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Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

tteck.github.io

21–30 of 113 posts

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#22
post #12

Slightly off topic: I’m setting up a home server on a Mini PC that has Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. I want to attach it to my TV and play retro games as well as run home automation tasks (periodic scripts, UniFi controller, Pihole etc) Is anyone using Proxmox on their homelabs? Would you recommend blowing away Windows and installing Proxmox and then install Windows with PCIE passthrough?

If the pc is beefy enough (win 11 pro runs smoothly) just go with the included hyper-v. Imho you don’t get any benefits installing proxmox on bare metal in this scenario. YMMV of course

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#23
post #12

Slightly off topic: I’m setting up a home server on a Mini PC that has Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. I want to attach it to my TV and play retro games as well as run home automation tasks (periodic scripts, UniFi controller, Pihole etc) Is anyone using Proxmox on their homelabs? Would you recommend blowing away Windows and installing Proxmox and then install Windows with PCIE passthrough?

My use-case is slightly different, but I use Proxmox for my home server and would recommend it. Especially if you're familiar with linux systems or want to learn about them which I've done through the years I've been using this setup.

My server was originally a single debian installation set up to host local services for things like git. That grew into hosting a site, vpn, then some multiplayer game servers. When I reached a point where too many things were installed on single machine, I looked at vm options. I've used VMWare/VSphere professionally, but settled on Proxmox for these main reasons: easy to set up and update, easy to build/copy vms, simple way to split physical resources, monitoring of each vm, and simple backup and restores. All without any weird licensing.

That server houses 4 vms right now. That might be a bit much for your mini pc but you could do a couple. The multiplayer servers are the main hog so I isolate resources for that. The windows machine is only for development which isn't your exact use case. I can say however that I've never had issue when I need it. Only thing I can't speak for is the need for graphics passthrough.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#26
post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Did they say it was a bad thing? And why the need to throw in autism shaming?

This worth investing time in getting infrastructure "just right" pay off big later in his grug experience.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#27
post #14
post #12

Slightly off topic: I’m setting up a home server on a Mini PC that has Windows 11 Pro pre-installed. I want to attach it to my TV and play retro games as well as run home automation tasks (periodic scripts, UniFi controller, Pihole etc) Is anyone using Proxmox on their homelabs? Would you recommend blowing away Windows and installing Proxmox and then install Windows with PCIE passthrough?

You really should have different physical hardware for such different use-cases.

Why? I find having a single capable hypervisor hosting VMs far more reliable than a bunch of smaller machines.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#28
post #24

Serious question: What is the advantage of Proxmox for power linux users that can run a debian or ubuntu server box + KVM ? I'm always reading stuff about people using proxmox but don't really understand its 'edge'

Me either, although I am using it for my home. It does allow configuring VMs, containers, logical volumes, and such. I think you can have multiple proxmox in a cluster. I might not have reached the point where I am doing enough with it to understand the benefit.

Re: Scripts for Streamlining Your Homelab with Proxmox VE

#30

The actual scripts: https://github.com/tteck/Proxmox After poking at a couple of these, they seem like they're 50% shiny packaging and 50% one-liner bash commands.

[flagged]

100% agree. I have been running my own NAS the hard way: FreeBSD, ZFS, manual samba/NFS shares, dhcp+gateway+firewall, PXE Boot, Jellyfin (can't remember if it's in a jail or not). All this stuff is a huge, utter PITA and never works quite right.

- I have to manually check the zpool periodically to see if there are faults. I went about 30d with a DEGRADED disk before I realized it, turns out it was a bad cable but if another disk failed I would have been hosed.

- I have to manually run zpool scrub (yeah I know about cron but chances are if I just add the cron entry it will fail, probably some permission thing or a 1-character bug in the cmd line. Nothing like this is ever easy, it's a 1-hour rodeo, at minimum. And yeah, I'm lazy too, not gonna deny it)

- I can only get NFS v3 working, not v4, no idea why. IIRC v4 isn't technically supported by either FreeBSD yet. But rather than just say "not supported" it gives you some cryptic bs that you waste minimum 20m on googling and trying things. Everything you try, you have to triple check: restart rpciod? Or was it nfsd? exportfs -ra? Or was it some encryption version in /etc/exports?

- Samba kinda works, no idea how the permissions are supposed to work, but turns out SMB is more resilient to network interrupts than NFS which just hangs the client indefinitely. So for listening to music or reading a book its fine.

- I wanted to set up VPN on a 2nd network (not VLAN, just a 2nd subnet that routes out the tun device. I thought since I control DHCP, I could force certain devices to only ever have access via VPN), turns out this isn't possible or "very hard" doing some hack to the NAT pf rules, way above my skill level. I wasted hours on this, got the VPN and tun to authenticate, but got stuck at the routing layer. Oh also I think dhcpd doesn't like routing to different adapters? Can't remember.

- PXE was a disaster, as it usually was. I got it barely working enough to boot my tape backup computer off it and run backup scripts.

- I want simple logfile aggregation. I dont want to have to ssh into the NAS and check the logs/dmesg. I admit I haven't done a lot of research (10 years ago there was nagios, thats all I know), but it bugs me profusely that I cannot easily monitor the logs of all the machines on my network, and I rarely ever hear about anyone else doing it.

so probably 40% success, 60% (frustration|half-assery|disappointment). I guess it's just masochism, like the weightlifters who love the pain of adding 10 extra pounds to their set. At least they get some results eventually. :/

Overall, I don't regret doing it the hard way, but I am often times envious of the Proxmox users who (presumably) just plug and play.

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