Proxmox Backup Server, FTP and RAID monitoring on a Supermicro storage unit
I turned an older Supermicro storage unit without JBOD support into a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS 4.1.0) backup target on Debian for low-criticality workloads. Hardware: 4-core Intel Xeon, 8 GB RAM, eight 3 TB SATA disks and two 240 GB SSDs. The article shows how a non-enterprise device can be run with enterprise-style monitoring.
What the article covers
- Building a RAID5 array on the storage controller (about 18 TB usable), formatting with ext4 and mounting it
- Installing PBS on bare metal and placing the datastore and FTP directory on that mount
- FTP with vsftpd: local users, no anonymous access, chroot restriction, limited passive port range, transfer logging
- Dedicated FTP user and directory ownership/write permissions
- Installing storcli for LSI/MegaRAID and querying the controller, virtual disks and physical disks
- Bash script that looks for degraded, offline, failed and predictive-failure states, logs them and sends an email alert; a state file prevents repeated alerts
- Scheduling the script daily at 03:00 with crontab