#Storage
The NVR Kept Beeping, Then Fell Silent When the Disks Failed
The NVR's all-day beeping was not videoloss as everyone thought. It was ipconflict from cameras using DHCP with conflicting IP addresses. Someone got annoyed and muted the whole unit, so when both disks failed together, there was not a single beep. This article fixes the policy one event at a time through ISAPI.
A Single-Page PHP and SQLite Document Vault That Keeps Originals
A document photo storage app for government submissions, using photos taken on site with a phone. Each upload produces three files—the display image, the original, and saved crop settings—so adjustments can be made later without losing quality, with automatic migration from JSON to SQLite and web server restrictions on folders containing personal data.
Borrowing a VLAN for Windows Tools That Need the Same L2
Many manufacturers' device discovery tools use broadcasts that cannot cross L3, so connecting over a VPN still leaves devices invisible. A solution that leaves switch ports alone is to put a small Windows VM on Proxmox with its interface directly in that VLAN, with pitfalls around vlan-aware bridges, a full thin pool breaking other VMs, and virtio leaving Windows without a network adapter after installation.
Backups Succeeded Nightly, but Offsite Uploads Failed for 3 Weeks
cron ran every night, local files were complete every day, and the log said done, but offsite storage had not changed for 3 weeks. The first 8 nights of backups were already gone for good because local rotation had deleted them first. This article examines the two gaps that let the failure stay silent for so long.
Recovering Old Website Images with Wayback Machine CDX API + Python
A website over a decade old had broken images throughout because it hotlinked to a dead CDN — I wrote a Python script to list images from the Wayback Machine CDX API and restore them to their original paths without touching a single character of HTML, with the full script I actually used.
Using Claude to Upgrade Proxmox 8 to 9 and Rebuild Windows VMs
A real case using VS Code + Claude to upgrade an entire Proxmox cluster from 8 to 9, then delete and rebuild all Windows VMs for VDI without ever SSHing into a host myself. I have laid out the commands and scripts Claude generated during the actual work as steps that a person or AI can read and run again.
Rebuilding DirectAdmin Backups with NFS and POSIX ACL in Production
A record of rebuilding backups on a DirectAdmin server after migrating to a new machine — from FTP push that broke at three layers to an NFSv4 hard mount + POSIX ACL, with kernel-level lessons learned along the way.
qcow2 or ZFS — Why I Switched After 12 Years on the Same Server
The reasons behind my storage choices for a Proxmox server that has run for 12 years without a reinstall — why I chose qcow2 in 2014, why I only moved to ZFS in 2026, and what actually changed the calculus.
Moving DA to Debian 12, Part 2 — Switching Storage to a ZFS Mirror
Replace the three storage layers of mdadm RAID1 + ext4 + qcow2 with a single layer of ZFS mirror + raw zvol while the old VM stays online, by degrading RAID to a single disk.