I’m a long-term ncdu user, but I recently discovered gdu which is much faster. This isn’t to say ncdu is bad or undesirable anymore, but for most cases I’ll be replacing ncdu with gdu moving forward for the speed advances alone.
If you haven’t seen either of these tools I suggest you check them out. They’re fantastic for quickly identifying directories and files that are taking up the most space on your hard disks via the command line in a more visual way that makes it easy to both find and delete unneeded files and directories.
A sample output looking in a home directory (gdu is shown).
You can navigate into and out of sub-directories that are also calculated and use keyboard shortcuts for all relevant actions.
gdu keyboard shortcuts — accessible from the application by pressing “?”
I’ve shown gdu here because I’m newly enamored by it, but ncdu still has more features even though it is truly slower.
note the extra options in ncdu
At any rate, these are both highly recommended applications. I’ve used them on local computers, remote computers via ssh, mounted drives locally (nfs, smb, etc) and on Linux and BSD. I’m currently using this on TrueNAS Core (FreeBSD) and TrueNAS SCALE (Linux) to generally sort out some erroneous backup strategies I tried over the years.
What happens when you just get frustrated and buy an old server on ebay? Well… I don’t know yet because at the moment I’m checking the RAM with memtester on a System Rescue CD running off of a bootable USB drive. What I do know is that this computer has 64G of ECC RAM, 2 Intel xeon processors with a combined 24 cores, and 8 3.5″ drive bays.
It seems to have completed successfully. If you’re wondering what steps it processes through it seems to start on “stuck address” and end on “16-bit Writes”.
After generally confirming the memory was working as intended I ran a CPU stress test for an hour or so a few times. Watching all 24 cores light up in htop was thrilling.
Everything seems to be humming along just fine…
My general plan here is to consolidate other computers that were providing FreeNAS (now TrueNAS), XCP-ng, and other functions into a single unit using the now alpha―should I be scared?―TrueNAS Scale. I’m not switching because TrueNAS is lacking in general as a NAS because it’s been great. It’s just that the VM solution, bhyve, is both not what I’m familiar with and seems generally less good for the virtualization I do. Additionally, TrueNAS is based on BSD, and while BSD is great, I’m far more experienced with Linux having used it for 10 years, and Scale is:
Built on Debian Linux
Maintains ZFS for file system
Integrates the more familiar KVM for virtual machines
Adds Docker for containers
Basically, it should allow me to consolidate:
My virtual machines
Currently running on a mix of desktop computers with KVM and a hobbled together machine running XCP-ng.
My NAS
Currently a dedicated old desktop computer with the sides off.
My Docker Containers
Running everything from Nextcloud to Minetest and Veloren servers (and increasingly other things).
Maybe PFSense (dare I virtualize this?)
Inside a bigger computer.
I’m have some trepidation about using the alpha TrueNAS Scale on this system that I actually intend to use for real, but I’ve also been very very interested in using this particular iteration of the Free and Open Source project TrueNAS since I heard about it sometime last year (or was it 2019?―what actually is time?).
End of post update
Since I started writing this post I’ve:
generally validated the hardware is working
added an internal SSD to directly to the SATA ports
installed a fresh copy of TrueNAS Scale alpha
Setup a single-disk pool (pool?) to test things
installed a docker version of Nextcloud that works well
created a working VM of Debian 10 Linux and accessed via included VNC
happily played in the shell with my known panoply of Linux terminal commands (so much less context switching!)
and generally explored the new web-based GUI (I’m liking it).
I’m not sure exactly when I’m going to fully fully commit to moving all of my day-to-day data over to the new machine (need to add non-test disks for non-test pools), but I suspect in the coming weeks I’ll gain an amount of trust to do so. The release notes indicate a certain stability in many of the elements independently (though when you bring things together who knows), but it looks good.
I’ll likely update here as I encounter problems or move additional items to the server.
