Proxmox

Something very easily overlooked is what my homelab looks like, as it mostly just works! It is a well thought out combination of fit for purpose hardware, without becoming “work”, so while I do have a preference for specific hardware, I still have the freedom to build it differently than I would do at my day job. It consists of the following parts: Netgate SG-4860-1U as a pfSense firewall and router; 2x Juniper Networks EX2300-C-12P for switching, running as a VC (virtual chassis); 2x Unifi NanoHD as WiFi Accesspoints; A small server running Proxmox, built within a Fractal design node 304 case: Intel i7-8700k cpu; 64GB DDR4 Crucial memory; Asus Prime H310I-Plus motherboard; Google Coral m.2 TPU; Sonoff Zigbee dongle P as a Zigbee router for Home Assistant. Flexoptix optics for terminating my fiber internet. While I like to automate at scale, I tend to like to get hands on at times in which my homelab gives great opportunities to test and try out new things, but also run mission-critical services to support my personal needs. ...

In the landscape of hypervisors there are a couple of big names that always come up when engineers are talking about virtualisation, a couple can be, VMware, Hyper-V, Nutanix, you name them. The reason for that is that they’ve been around for so long that most people have seen or touched it at some point in their career, in 2008 Proxmox came around, as a newcomer it was always the special kid in class that used it. ...

Today I struggled for some time to get a LANCOM vRouter appliance to work on Proxmox, in the end I got there but the provided instructions weren’t working. Hence I write this small post to help that small group of people out there that might at some point come across the need to do the same. According to the official installation guide for the KVM image we should use the following features: - Import the provided .img as a VirtIO Disk; - Provide some CPU and RAM; - Use Standard VGA as Display; - Provide two serial ports; - Provide as many VirtIO network cards as needed. ...

Sometimes cloud providers or maybe in your own infrastructure you might find the need to have your default gateway outside of your subnet, for example this is sometimes done by Hetzner and Myloc. The problem with cloud-init is that it doesn’t like it when your gateway is outside your subnet, well, it works with for example 1.1.1.100/32 and 1.1.1.1 but when you try 1.1.1.100/32 and 9.9.9.9 as gateway you will find out that cloud-init happily provisions your VM with the address, but that there are no routes. ...