🔍 The Strange Write Load While investigating unexpectedly high SSD wear on a Proxmox cluster, I found something surprising: several otherwise quiet Debian VMs were writing tens of gigabytes per day. The pattern was suspiciously regular. VMs checked every two minutes were writing around 65–67 GiB per day. Systems checked every five minutes were closer … Read more
🧱 Built Step by Step The last public update on QuorumBD was published several months ago. In an early-stage project, such a gap can easily create the impression that development has stalled or that the project has been abandoned. That is not the case. QuorumBD is still on our workbench. However, a project like QuorumBD … Read more
Designing Backpressure and Concurrency in QuorumBD Middleware Building a distributed block storage system requires careful attention not only to replication and consistency, but also to the behaviour of the middleware layer that connects clients to the storage core. In QuorumBD, the middleware is intentionally designed to remain lightweight and deterministic, acting as a reliable bridge … Read more
Thirty-Five Years in the Machine — and Why I Left 🏭 Inside the Machine I have been inside the machine for thirty-five years. Not on the periphery. Not as an observer. Inside — where decisions are made that shape products used by billions, where projects worth hundreds of millions live and die in conference rooms, … Read more
🧩 Proxmox vzdump Hooks, Done Right Proxmox offers a powerful but often underused feature: vzdump hooks. They allow you to run custom logic at well-defined points during the backup lifecycle — before, during, and after a backup. In practice, however, most setups either: I wanted something different: This post describes the hook setup I’m using … Read more
🔥 QuorumBD: A System Built for the Edge of Collapse There are storage systems that whisper. And there are storage systems that roar. QuorumBD must roar. Not because the world needs more noise —but because the world is drowning in fragile complexity. Clusters that pretend to be invincible.Stacks that collapse under their own abstraction.Distributed systems … Read more
🧱 GlusterFS: Why It Was a Perfect Fit for SMBs and HomeLabs For many years, GlusterFS filled a very specific and important niche:distributed storage for small and medium-sized environments that did not have enterprise budgets, datacenter-class hardware, or massive network bandwidth. It was never perfect. But it was practical. And in many environments, it was … Read more
