I have some spare HDDs that I would like to set up as new storage nodes, but I don’t want them to be active until me existing drives are nearly full. I also don’t want to risk having the spares get DQ’ed while standing by. What advice do you offer?
My thought is to get each one fully provisioned (fstab, mounted, identity authorized, port forwarding created) but then shut each one down once authorized and tested (not vetted). Then it would be as simple as mounting each one when ready.
How much time do you think these take besides creating identity?
Just create your identity, configure your new disk in your machine (fstab, mount, port forwarding) and prepare your docker start command so you just have to copy-paste it.
This would be a problem. Once the satellites know about the nodes, they will expect them to be online and while downtime is currently not a cause for disqualification, as soon as the new system for down time tracking goes live these nodes will be disqualified.
The only thing that really takes time is creating the identity and maybe waiting for the token. So just prepare and sign a few identities and do the rest when you actually want to start the node.
I added a new HDD yesterday and all told I was down about three hours, including creating identity however that also includes other work such as adding a PCIe to SATA adapter, mucking about with BIOS, and other chores. My next bit of maintenance will be to install a drive cage to hold more HDDs as well as mounting and cabling the spare drives.
Thanks - that gets to the root of the issue - once I run the new docker command(s) then the [DQ] clock starts ticking. So what I will hold off on is the new node docker command(s) and updating watchtower.