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Rumba — history & operations

How Rumba got to its current state: the dated operation logs, newest first, then the pre-Proxmox legacy configuration. Current facts live on the main page; finished work across the whole rack is indexed in the ops journal.

Both PSUs moved onto the UPS (2026-08-03)

Rumba's two power cords were moved from their PDU outlets to the rack UPS, one at a time so the machine never lost redundancy — ~5 s of lost input per PSU (bounded by the iDRAC event log), no reboot.

What the move changed, measured the same afternoon:

BeforeAfter
ups.load / output.current1–2 % / 0.00 A14 % / 1.0–1.1 A
Rumba's own draw (iDRAC)265 W total
PDU rack total~1.09 kW~1.09 kW, unchanged

The UPS load matches rumba's own draw, so rumba is the only thing on it. The unchanged PDU total says the UPS's own input is itself fed from the PDU, so this did not move load off the rack's metering — and a PDU-side failure still reaches rumba, just through the battery.

Consequence worth knowing: rumba no longer has a mains feed independent of this UPS, which makes NUT's monitor-only setting the wrong one for the present cabling — see shutdown policy.

ISC typography in the web UI (2026-08-03)

The web UI uses the isc-hub fonts — Manrope for body and UI text, Inter for panel and window titles — instead of the stock helvetica, arial, verdana. Sixteen self-hosted woff2 faces (latin + latin-ext, weights 400–700) live in /usr/share/pve-manager/css/, so the UI needs no Internet access and no Google Fonts call.

Everything is version-controlled in provisioning/pve/ui-theme/; deploy-ui-theme.sh is idempotent and has a --revert. The standing rules:

  • Family only. No font-size, line-height or font-weight is touched — ExtJS lays widgets out against fixed pixel metrics, and a size change clips labels.
  • Never trust a font-family grep. The theme sets most widgets through the font: shorthand, so overriding only the font-family rules restyles the containers while every widget inside keeps Helvetica. check-coverage.sh re-derives the full selector list from the live stylesheets and fails if anything is uncovered — run it after every pve-manager or extjs upgrade.
  • Icon fonts and frame metrics stay untouched. Font Awesome glyphs are selected by family name (a blanket rule turns icons into tofu), and the dh-*/th-* "families" are ExtJS frame-metric encodings, not fonts. The xterm.js/noVNC consoles and the RRD chart axes are deliberately left alone too.
Survives reboots, not upgrades

A pve-manager upgrade replaces index.html.tpl and drops the <link> — the CSS and font files survive. Re-run deploy-ui-theme.sh after such an upgrade. The pristine template is kept as /usr/share/pve-manager/index.html.tpl.isc-orig.

The hdd ZFS pool creation (2026-08-01)

The eight SATA HDDs had been deliberately excluded from the Proxmox install; on 2026-08-01 they were formed into the RAIDZ2 pool described in the storage layout. At pool creation all eight drives showed ~49,300 power-on hours each with clean SMART (zero reallocated or pending sectors on every disk) — the same model with identical wear, i.e. a correlated-failure profile where surviving any two dead disks matters more than IOPS. That is why RAIDZ2 was chosen over mirrors.

The nightly vzdump job at 02:00 (all guests, snapshot mode, zstd, mail on failure) was set up the same day.

Netdata installation (2026-08-01)

Netdata v2.10.4 was installed on the PVE host from the official repo.netdata.cloud stable channel, with anonymous telemetry disabled at install time (--disable-telemetry). Current dashboard facts are on the main page.

Legacy configuration (before 2026-07-31)

Rumba previously ran Ubuntu with services in LXC containers, on its own isolated subnets — 192.168.93.0/24 (servers, host rumba1 at .93.10) and 192.168.94.0/24 (containers) — behind an SInf-provided gateway. The CCR2004 still carries the old gateway addresses (192.168.92.1, 192.168.93.1, 192.168.94.254) but only the iDRAC subnet is still in use. The services that used to run there, kept for reference:

ServiceOld container IPActual status (checked 2026-07-31)
ISC Inventory (Snipe-IT)192.168.94.10Alive elsewhereinventory.isc-vs.ch resolves to hannibal and serves Snipe-IT. It had already moved off Rumba; nothing to redeploy.
Reverse proxy (Nginx)192.168.94.13Superseded by Caddy in srv-web01, which now holds the inbound 80/443 forwards
ISC Learn platform backup (Moodle) — testing and disaster recovery192.168.94.14Gone with the reinstall. Was published as test.isc-vs.ch — see the note below
Monitoring (TPI Rodrigo)192.168.94.20Gone with the reinstall — basic host + per-guest monitoring is now covered by Netdata on the host (2026-08-01)
caution
test.isc-vs.ch has been reused

That name was the published URL of the Moodle disaster-recovery copy (see the ISC Learn restore procedure). The DR container disappeared with the reinstall, and the name is now serving a static demo page. Resolved 2026-08-01: the DR copy was rebuilt as VM 107 under the internal-only name learn-test.calypso, so the public name stayed with the demo page.

A copy of the old /home (nine accounts) and the relevant /etc files sits in calypsomaster:~/rumba-preinstall-backup/.

An earlier revision of the Rumba page also listed a Gigabyte R282-Z92 in its hardware section; per the rack layout those are the separate epyc0 / epyc1 servers, also earmarked for Proxmox.