For many years, I have been relying on the virtualization and container management tool “Incus” (formerly “LXD”) to host my services. Incus runs in a virtual machine and helps me to create separation at the application level. For example, there is an Incus container for trashserver.net, another for metalhead.club, etc. The root file systems of the individual containers are located in a ZFS file system. This allows me to create space-saving snapshots of my containers before critical maintenance actions, e.g., before updates or operating system upgrades.
Since I recently upgraded the underlying storage, I would like to briefly introduce my storage setup and document for myself (but also for you ;-) ) what I paid attention to and how I moved my containers to the new storage.
At the end of May 2025, I published the metalhead.club song via a Faircamp website at music.metalhead.club. However, not all users were able to follow my links to the Faircamp site without problems. In a few cases, users reported at least one of the following errors to me:
- When users accessed the album page: Error 404 - not found
- When users accessed the main page: The watch.metalhead.club globe was displayed
After a few attempts, I was able to reproduce the error sporadically myself. In the access logs of the Nginx proxy, I noticed that all erroneous requests were made with HTTP/3.
Since the big Twitter wave that flooded the Mastodon network and, more broadly, the Fediverse in the fall and winter of 2022, international users have been playing a bigger role for metalhead.club. The service is hosted entirely in Germany, and that was still the case until recently. However, with the increasing number of international members come new challenges: for example, the rapid delivery of content.
As long as users are mainly located in Germany and Europe, latency times to the “Full Metal Server” in Frankfurt are low. However, the situation is different for users from Canada, the US, and Australia, for example, of whom there are a significant number on metalhead.club. For these users, using metalhead.club was sometimes a bit of a test of patience, as videos and larger images in particular appeared on the website with a slight delay. I can only simulate the situation in the browser, but even a ping of more than 200 ms spoils the fun of scrolling through the timeline in some places.