More random home lab things I've recently learned

Summary

It’s me again, I’ve wasted more time with the various computers in our basement. I’ve wrote several of these before. As usual, I don’t necessarily claim to be an expert on all of this; I just like to share things that I learned (or find worth writing about). For me, home labs are all about learning and experimenting. [1] Raspberry Pi 5s can use NVME SSDs, actually↑ I logged into my Raspberry 5 (an ARM Proxmox node via pxvirt) and realized that everything was very, very - and I cannot stress this enough - very slow. A simple SSH login would take minutes. In case you don’t know, running Proxmox on ARM or running a RasPi for a server in general is all sorts of stupid. But they’re so powerful for so little power draw! And ARM is cool! Anyways… maybe don’t do this. Also maybe set SSH timeouts. The Dying Breath of a Sacred SD Card↑ The obvious answer here is: The SD card that runs the Pi is dying, since that’s an inevitability (despite the VMs running on an external drive). I’d usually expect this to happen fully - i.e., it just stops working one day - and not behave like a broken RAM module with essentially undefined behavior, but I suppose it makes sense that random I/O timeouts aren’t bad enough to crash the system (especially if we haven’t lost crucial data), but bad enough to make it de-facto unusable. [2] I also guess that with virtualization, everything lives either in memory or the external VM storage (rather than on the dying card), which is why the VMs themselves never caused any issues, didn’t run slowly, or triggered any alerts (SD cards, of course, do not support S.M.A.R.T, so there’s no direct alerts for this type of failure). I confirmed all this via dd, which was very unhappy: sudo dd if=/dev/rdisk4 of=$HOME/2025-10-01_Pi5-32.img bs=4mdd: /dev/rdisk4: Operation timed out4194304 bytes transferred in 26.706714 secs (157051 bytes/sec) You can force dd into submission via conv=noerror,sync, btw. That won’t get you your data back, though. Interesting, but expec...