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> As an aside... Because one node didn't start, and my Proxmox cluster has only two nodes, it can't reach quorum, meaning I can't really make any changes to my other node, and I can't start any containers that are stopped. I've recently added another Zigbee dongle, that supports Thread, and it happens to share same VID:PID combo as the old dongle, so due to how these were mapped into guest OS, all my light switches stopped working. I had to fix the issue fast.

Lesson in here somewhere. Something about about a toaster representing the local intelligence maxima?

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The lesson is use dumb light switches and have a shotgun ready if the printer starts to act up.

Also regularly print out sheets of electronic recycling facts to remind the printer of its place.

I see you made the mistake of buying an hp inkjet in the last twenty years as well...

Lesson 1: clusters should have an odd number of nodes.

I really, really think there are better lessons there. Maybe more like "Lesson 0. Don't put distributed clusters in control of your light switches"

Why not?? It's fun!

Yes, but then I'm going to have to manually go around my house and turn off all the lights when I leave the house and when I come back I have to turn them on manually instead of them just turning on when I open the door to a room. Also my AC/heating automatically turns off when I leave the house and turns on when I come back, my lights automatically dim/change to a warmer temperature in the evening as it gets closer to bed time, my desktop goes to sleep when I leave the house, my TV automatically turns on when I power on the living room media PC, etc. etc.

Two node / even node clusters can work fine.

For even n>2 you define a tie breaker node in advance and only the partition connected to that node can make a quorum at 50%. For n=2 going from no quorum to quorum requires both nodes but losing a node doesn't lose quorum, and when you lose a node you stop, shoot the other node, and continue. For split brain the fastest draw wins the shootout.

> For split brain the fastest draw wins the shootout.

I bet there is still space for a race condition there.

In fairness to proxmox, that's the recommended way.

Most homelabbers ignore recommendations because if anything breaks nothing of corporate value is lost and no one's gonna lose their job.

Originally I was planning on building the NAS with just the Minisforum MS-01, but truenas and USB enclosures do not play well together.

So I went for the AOOSTAR NAS mini-pc as a "proper" solution. Ended up with two machines, so why not join them into the cluster!

Probably can chuck proxmox on a RasPi somewhere, just for quorum purposes :)

proxmox even makes it easy by letting you run something like a raspberry pi as an additional quorum member if you dont have enough hardware for a 3rd node

At least I was laughing at the Cloudflare oopsie, since all my light switches (et al) are all local. Unlike those people with a fancy smart bed that went into a W shape because it couldn't talk to AWS.

Yup, if you're going to have smart lights, get ones that still have a physical switch!

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