Have you ever wanted a nice, easy way to create new VMs to play with using your favorite base distro, without doing a lot of work to configure basic settings like your account, networking, hostname, etc? Cloud-Init can do all of that and more, but it’s designed more for big cloud providers and not the easiest thing to setup. But, what if we could take a generic cloud image, and use it with Proxmox’s built-in Cloud-Init automation, to provision easy bare VMs without having to build our own templates?

Continuing the series where apalrd teaches proxmox skills through meaningful applications, today we are setting up a proper fileserver on our Proxmox system using Linux Containers. I’ve chosen to use a lightweight Linux Container (LXC) for this, so we can share the host’s ZFS filesystem. To manage shares and users using a web UI, I’m installing Cockpit, as well as some additional modules from 45Drives to deal with Samba. This should provide a pretty easy to use storage interface, keep all of our storage contained in the host Proxmox system without adding another layer of filesystem or a virtual machine, and run well on lower end hardware such as the Terramaster unit I’m using.

Do you have a USB3 2.5Gbe network adapter that doesn’t work well in Linux? Well, the kernel has included the upgraded Realtek drivers for awhile now, but for some reason it needs additional udev rules to load correctly. It’s a pretty simple fix and results in dramatically improved bandwidth (full duplex ~1.5Gbps and half duplex ~1.9Gbps), and functions properly with the correct driver. tl;dr if you’re on a Debian-based system (including Proxmox) create the udev file below and reboot, and it should work fine.

If you’re building your first home server (or following my Ultimate Home Server series!), the first app I recommend playing with is Home Assistant. Taking control of your home automation with free and open-source software is an excellent way to get out of the cloud-based walled gardens, and self-hosting an app like this is a great way to learn about self-hosting in general without the pressure of hosting something like your firewall.

I get asked a lot about what hardware I recommend for homelabs and home servers. It’s a very difficult question since it depends on what exactly you want to get out of your setup. But, whatever you choose, I’m starting a new series where I’ll setup all of the commonly requested home server software in a single box. Since I want to try this on both used and new hardware, here’s a low cost NAS you can buy brand-new and run your own software on it!

In this video, I expand on the last video of my hyper-converged Proxmox + Ceph cluster to create more custom pool layouts than Proxmox’s GUI allows. This includes setting the storage class (HDD / SSD / NVME), failure domain, and even erasure coding of pools. All of this is then setup as a storage location in Proxmox for RBD (RADOS Block Device), so we can store VM disks on it.

So, you want to send HDMI video around your house? Maybe you want to use your office computer on your living room TV without a proprietary streaming solution like AirPlay or Chromecast? Share a cable or satellite box between your living room and bedroom? Or you’re crazy like me and you want to put all of your computers into the basement, and connect to any of them from any desk in the house?

Short tutorial this week, how to import a VM image you may get to use in Proxmox. I took a vacation for Thanksgiving, so back to the regularly scheduled madness soon. Enjoy! The Basics: You need to use qm importvm (See the man page here if you want to reference it). The basic command is: qm importvm <vmid> <source> <storage> <options> Where <vmid> is the number of a VM which alraedy exists, <source> is the path to a file which qemu can convert (qcow2, vmdk,raw img), and <storage> is the name of a storage location in Proxmox.

I’m sure many of you follow me because you use Proxmox. It’s been a staple of my content for some time now. So, while working on the next episode of the Ceph series, I thought it would be good to do a separate segment on networking. So, here you have it. The basics of VLANs, Bridges, and Bonds in Proxmox VE. I’m only covering the native Linux versions, not Open VSwitch and VXLAN.

I have a thin client addiction. You all have seen my 3x Dell Wyse 5060 Hyperconverged Cluster project. And you know that I bought a Dell Wyse 3040. But, I actually bought 3x 3040s, and someone sent me a Wyse 7010, and an HP T620 (yet to be reviewed). And now I bought another. An HP T530. I’d consider this to be an excellent choice for anyone wanting to run Home Assistant, since it has enough power for, an upgradeable M.