work.
  
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