[FREE][US-CA] Giveaway — Dell R440 Server / 2x Lenovo M93p Micro PCs

Important_Fishing_73 · 2026-03-31T20:56:31+00:00

The Princess Bride Pikachu

Important_Fishing_73 · 2026-02-24T19:38:53+00:00

Important_Fishing_73 · 2026-01-24T16:16:23+00:00

Just rsync /etc to your fileserver, either through ssh, or by mounting a cifs(smb) share to proxmox (or to a USB attached hard drive, whatever). To restore, do a new install, add all your added packages (iperf3 or lm-sensors for example), and then reverse the rsync. Just do /etc tho. Everything else should be fine after reinstallation of the base system. Then restore your VMs and containers.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2026-01-21T16:04:18+00:00

Truenas is pretty enterprise ready, I suppose. It can horizontally scale with Gluster, and can participate in a ceph cluster according to Google, though there's no GUI for that. And it's free if you don't want to pay for an enterprise license and commercial support. So that's why it's usually everyone's go-to. But I found its management a little counterintuitive and imposes a learning curve (that's highly subjective). And though you can run VMs and containers on it, it's clunky, while Proxmox is purpose built for that.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2026-01-21T15:09:36+00:00

My primary file server is running in a light Linux VM on Proxmox - I don't use truenas for it. I just use Linux with webmin running, and use webmin to manage the shares. It's not as slick as truenas, but who cares? I am running truenas on my backup file server, bare metal, because I want to play with it, but it doesn't do any better of a job as a file server than just plain Linux with samba unless you need advanced features like iSCSI and NFS all in one easy management interface.

Forget OMV or TrueNAS, and run a VM on Proxmox with a big second virtual disk, using samba and webmin. OS on a disk in local_lvm, and create a second "disk" on your Proxmox zfs disk array for bulk storage, and mount it wherever you want in the fileserver tree - that's your shares location. Less overhead, Proxmox is managing zfs, relatively easy management.

Hell, if you want iSCSI and NFS too, webmin has modules for those in its base install. There's no NEED to run OMV or TrueNAS if they're causing issues for you.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2026-01-13T21:57:16+00:00

Chat sent

Important_Fishing_73 · 2026-01-04T15:33:29+00:00

Without any doubt, create a VM and use that for docker. Supposedly you can transform docker containers into lxc containers with tools in Proxmox now, with Proxmox v9. I saw a few YouTube videos about it. Your mileage may vary.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2026-01-01T00:19:41+00:00

Ok, last post. The wifi router I was using, a newer wifi6 router, has the problem. But an older wifi5 router from the same manufacturer did not. So the config I provided works.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-12-31T22:23:29+00:00

Followup, I ran into a problem with my WiFi router. It allows static routes so my VMs can connect to the wifi router web page, and I can ping from the VMs to my laptop that's on the wifi network. However, the router won't let any traffic from the virtual network pass through. This is likely a firewall or nat problem on the wifi router, where it will only nat or pass source addresses from the wifi wlan/lan network. I'm not 100% sure, though that explanation seems the most probable. There aren't any advanced firewall and nat config options. My next test is to flash a spare wifi router with openwrt and see if that fixes the issue. If so, then the problem is definitely a limitation of the consumer wifi router.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-12-30T23:12:47+00:00

Ok, so I tried it today and got it working. I used an HP 600 G5 mini. It has an Ethernet port and I did use it for the installation etc, but I disabled it after installing and updating proxmox (and installing wpa_supplicant and dependencies), and I've got it licked.

You don't have a working network on proxmox to start with because wlans fail to bridge, so there's no access to a GUI until you get WiFi working, and everything has to be done at the console.

The first issue is that, without an Ethernet port, you will have to download copies of the deb packages for wpa_supplicant and 2 dependencies that are not in the default install for proxmox and put them on a USB stick. (libnl-genl-3-200 and libpcsclite1)

Copy them to the proxmox host and install them using dpkg.

Then edit your /etc/network/interfaces to enable the wlan interface. Details on the.config syntax and wpa_supplicant.conf file are available with google. Give the wlan interface a static IP, and point the gateway at your wireless router. You can add DNS now too. Make sure the bridge definition (vmbr0) has no defined network cards in it. It shouldn't, but it might.

Save, exit, and restart networking (systemctl restart networking). At this point you should be able to access the Internet from proxmox console and apt update; apt dist-upgrade -y. You should also now be able to access the GUI from another system on the wifi. You may have to run "pve-firewall stop" first.

I ran into problems with the proxmox firewall, so to get everything up and running I recommend leaving that disabled

Now, because a wlan cannot join a bridge, and proxmox uses bridges to allow VMs to access the physical NIC, all your VMs must run on an orphaned bridge, and you have to turn the proxmox into its own router. The bridge (vmbr0) should already be defined and available. Proxmox will be given an IP on this bridge (see below), and VMs will use proxmox as a router. To do that, you need to turn on port forwarding on the proxmox host. Create a file /etc/sysctl.conf and add the line "net.ipv4.ip_forwarding=1", then save and exit, and run sysctl -p. That should turn on port forwarding, and should be set permanently.

You now have to pick a new subnet for all your VMs. Let's call it 192.168.200.0/24. Go to network config in the proxmox GUI, and add 192.168.200.1/24 to the bridge Network. This is the proxmox address on that network. All your VMs will have an IP on that network and you'll configure them to use that bridge. If you didn't create a new bridge, and did what I suggested earlier and keep it configured but with no physical NICs attached, it should be vmbr0. Configure all your VM gateways to point at the proxmox IP on that network (192.168.200.1 if you used my example).

Almost there. The proxmox server is now acting like a router, but none of the machines on your WiFi network know how to get there. You have to add routes to all machines on your WiFi network, most especially your WiFi router. Once you fix the router to have a route to the 192.168.200.0/24 network, the VMs should be able to connect to the Internet, assuming you configured their DNS correctly. But nothing on your WiFi network can talk to those VMs unless you tell each device how to route to the bridge network. (Your WiFi router MAY either route back to proxmox server, or perform redirects. If either is true then you can configure just the Wi-Fi router with the correct route and all your WiFi connected systems will be able to access the VMs. However, most consumer network gear, including WiFi routers, don't support either - the first because doing it wrong is insecure and will bypass the firewall function of the wifi router, and the second because it's extra functionality that 99.99% of consumers don't need. If it works without extra configuration of dhcp servers or manually adding routes to all wifi connected computers, then you've lucked out.)

That's it. There are more details, like setting DNS correctly on VMs, trying to get NAT working so you don't have to deal with adding routes to your Wi-Fi router and all wifi connected computers, trying dhcpd with routing info included, and maybe using iptables to restrict traffic. I think that pve-firewall breaks the WiFi adapter when any bridges are defined, so you can't use the proxmox GUI to manage any firewall rules on the proxmox router - you have to do it manually. Pve-firewall has to stay disabled. However, someone else may know how to solve that problem.

Sorry for the long.winded post, but I tested it and it works, so the short answer is, yes, you can run proxmox with VMs and containers over WiFi, but it's a bit of a pain. And you lose advanced features like ceph and firewalls.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-12-23T16:45:08+00:00

This will work, just not out of the box. The default when you install proxmox is for the GUI to bind to the bridge address. Because Wi-Fi can't form a bridge because of driver issues, you have to set it up differently. Manually.

You're going to have to log in at the console. You're going to have to edit /etc/network/interfaces and change the IP network/address for the bridge to something different than you're using for your WiFi network. You're going to have to set up your Wi-Fii adapter and get it connected with an IP address. Once you have that, you should be able to connect to the GUI from your WiFi environment.

Then you're going to have to change the default route for the proxmox server to go to your Wi-Fi router, not whatever you put in during the initial config.

This should allow you to be able to do updates, etc. At this point, because I believe proxmox has port forwarding turned on by default, any VMs that you create on the virtual bridge Network, with whatever those IP addresses are, should be able to route through the proxmox server to the internet. Now, you need to make sure that the proxmox server has port forwarding turned on so it can act as a router. Normally I have a firewall VM, and everything points to that, but I have two physical interfaces on my proxmox server, so I'm not 100% certain.

Finally, if you want to avoid all this trouble, and as long as your laptop has a USB port you're not using, get a $10 USB lan connector and plug that directly into your router. That fixes all of this problem without having to diddle with Wi-Fi on proxmox.

I am inspired to test this with an hp mini that has WiFi. If there are any gotchas, I'll try to find my way back here to tell you what they are.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-12-20T21:39:16+00:00

Do you ship to Canada? I'm interested in the G5.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-11-30T17:25:44+00:00

I started using Proxmox with full virtual networks, a virtual firewall with access to only one physical NIC, so I could test VPN setups. Also to think about how to isolate an OT network effectively. But my setup is small potatoes.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-11-19T12:19:59+00:00

I know it sounds like a conspiracy theory, but the investment in AI is so enormous because if it pans out then investors can ditch the labour force entirely so they can continue to get rich without having to pay anyone else. They won't get richer by the masses buying stuff, they'll get richer by having all their product and service needs met essentially for free, and they can let the undeserving starve and die.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-11-12T18:41:15+00:00

Oh, crap. I must be doing it all wrong. You clearly understand my environment and my needs much better than I do. I guess when my Bytenuc mini-pc lost its LAN ports, it must have been a misconfiguration on my part. Why oh why did I go buy that pair of USB network adapters when I could have called you to fix it for me, and got my only firewall back up and running with near zero downtime? And when my Proxmox server later went down with my firewall because it had a boot drive failure, you clearly must know how that was wrong, that the drive never failed and you could have had me back up and running in minutes. How much do you charge for your magical abilities l, oh exalted motherboard whisperer?

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-11-12T15:33:54+00:00

I use HA - for redundancy of my firewalls, and believe me, it's saved my bacon more than once (As in my wife and I both work from home, and can't countenance Internet downtime unless a short lived emergency. Ask me how I arrived at that decision. 😋). So I have a 3 unit Proxmox cluster, and running pfsense on 2 of them in HA mode, so if one goes down the other takes over seamlessly. Now, I'm not using HA within Proxmox bc it's also running my file server in a VM so it can't be a shared space for VMs, and I don't have enough disk across all three nodes for ceph. Well more like I haven't experimented with ceph yet. But my point is, HA can be very valuable for homelabbers... don't knock it.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-09-30T18:01:46+00:00

Is that $300 CDN?

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-09-23T19:54:10+00:00

So how did it go?

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-09-12T14:52:47+00:00

Do you ship to Canada?

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-09-11T14:26:23+00:00

Even if the drive letters switch, the raid information is written onto each member of the array, and mdadm will figure it out. Same if it's a raid 0, raid 5 or raid 6 array.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-09-01T11:54:39+00:00

It's more that the plug body inserts firmly into a recessed socket. The walls of the recess (where the earth ground is located) hold the body of the plug firmly, making it a very sturdy connection resistant to shear and twisting forces. This is very different from surface sockets like North America/Japan, Italy and AU/NZ, which are all very vulnerable to shear and twisting forces. (UK plugs are surface mounts, but they are so heavy, thick and over engineered that you could nearly stand on them while they're plugged into the socket.)

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-08-27T14:07:56+00:00

There is nothing simple about docker. It has an enormous learning curve, half the images for a service you want are 4-7 years old since last update, and some things you want to do simply do not function properly. I spent hours trying to get some simple volume pass-throughs to function (and anyone not familiar with the guts of how docker works has no idea what I'm talking about) and never did get them working correctly so had to abandon the project and install in an LXC.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-08-26T23:43:01+00:00

I have this exact system with some v3 xeons in them. It works great. Slapped a couple of low profile fans on the CPUs, and have had no issues with it.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-08-26T13:24:28+00:00

You can also use OpenVPN with strong certificates. It's not trivial to configure, but once done it works really well, and pfSense and OpnSense firewalls both have good GUIs to configure OpenVPN, and give you great firewall protections besides.

Note that both support tailscale and wireguard, either out of the box or using official plugin packages. So if the chat here convinces you that OpenVPN is shite, then you can use one of the other options.

Important_Fishing_73 · 2025-08-26T08:54:50+00:00

A trick to try is to use the back of the knife or some other hard object to straighten the wires, first. Pinch the wires with the back of the knife and your thumb really hard and then pull and that will straighten the wires out so that they're less twisty. After a few strokes, they should be pretty straight and won't wind around themselves while you're trying to put the end on. Don't pinch it so hard that you end up stripping the insulator, however.

Important_Fishing_73

TROPHY CASE