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.

This is a continuation of my previous article on the Net Booted Thin Client. The instructions got way too long, so I created a new article for the client setup. You need a functional server setup (TFTP, HTTP, iPXE) which I did in my previous post. I could use something like Linux Terminal Server Project, but that’s a bit overkill for this, and I wanted to learn Alpine anyway, so I’ve chosen to use Alpine Linux for the client operating system.

Sometimes, projects don’t work. Today, I’m going to describe a bit about a few of them. Thank you for coming to my ted talk lol. I’ve been working on Linux Multiseat for awhile now, it’s a topic that has fascinated me for over a decade now. But, getting it to actually work with cheap hardware has eluded me. So, here’s a bit of an overview of what I’ve learned so far.

In this project, I explore using low cost thin clients as cluster nodes, the fundamentals of Proxmox clustering, redundant storage, and hyper-converged infrastructure using Proxmox and Ceph. Setting up a Proxmox HA Cluster In the first video, I take the Dell Wyse 5060 I bought before and … bought 2 more. Once I had 3, I built a complete high availability cluster using them, demonstrating the very basics of Proxmox clustering, high availability resources, and how Proxmox handles failure.

I’ve wanted to play with multi-WAN routing setups for awhile. I thought about buying Starlink, but it’s a bit pricey as a purely backup solution, and I’m in a situation where my primary internet is very reliable for about the same price. So I settled for LTE backup. I looked around for awhile, trying to decide what the right solution is for me. I really wanted to pass through the IPv4 address and IPv6 prefix from the ISP through to my OPNsense router, since I don’t want to deal with triple-NAT and dual layer firewall.

I’ve played with network booting before (and I even tried to netboot Windows, what a nightmare that was), but now I want to get serious about it. I want to netboot my VDI Clients. I’ve been working on a thin client series, and the next step is to get rid of the installation entirely. I could use something like Linux Terminal Server Project, but that’s a bit overkill for this, and I wanted to learn Alpine anyway, so I’ve chosen to use Alpine Linux for the client operating system.

In this project, I explore thin client software, and set up a Raspberry Pi to act as a thin client. This is a multi-part project, follow along below for each sub-project. Raspberry Pi SPICE Thin Client The first project in this series creates a Raspberry Pi Thin Client which is permanently bound to a specific VM in Proxmox, and boots directly into the thin client session. You would use this when you have a 1:1 relationship between clients and VMs, such as a computer lab.

For my last trick, I setup a multi-user thin client where each user account was connected to a specific virtual machine. This is great, but if you have a lot of thin clients you might not want to create a ton of VMs and might instead want each user in the system to have one or more VMs. Well, Josh Patten has written a Python-based GUI to select thin clients which you have access to, and today we are going to turn that into an appliance on both a Raspberry Pi and an actual x86 based Thin Client (running Debian).

I’ve made many videos on Thin Clients before, all of them relying on Proxmox and the SPICE protocol. This works well when you control both the client and the hypervisor, and allows a lot of flexibility in the guest OS at the expense of flexibility at the client. If you want to rely on a remote access / Bring-Your-Own-Device type solution, you probably care more about solid multi-platform client support than flexibility in mixing VM OSes and running with no software installation on the VM.

In previous posts, I’ve been building up a thin client / VDI infrastructure based on Proxmox hosted virtual machines, using the SPICE protocol. This has gone well. However, the current setup basically launches the computer into a purely thin client mode, where it’s hardcoded to a specific VM and can do nothing else. There has been some interest in making some kind of launcher to select VMs to log in to, and I decided to find a solution for this.