8 ms·

Show HN: Proxmox VE Helper Scripts

238 points by BramSuurdje 2y ago

prettyStandard 2y ago
A bit of a tangent. I've been trying to manage libvirt& Unraid through terraform, but have run into issue after issue. I'm about given up, and will just manage the virtual machines manually... What's the virtualization technology on proxmox? What's the advantage to using something like this as opposed to terraform or salt stack or Ansible?
- beardbound 2y ago
  proxmox is using KVM for virtualization and Linux Containers (LXC) for the containers. I agree that something like terraform and/or ansible would make more sense for an IAC (infrastructure as code) deployment. Most of the people I talk to that use proxmox for a homelab prefer to do things manually and don't bother with any IAC implementation. For work I'm a firm believer in reproducible environments and IAC. We actually a combination of vagrant, libvirt, and KVM to spin up local clusters for quick testing and development. It works out pretty well, but in my homelab I don't have anything complicated enough to bother setting up terraform/ansible for. Although I imagine if my server crashed I probably wouldn't think that way anymore.
  - LilBytes 2y ago
    Given enough appetite and love from me, I've got a pretty robust Ansible script for building a Proxmox host with $i++ LxC's. It's not suitable for open sourcing yet (embedded secrets and the like), but if the community wants it, it's pretty solid. Only issue I see is the Ansible script currently always expects to be building a cluster of Proxmox hosts. I'd need to make some change to customise it so it can build out just one node though. I've been using it or ~3 years now for my Proxmox cluster home lab which predominantly hosts LLAMA, *Arr stack, deluge, Nginx, Tailscale and a few other services. It's not quite a one click deployment, but it can build our an entire cluster in 30 minutes after an initial Proxmox install is completed.
  - whartung 2y ago
    Why is something like Proxmox a bad target for IAC?
    - BonusPlay 2y ago
      If you want to manage VMs, then you're probably using terraform + provider. However, SDN (Software Defined Networking) is not yet supported [1], which makes any kind of deployment with network separation not feasible (using IAC only). [1] https://github.com/bpg/terraform-provider-proxmox/issues/817 https://github.com/bpg/terraform-provider-proxmox/issues/817
  - j45 2y ago
    Proxmox makes that all into a point and click appliance to focus on reliability and doing something with the technology. Just because someone doesn't use vagrant, libvirt and KVM to spin up local clusters manually, doesn't mean they don't know how. There is no shortage of Proxmox users who grew up in datacentres from bare metal servers, to virtualization first coming out, and beyond.
- daqnz 2y ago
  It is also worth mentioning that Proxmox uses ZFS making snapshotting quick and Proxmox also has a very good backup system. If you want to treat your self-hosted applications as "sheep" (1) , then terraform k8s etc. is a better bet. But if you are happy to manually restore from a backup or snapshot when something goes wrong, or automatically have your LXC container shifted to different hardware if you have a cluster, then Proxmox is for you. The reality is that in a home setup you will spend about as much or less time maintaining your "pets" than than you would your "farm". (1) I write this from New Zealand
  - gerdesj 2y ago
    "It is also worth mentioning that Proxmox uses ZFS" No it does not enforce ZFS or any other filesystem. That's up to you. ZFS or BTRFS are fine when indicated - and you need to know your stuff. Cephs for clustering (hyperconverged) is very much a first class citizen. I generally only use EXT4 as a filesystem - keep it simple. XFS is lovely too, especially for reflinks if you need them. (1) Wal and Cooch know how to run a farm (and so do I, in the UK!)
    - daqnz 2y ago
      > No it does not enforce ZFS or any other filesystem. That's up to you. ZFS or BTRFS are fine when indicated - and you need to know your stuff. You are correct, it is optional and I should have made that clear. While optional it does have native support for ZFS and takes advantage of ZFS features, like instant snapshotting of LCX containers.
  - BonusPlay 2y ago
    > Proxmox uses ZFS making snapshotting quick Proxmox only supports linear snapshots using ZFS (so no tree-like snapshots). This might be a deal-breaker for some usages.
- justinclift 2y ago
  Proxmox is more about the management of the hosts and resources on them, including the live migration of VMs between hosts, support for some types of HA and failover. You can likely manage the configuration of the VMs themselves through terraform or similar in combination with Proxmox if that's your desire.
- heatmiser 2y ago
  You can split the difference with the Proxmox provider for Terraform[1]. The workflow would be: - provision VMs with Terraform - configure/maintain your VM with something like Ansible The provider also allows your to schedule LXC if you'd like to target that instead. [1]: https://github.com/Telmate/terraform-provider-proxmox https://github.com/Telmate/terraform-provider-proxmox
  - RealStickman_ 2y ago
    How good and complete are any of these providers for Proxmox? If the ratio holds (4/10 I checked), I'd have to look more closely at about a third of the providers, just based on their latest release date.
BLKNSLVR 2y ago
I'll definitely look into the docker LXC and Home Assistant VM. I'd been using docker in a VM on proxmox, successfully mind you, but perhaps there's some more efficiency to squeeze...
- paranoidrobot 2y ago
  HAOS as a VM on proxmox works well. I used some of tteck's helper scripts to set up mqtt and zigbee2mqtt LXC containers with a passthrough of the USB zigbee device.
- daqnz 2y ago
  The scripts for both these projects work very well. I would recommend Home Assistant HAOS in a VM over a LXC or docker.
bigmattystyles 2y ago
Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605
WaxProlix 2y ago
I decided to run proxmox on my homelab rather than having a k8s setup, and I've come to sort of regret it. LXCs are awesome, but being bound to just them or qemu VMs doesn't fit all of my needs. With Kubernetes I could just add support for lightweight VMs (Firecracker hypervisor, or unikernels or something) with a project like Kata. Proxmox is just not extensible. It's also just not amenable to automation or reproducible builds in the same way as an established pod manager like Kubernetes: there's no support that I can find for Terraform, and so you're stuck with regular full-disk backups and maybe some Chef/Ansible/Puppet tooling, which I don't want to invest in [re]learning. Still, very cool resource management and passthrough model, and it's easy to set up and maintain, with a nice control panel.
- tombert 2y ago
  I've pretty thoroughly drunk the NixOS Kool-aid. For awhile I ran Docker Swarm with a bunch of SBCs, then k8s, then just a big server running Ubuntu + Cockpit, then Proxmox, until I have finally settled on NixOS. NixOS has decent container support if necessary, but I've found that its declarative nature means I almost never bother with containers. "Uninstalling" something is generally as simple as "remove it from the config file, rebuild", and it's not hard to do cgroupey stuff if you need to manage memory and the like. Not to mention that I think NixOS's nginx DSL is wonderful. It's so nice being able to have my proxy configs (along with LetsEncrypt) managed directly (and correctly) by the config environment instead of me writing my own scripts and the like. (I'm not sure if there are any distributed NixOS things, because I could totally see something neat being built on Flakes) My homelab has never been simpler and I've never been happier with it.
  - daqnz 2y ago
    Any reason you didn't go NixOS in a Proxmox VM? The advantage would not be having to do a full reinstall if anything went wrong and being able to spin up other OS' if needed. The downside would be a few percentage of performance loss.
    - tombert 2y ago
daqnz 2y ago
Along with the submitter, I am also on the team of maintainers who volunteered to help with maintenance of this project after tteck's sad news that they were entering hospice (1). The team members are all motivated individuals, who are enthusiastic on carrying on tteck's legacy. We are moving forward in a transparent manner and I am more than happy to answer any questions. (1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605
- lotophage 2y ago
  Oh wow, this is truely sad news. I only recently went down the homelab/selfhosted path and the majority of my containers were setup using tteck's scripts.
  - daqnz 2y ago
    > Oh wow, this is truely sad news. Incredibly sad. It’s a real testament to tteck that he took the time to transition the project, and make his wishes known how he wanted us to proceed. Tteck is a legend.
    - gerdesj 2y ago
      "Tteck is a legend." When the shit has really hit the fan personally and yet you still worry about other people: that is the mark of a decent person. Legend, indeed.
sgc 2y ago
I have been looking into setting up my first Proxmox box, here is my take as a newcomer. I wanted to do what I think is a very basic and very common setup: Modem > proxmox box > OPNsense VM > physical wifi router via onboard 10Gb NIC + internal network VMs like OMV etc. The goal is to add a full network filter via OPNsense, and allow access to a media sever and backup etc from the internal network. I see no OPNsense, OMV script is basically contra-indicated because it should be a VM instead of the LXC container, and I don't see any glue scripts to get VMs talking to each other, which is an important part of Proxmox configuration. So it looks like there is room here to get some basic setup scripts for a simple home server either improved or added to the collection.
- TheSmiddy 2y ago
  > I don't see any glue scripts to get VMs talking to each other I'm confused by what you mean here? Don't they just use the network like any other computer? I haven't had to do any special configuration to get my VMs to talk to each other.
  - sgc 2y ago
    I am not perfectly informed, but in my case, OPNsense would need to be the only vm with access to the incoming NIC port, and all other VMs and the router would need to use virtual network interfaces only coming from OPNsense for incoming. The router would be the only device with direct access to the outgoing NIC port. None of that seemed incredibly difficult looking into it, but still, it was the type of recipe I was expecting when I saw "Proxmox scripts". And of course this means that the Proxmox box as a whole should have similar hardening to a typical web server, with minor tweaks to allow residential traffic on various other standard ports. So that hardening would probably be another script I would like to see (I don't know what all the proxmox scripts in the first section do).
    - brainfish 2y ago
      VMs already use virtual network interfaces, which are by default bridged to `vmbr0`, a bridge that proxmox creates by default which is also bridged to the hardware NIC. For your use case, you simply want to create a second bridge, e.g. `vmbr1`, which is not bridged to the hardware NIC. You would then assign two virtual NICs to opnsense, one on each bridge (WAN and LAN, essentially) and then choose `vmbr1` as the bridge each time you create an "internal" service behind opnsense. Since selecting the bridge for a service's NIC is part of setting up each service, the only thing such a "glue script" would be doing is creating the `vmbr1` bridge. That's already a one-liner.
xrd 2y ago
Am I right that proxmox takes over your entire machine? I have been using a combination of docker and lxc/lxd to manage my VMs. But, cockpit (on ubuntu) does not give me a perfect experience for managing running VMS, etc. I wish there was a good solution for all of this. But, it feels like you need to cobble together a bunch of kibana tools to get true monitoring.
- alsetmusic 2y ago
  Yes, installing Proxmox is akin to installing ESXi.
- gchamonlive 2y ago
  I wanted to delegate management of my raid array to higher level tools since it died on me seemingly for nothing (I was able to recover all the drives but none of the files). I tried TrueNAS but it's very rigid. Proxmox seems to give you more control over what's installed on the server but it's also quite locked down. Don't remember exactly what was it that pushed me off Proxmox. I think it was that I needed to manage some VMs over LXD API and others over proxmox and I couldn't mix and match, I had to choose one without extra hacks.
- unixhero 2y ago
  Monitoring is there in Proxmox
- jdboyd 2y ago
  Usually, proxmox is the base OS (meaing replaces whatever Linux/Windows/FreeBSD/etc that there was before). It is possible to run Proxmox inside KVM, but that isn't the usual choice.
  - stephen_g 2y ago
    Specifically, running Proxmox in a VM (for me at least) I'd only recommend for testing Proxmox itself, not for any production setup (even "production" in my homelab)
- pkaye 2y ago
mateus1 2y ago
Heartwarming to see the community response here, long live tteck. I’ve just built my first homelab and have favored OpenMediaVault which seems better suited for my use.
evoke4908 2y ago
I doubt you have a whole lot of control over this, but this website is misery to use on a phone. Browsing scripts gives you six or ten tiles per page, navigation buttons are only in the header. There are no page numbers or any indication of progress. At a glance, there appears to be no way of filtering or sorting, although there is some arbitrary grouping being applied in the middle of the list. Also the script descriptions only show three lines of text, which is not nearly enough to give a clue to what the script is for. This is probably the worst implemented list view I've ever seen. Completely useless.
- sigseg1v 2y ago
  Not sure if we're seeing the same site but this site is better than 90% of the web when accessed via mobile for me. No page number when navigating forward/back through scripts, true, but I doubt you want to go through more than 1 or 2 pages without searching first. Search worked for me and turned up what I wanted on the first hit. Descriptions being 3 lines is pretty much the best it can do with the limited screen space; to improve this I feel you would need dedicated summarized content for mobile, which is a price that most platforms don't want to pay. Your description made me think that this was in the bottom 1% of mobile sites but honestly it's above average.
jamifsud 2y ago
Tangential question - what are people using their homelab for / what are some interesting or useful projects you've spun up on them? I've been thinking about setting one up but not 100% sure I'd find use out of it :)
- pkaye 2y ago
  I started with a home lab a few months back. Its basically an old miniPC running Proxmox virtualization and LCX containers. Mostly it helps me learn various technology I have not much experience with in my work. I run about 20+ services on the home lab. Some of them include: Open WebUI which can connect to the OpenAI api or a local Ollama LLM. You can also connect various tools to the LLM like a calculator or web search to augment them. The AI has helped me learn how to configure and debug stuff. Like I got step-ca to setup a local certificate authority and give certificates to my various internal services. I played around with configuring Caddy and Nginx along with ACME to the the step-ca. The LLM was even helping be debug my config files. I'm also using Hoarder for bookmarking and it can use AI to automatically tag your bookmarks. It can even backup the webpages. I've been using Mealie to clip and save online recipes. I'm running Uptime Kuma to check if my computers and services are up and if they are down, I'll get a notification.
- hughesjj 2y ago
  At the risk of leaking info to any toes I step on w.r.t my home environment, - home assistant - Network Video Recorder - Jellyfin - network management such as ubiquiti or omada etc - vault warden/1pass/other secrets servers - tailscale or wire guard server - build server/k8s test environment - private artifactory or mirror (especially useful if you're using the same distro on a bunch of devices but don't want to overload the actual mirror+improves download times) - torrents (someone's gotta seed Wikipedia) - onsite backups - bastion into your home network (see also: wire guard) - some people even use it for their router You could also take a look at the tteck scripts, there's a bunch of cool stuff in there
  - BLKNSLVR 2y ago
    I'm just going to repeat a bunch of what hughesjj has already said, but anyway: OPNSense (as my household's internet interface), Unifi Controller (as my household's primary wifi), Jellyfin, Wireguard, Pi-hole, LMS[0], Frigate NVR (migrating off ZoneMinder, awaiting delivery of a Coral TPU to finalise this), couchdb (as Noteself[1] back-end), nginx (serving a handful of sites for my own entertainment), Mailu[2], Calibre[3], various other in-flight experiments (which Home Assistant will soon become, Bitmagnet DHT scraper). Most of the above are docker instances hosted on a small number of VMs hosted on two (or sometimes three) physical machines running proxmox. [0]: https://github.com/epoupon/lms https://github.com/epoupon/lms (HN lurker) [1]: https://noteself.org/ https://noteself.org/ [2]: https://mailu.io https://mailu.io [3]: https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre or https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre-web https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre-... (I can't remember which)
ibuprofn 2y ago
Fantastic community! I've tried a couple of scripts already. I have running Pi-hole and Paperless LXC containers. I'm looking forward to Appflowy!
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midtake 2y ago
What capabilties does Proxmox have that are missing from simple KVM? Just a web interface?
- eddieroger 2y ago
  Clustering, migration, high availability, backups, Ceph integration, virtual networks as of recent, can do containers as well as VMs to name a few off-hand. The web interface is optional, too. You should check out their webpage for more.
  - dizhn 2y ago
    re: backups, their other product "proxmox backup server" integrates really well with the backup system they have in place. It can be run in a container on the proxmox host itself.
- zokier 2y ago
  KVM is just kernel side of things, it's not full vmm by itself, you always need some userspace application too. Firecracker, Qemu, Cloud-Hypervisor are some vmms built on top of kvm. While qemu is common way of using kvm, but running qemu directly is quite annoying. So you have stuff like libvirt and proxmox as wrappers around qemu.
IseardMi 2y ago
I have been using Proxmox VE for several years now and have most of my services running as docker containers in one VM. This always bothered me because I wanted to be able to control the individual services and their backup jobs using the Proxmox interface. After checking out these scripts I already moved a couple services (Caddy and Wireguard) over to LXC containers and am very impressed by how easy it was to do. Basically I just wanted to say thanks to everyone involved in making these scripts, it has left me with a great first impression.
- crimsonnoodle58 2y ago
  Careful. I too thought about this, but docker containers have the following benefits over the LXC scripts: - Updates and automatic upgrades between major versions. - The developer who wrote the software created the container (most of the time), this means its a supported environment. Also, as they have the insight into the application and future upgrades the environment has been setup correctly for each version. If you want to achieve your goal, I'd suggest an LXC with your favourite Linux distro + docker + app container(s) for each app you have. It gives you the same thing, but with the benefits above.
  - fazeirony 2y ago
    i too was looking at going the route of the poster above. is your suggestion essentially the 'same' in terms of resources as converting a docker container to a LXC (relatively speaking)? for some reason i had/have it in my head that the LXC's would somehow be more efficient (based on...nothing, hence the question!)
    - crimsonnoodle58 2y ago
      Think of an LXC as a docker container but at the OS level. An LXC running docker with an app containerised inside will basically be the same as if the app is running a level higher in the LXC itself. Give it a try. Then open top/htop in the host OS (pve shell) and you'll see the apps running in the docker container inside the LXC as native processes.
BodyCulture 2y ago
Unfortunately until this day Proxmox doesn’t support full disk encryption oob, despite using the word „Enterprise“ in the first paragraph of their website. Yes, you can go your own way and install on an encrypted Debian, but you will miss important features and are on your own. It all comes down to ZFS not treating FDE as a first class citizen. Very sad state of affairs.

238 points by BramSuurdje 2y ago

A bit of a tangent. I've been trying to manage libvirt& Unraid through terraform, but have run into issue after issue. I'm about given up, and will just manage the virtual machines manually... What's the virtualization technology on proxmox? What's the advantage to using something like this as opposed to terraform or salt stack or Ansible?

beardbound 2y ago
proxmox is using KVM for virtualization and Linux Containers (LXC) for the containers. I agree that something like terraform and/or ansible would make more sense for an IAC (infrastructure as code) deployment. Most of the people I talk to that use proxmox for a homelab prefer to do things manually and don't bother with any IAC implementation. For work I'm a firm believer in reproducible environments and IAC. We actually a combination of vagrant, libvirt, and KVM to spin up local clusters for quick testing and development. It works out pretty well, but in my homelab I don't have anything complicated enough to bother setting up terraform/ansible for. Although I imagine if my server crashed I probably wouldn't think that way anymore.
- LilBytes 2y ago
  Given enough appetite and love from me, I've got a pretty robust Ansible script for building a Proxmox host with $i++ LxC's. It's not suitable for open sourcing yet (embedded secrets and the like), but if the community wants it, it's pretty solid. Only issue I see is the Ansible script currently always expects to be building a cluster of Proxmox hosts. I'd need to make some change to customise it so it can build out just one node though. I've been using it or ~3 years now for my Proxmox cluster home lab which predominantly hosts LLAMA, *Arr stack, deluge, Nginx, Tailscale and a few other services. It's not quite a one click deployment, but it can build our an entire cluster in 30 minutes after an initial Proxmox install is completed.
- whartung 2y ago
  Why is something like Proxmox a bad target for IAC?
  - BonusPlay 2y ago
    If you want to manage VMs, then you're probably using terraform + provider. However, SDN (Software Defined Networking) is not yet supported [1], which makes any kind of deployment with network separation not feasible (using IAC only). [1] https://github.com/bpg/terraform-provider-proxmox/issues/817 https://github.com/bpg/terraform-provider-proxmox/issues/817
- j45 2y ago
  Proxmox makes that all into a point and click appliance to focus on reliability and doing something with the technology. Just because someone doesn't use vagrant, libvirt and KVM to spin up local clusters manually, doesn't mean they don't know how. There is no shortage of Proxmox users who grew up in datacentres from bare metal servers, to virtualization first coming out, and beyond.
daqnz 2y ago
It is also worth mentioning that Proxmox uses ZFS making snapshotting quick and Proxmox also has a very good backup system. If you want to treat your self-hosted applications as "sheep" (1) , then terraform k8s etc. is a better bet. But if you are happy to manually restore from a backup or snapshot when something goes wrong, or automatically have your LXC container shifted to different hardware if you have a cluster, then Proxmox is for you. The reality is that in a home setup you will spend about as much or less time maintaining your "pets" than than you would your "farm". (1) I write this from New Zealand
- gerdesj 2y ago
  "It is also worth mentioning that Proxmox uses ZFS" No it does not enforce ZFS or any other filesystem. That's up to you. ZFS or BTRFS are fine when indicated - and you need to know your stuff. Cephs for clustering (hyperconverged) is very much a first class citizen. I generally only use EXT4 as a filesystem - keep it simple. XFS is lovely too, especially for reflinks if you need them. (1) Wal and Cooch know how to run a farm (and so do I, in the UK!)
  - daqnz 2y ago
    > No it does not enforce ZFS or any other filesystem. That's up to you. ZFS or BTRFS are fine when indicated - and you need to know your stuff. You are correct, it is optional and I should have made that clear. While optional it does have native support for ZFS and takes advantage of ZFS features, like instant snapshotting of LCX containers.
- BonusPlay 2y ago
  > Proxmox uses ZFS making snapshotting quick Proxmox only supports linear snapshots using ZFS (so no tree-like snapshots). This might be a deal-breaker for some usages.
justinclift 2y ago
Proxmox is more about the management of the hosts and resources on them, including the live migration of VMs between hosts, support for some types of HA and failover. You can likely manage the configuration of the VMs themselves through terraform or similar in combination with Proxmox if that's your desire.
heatmiser 2y ago
You can split the difference with the Proxmox provider for Terraform[1]. The workflow would be: - provision VMs with Terraform - configure/maintain your VM with something like Ansible The provider also allows your to schedule LXC if you'd like to target that instead. [1]: https://github.com/Telmate/terraform-provider-proxmox https://github.com/Telmate/terraform-provider-proxmox
- RealStickman_ 2y ago
  How good and complete are any of these providers for Proxmox? If the ratio holds (4/10 I checked), I'd have to look more closely at about a third of the providers, just based on their latest release date.

BLKNSLVR 2y ago

I'll definitely look into the docker LXC and Home Assistant VM. I'd been using docker in a VM on proxmox, successfully mind you, but perhaps there's some more efficiency to squeeze...

paranoidrobot 2y ago
HAOS as a VM on proxmox works well. I used some of tteck's helper scripts to set up mqtt and zigbee2mqtt LXC containers with a passthrough of the USB zigbee device.
daqnz 2y ago
The scripts for both these projects work very well. I would recommend Home Assistant HAOS in a VM over a LXC or docker.

bigmattystyles 2y ago

Related https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605

WaxProlix 2y ago

I decided to run proxmox on my homelab rather than having a k8s setup, and I've come to sort of regret it. LXCs are awesome, but being bound to just them or qemu VMs doesn't fit all of my needs. With Kubernetes I could just add support for lightweight VMs (Firecracker hypervisor, or unikernels or something) with a project like Kata. Proxmox is just not extensible. It's also just not amenable to automation or reproducible builds in the same way as an established pod manager like Kubernetes: there's no support that I can find for Terraform, and so you're stuck with regular full-disk backups and maybe some Chef/Ansible/Puppet tooling, which I don't want to invest in [re]learning. Still, very cool resource management and passthrough model, and it's easy to set up and maintain, with a nice control panel.

tombert 2y ago
I've pretty thoroughly drunk the NixOS Kool-aid. For awhile I ran Docker Swarm with a bunch of SBCs, then k8s, then just a big server running Ubuntu + Cockpit, then Proxmox, until I have finally settled on NixOS. NixOS has decent container support if necessary, but I've found that its declarative nature means I almost never bother with containers. "Uninstalling" something is generally as simple as "remove it from the config file, rebuild", and it's not hard to do cgroupey stuff if you need to manage memory and the like. Not to mention that I think NixOS's nginx DSL is wonderful. It's so nice being able to have my proxy configs (along with LetsEncrypt) managed directly (and correctly) by the config environment instead of me writing my own scripts and the like. (I'm not sure if there are any distributed NixOS things, because I could totally see something neat being built on Flakes) My homelab has never been simpler and I've never been happier with it.
- daqnz 2y ago
  Any reason you didn't go NixOS in a Proxmox VM? The advantage would not be having to do a full reinstall if anything went wrong and being able to spin up other OS' if needed. The downside would be a few percentage of performance loss.
  - tombert 2y ago

daqnz 2y ago

Along with the submitter, I am also on the team of maintainers who volunteered to help with maintenance of this project after tteck's sad news that they were entering hospice (1). The team members are all motivated individuals, who are enthusiastic on carrying on tteck's legacy. We are moving forward in a transparent manner and I am more than happy to answer any questions. (1) https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42016605

lotophage 2y ago
Oh wow, this is truely sad news. I only recently went down the homelab/selfhosted path and the majority of my containers were setup using tteck's scripts.
- daqnz 2y ago
  > Oh wow, this is truely sad news. Incredibly sad. It’s a real testament to tteck that he took the time to transition the project, and make his wishes known how he wanted us to proceed. Tteck is a legend.
  - gerdesj 2y ago
    "Tteck is a legend." When the shit has really hit the fan personally and yet you still worry about other people: that is the mark of a decent person. Legend, indeed.

sgc 2y ago

I have been looking into setting up my first Proxmox box, here is my take as a newcomer. I wanted to do what I think is a very basic and very common setup: Modem > proxmox box > OPNsense VM > physical wifi router via onboard 10Gb NIC + internal network VMs like OMV etc. The goal is to add a full network filter via OPNsense, and allow access to a media sever and backup etc from the internal network. I see no OPNsense, OMV script is basically contra-indicated because it should be a VM instead of the LXC container, and I don't see any glue scripts to get VMs talking to each other, which is an important part of Proxmox configuration. So it looks like there is room here to get some basic setup scripts for a simple home server either improved or added to the collection.

TheSmiddy 2y ago
> I don't see any glue scripts to get VMs talking to each other I'm confused by what you mean here? Don't they just use the network like any other computer? I haven't had to do any special configuration to get my VMs to talk to each other.
- sgc 2y ago
  I am not perfectly informed, but in my case, OPNsense would need to be the only vm with access to the incoming NIC port, and all other VMs and the router would need to use virtual network interfaces only coming from OPNsense for incoming. The router would be the only device with direct access to the outgoing NIC port. None of that seemed incredibly difficult looking into it, but still, it was the type of recipe I was expecting when I saw "Proxmox scripts". And of course this means that the Proxmox box as a whole should have similar hardening to a typical web server, with minor tweaks to allow residential traffic on various other standard ports. So that hardening would probably be another script I would like to see (I don't know what all the proxmox scripts in the first section do).
  - brainfish 2y ago
    VMs already use virtual network interfaces, which are by default bridged to `vmbr0`, a bridge that proxmox creates by default which is also bridged to the hardware NIC. For your use case, you simply want to create a second bridge, e.g. `vmbr1`, which is not bridged to the hardware NIC. You would then assign two virtual NICs to opnsense, one on each bridge (WAN and LAN, essentially) and then choose `vmbr1` as the bridge each time you create an "internal" service behind opnsense. Since selecting the bridge for a service's NIC is part of setting up each service, the only thing such a "glue script" would be doing is creating the `vmbr1` bridge. That's already a one-liner.

xrd 2y ago

Am I right that proxmox takes over your entire machine? I have been using a combination of docker and lxc/lxd to manage my VMs. But, cockpit (on ubuntu) does not give me a perfect experience for managing running VMS, etc. I wish there was a good solution for all of this. But, it feels like you need to cobble together a bunch of kibana tools to get true monitoring.

alsetmusic 2y ago
Yes, installing Proxmox is akin to installing ESXi.
gchamonlive 2y ago
I wanted to delegate management of my raid array to higher level tools since it died on me seemingly for nothing (I was able to recover all the drives but none of the files). I tried TrueNAS but it's very rigid. Proxmox seems to give you more control over what's installed on the server but it's also quite locked down. Don't remember exactly what was it that pushed me off Proxmox. I think it was that I needed to manage some VMs over LXD API and others over proxmox and I couldn't mix and match, I had to choose one without extra hacks.
unixhero 2y ago
Monitoring is there in Proxmox
jdboyd 2y ago
Usually, proxmox is the base OS (meaing replaces whatever Linux/Windows/FreeBSD/etc that there was before). It is possible to run Proxmox inside KVM, but that isn't the usual choice.
- stephen_g 2y ago
  Specifically, running Proxmox in a VM (for me at least) I'd only recommend for testing Proxmox itself, not for any production setup (even "production" in my homelab)
pkaye 2y ago

mateus1 2y ago

Heartwarming to see the community response here, long live tteck. I’ve just built my first homelab and have favored OpenMediaVault which seems better suited for my use.

evoke4908 2y ago

I doubt you have a whole lot of control over this, but this website is misery to use on a phone. Browsing scripts gives you six or ten tiles per page, navigation buttons are only in the header. There are no page numbers or any indication of progress. At a glance, there appears to be no way of filtering or sorting, although there is some arbitrary grouping being applied in the middle of the list. Also the script descriptions only show three lines of text, which is not nearly enough to give a clue to what the script is for. This is probably the worst implemented list view I've ever seen. Completely useless.

sigseg1v 2y ago
Not sure if we're seeing the same site but this site is better than 90% of the web when accessed via mobile for me. No page number when navigating forward/back through scripts, true, but I doubt you want to go through more than 1 or 2 pages without searching first. Search worked for me and turned up what I wanted on the first hit. Descriptions being 3 lines is pretty much the best it can do with the limited screen space; to improve this I feel you would need dedicated summarized content for mobile, which is a price that most platforms don't want to pay. Your description made me think that this was in the bottom 1% of mobile sites but honestly it's above average.

jamifsud 2y ago

Tangential question - what are people using their homelab for / what are some interesting or useful projects you've spun up on them? I've been thinking about setting one up but not 100% sure I'd find use out of it :)

pkaye 2y ago
I started with a home lab a few months back. Its basically an old miniPC running Proxmox virtualization and LCX containers. Mostly it helps me learn various technology I have not much experience with in my work. I run about 20+ services on the home lab. Some of them include: Open WebUI which can connect to the OpenAI api or a local Ollama LLM. You can also connect various tools to the LLM like a calculator or web search to augment them. The AI has helped me learn how to configure and debug stuff. Like I got step-ca to setup a local certificate authority and give certificates to my various internal services. I played around with configuring Caddy and Nginx along with ACME to the the step-ca. The LLM was even helping be debug my config files. I'm also using Hoarder for bookmarking and it can use AI to automatically tag your bookmarks. It can even backup the webpages. I've been using Mealie to clip and save online recipes. I'm running Uptime Kuma to check if my computers and services are up and if they are down, I'll get a notification.
hughesjj 2y ago
At the risk of leaking info to any toes I step on w.r.t my home environment, - home assistant - Network Video Recorder - Jellyfin - network management such as ubiquiti or omada etc - vault warden/1pass/other secrets servers - tailscale or wire guard server - build server/k8s test environment - private artifactory or mirror (especially useful if you're using the same distro on a bunch of devices but don't want to overload the actual mirror+improves download times) - torrents (someone's gotta seed Wikipedia) - onsite backups - bastion into your home network (see also: wire guard) - some people even use it for their router You could also take a look at the tteck scripts, there's a bunch of cool stuff in there
- BLKNSLVR 2y ago
  I'm just going to repeat a bunch of what hughesjj has already said, but anyway: OPNSense (as my household's internet interface), Unifi Controller (as my household's primary wifi), Jellyfin, Wireguard, Pi-hole, LMS[0], Frigate NVR (migrating off ZoneMinder, awaiting delivery of a Coral TPU to finalise this), couchdb (as Noteself[1] back-end), nginx (serving a handful of sites for my own entertainment), Mailu[2], Calibre[3], various other in-flight experiments (which Home Assistant will soon become, Bitmagnet DHT scraper). Most of the above are docker instances hosted on a small number of VMs hosted on two (or sometimes three) physical machines running proxmox. [0]: https://github.com/epoupon/lms https://github.com/epoupon/lms (HN lurker) [1]: https://noteself.org/ https://noteself.org/ [2]: https://mailu.io https://mailu.io [3]: https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre or https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre-web https://fleet.linuxserver.io/image?name=linuxserver/calibre-... (I can't remember which)

ibuprofn 2y ago

Fantastic community! I've tried a couple of scripts already. I have running Pi-hole and Paperless LXC containers. I'm looking forward to Appflowy!

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midtake 2y ago

What capabilties does Proxmox have that are missing from simple KVM? Just a web interface?

eddieroger 2y ago
Clustering, migration, high availability, backups, Ceph integration, virtual networks as of recent, can do containers as well as VMs to name a few off-hand. The web interface is optional, too. You should check out their webpage for more.
- dizhn 2y ago
  re: backups, their other product "proxmox backup server" integrates really well with the backup system they have in place. It can be run in a container on the proxmox host itself.
zokier 2y ago
KVM is just kernel side of things, it's not full vmm by itself, you always need some userspace application too. Firecracker, Qemu, Cloud-Hypervisor are some vmms built on top of kvm. While qemu is common way of using kvm, but running qemu directly is quite annoying. So you have stuff like libvirt and proxmox as wrappers around qemu.

IseardMi 2y ago

I have been using Proxmox VE for several years now and have most of my services running as docker containers in one VM. This always bothered me because I wanted to be able to control the individual services and their backup jobs using the Proxmox interface. After checking out these scripts I already moved a couple services (Caddy and Wireguard) over to LXC containers and am very impressed by how easy it was to do. Basically I just wanted to say thanks to everyone involved in making these scripts, it has left me with a great first impression.

crimsonnoodle58 2y ago
Careful. I too thought about this, but docker containers have the following benefits over the LXC scripts: - Updates and automatic upgrades between major versions. - The developer who wrote the software created the container (most of the time), this means its a supported environment. Also, as they have the insight into the application and future upgrades the environment has been setup correctly for each version. If you want to achieve your goal, I'd suggest an LXC with your favourite Linux distro + docker + app container(s) for each app you have. It gives you the same thing, but with the benefits above.
- fazeirony 2y ago
  i too was looking at going the route of the poster above. is your suggestion essentially the 'same' in terms of resources as converting a docker container to a LXC (relatively speaking)? for some reason i had/have it in my head that the LXC's would somehow be more efficient (based on...nothing, hence the question!)
  - crimsonnoodle58 2y ago
    Think of an LXC as a docker container but at the OS level. An LXC running docker with an app containerised inside will basically be the same as if the app is running a level higher in the LXC itself. Give it a try. Then open top/htop in the host OS (pve shell) and you'll see the apps running in the docker container inside the LXC as native processes.

BodyCulture 2y ago

Unfortunately until this day Proxmox doesn’t support full disk encryption oob, despite using the word „Enterprise“ in the first paragraph of their website. Yes, you can go your own way and install on an encrypted Debian, but you will miss important features and are on your own. It all comes down to ZFS not treating FDE as a first class citizen. Very sad state of affairs.