Proxmox Setup

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I had decided a long time ago, that when I build my next PC I would make the current PC a server. But I was unclear about how I was gonna go with it, I was thinking of maybe installing Ubuntu on it, and install all the services(maybe all the services in individual dockers) for safety reasons.

But then, that’s when my friend introduced me to Proxmox. To put it simply with proxmox we can create multiple Virtual Machines or LXC containers. VMs are more like docker and LXC are one level above and can access the host machine’s peripherals directly(might not be the accurate definition but that’s how I’ve understood it).

Once you’re done with the installation which is mostly similar to other linux installs ( one thing I would suggest is to set up a static IP for your proxmox ), so that things are easier, you’ll be greeted with following dashboards, only with no VMs created yet.


proxmox This is how it’ll look once you’ve configured few of the services

proxmox dashboard
You’ll also be able to see all the metrics without having to setup additional services

If you wanna test something, you just spin up a new VM, by clicking the “Create VM” in the top right, by giving some basic details, an iso image and assigning an IP. What I really like is my CPU get assigned multiple IPs each IP being mapped to each VM, which I kinda find it cool.

What I use proxmox for:

I majorly use it for 2 main things - plex and TrueNas.

TrueNas - This is the only LXC container and my 2TB hard disk is passed through this container, basically I’m managing all my storage via this. I created Samba file share here, and in all my other containers, VMs and in all my home PC and laptops and even in phones, I mount this, this has been incredibly useful when I wanna transfer files, 100% would recommend this, at the minimum just a mini PC with a hard disk and TrueNas installed will do the job. drives


Plex and all the servarr helps me with my media management. I got a lifetime plex pass around 3 years, one of the best purchases I have made, the number of TV shows and anime I’ve watched in this is crazy.


Apart from this I wanted to properly set up PiHole, but idk, it doesn’t feel like it really solves an issue for me at least not yet, plus I wasn’t planning to set the pihole DNS in my router, so that leaves me with setting the pihole configuration in all my home devices manually which I didn’t wanna do. Though I tried to set it up in my Android phone, DNS kept resolving with IPv6, I tried a little bit to fix it but gave up at the end. One thing I really liked was I can set up custom local domain names, for example I can map http://proxmox/ to redirect to the proxmox ip and stuff, but I had a silly idea to fix that.
First I configured a Heimdall hashboard to access all the services like this.
dashboard
Now let’s say that my dashboard VM has a IP of 192.168.1.20, and this IP was given to me by the router and I had marked it as a static IP(as I do for all my VMs in proxmox). Now I mapped one of my domains(say vishnugt.com) to 192.168.1.20, I know that doesn’t make sense, because I’m mapping my local ip to a domain which can be accessed anywhere. And now whenever I type vishnugt.com it’ll take me to the dashboard BUT ONLY if I’m on my local network ( •̀ᴗ•́ ).

Future plans:




Tags · Tech, Setup