Bought a dedicated server a while ago and now have around 1800gb out of 4 disks in it.

Hardly knew how to work with proxmox/raid setups and so on a few days ago.

Can configure the basics without thinking as for now!

Gotta love learning stuff with open technology and seeing yourself grow 😃

Before anyone starts going batshit crazy, this is NOT a windows hate post. Just a funny experience imo.

So I was tasked with installing ProxMox on a dedicated server at my last internship. The windows admin was my guider (he could also do debian). (he was a really nice/chill guy)

So we were discussing what VM's we wanted and the boss (really cool dude by the way) said he wanted a VPS for storing some company stuff as well. Fair enough, what would we use? I suggested debian and centos. Then we started discussing what we'd do if the systems would fuck up etc (at installation or whatever).
So I didn't wanna look like a Linux Nazi so I suggested windows. Then the happy/positive guider/windows admin suddenly became dead serious (I was actually like 'woah' for a second) and said this:
No. We're not going to fucking use windows for this. For general servers etc sometimes, fair enough but we're talking about sensitive company data here. I don't want that data to be stored on a proprietary/closed source system, hell what if there's some kinda fucking backdoor build in, who can fucking verify that? We're using Linux, end of discussion.

😓

I was pretty flabbergasted as he's a nice guy and actually really likes windows!

Linux it became.

So I recently started discarding Proxmox for Arch on my experimental server.. new skill acquired 🙃

Upon suggestion of @platypus I went to the cafe and just took my tablet there (unfucking the laptop's rootfs flash drive took too long, and ArduinoDroid's avrdude didn't seem to work very well), so just doing some chatting in IRC and trying to figure out how the hell I'm supposed to make a serial link to a Proxmox VM from the host (thinkstation on the top left pane).

Attached below is the screenshot of that.. much turminel, very h3xx0r! But so far nobody has come up to me calling me "evul h3xx0r" yet.. very intriguing! I expected things to be much worse.

A glass of Duvel in front of me, tastes great! Cheers!

Proxmox, i love you but kindly to fuck yourself.

It shouldn't be such a pain to get you up and running.

Let's go for CentOS or Ubuntu server, then.

😤

Working on my virtualization server...

This rant is particularly directed at web designers, front-end developers. If you match that, please do take a few minutes to read it, and read it once again.

Web 2.0. It's something that I hate. Particularly because the directive amongst webdesigners seems to be "client has plenty of resources anyway, and if they don't, they'll buy more anyway". I'd like to debunk that with an analogy that I've been thinking about for a while.

I've got one server in my home, with 8GB of RAM, 4 cores and ~4TB of storage. On it I'm running Proxmox, which is currently using about 4GB of RAM for about a dozen VM's and LXC containers. The VM's take the most RAM by far, while the LXC's are just glorified chroots (which nonetheless I find very intriguing due to their ability to run unprivileged). Average LXC takes just 60MB RAM, the amount for an init, the shell and the service(s) running in this LXC. Just like a chroot, but better.

On that host I expect to be able to run about 20-30 guests at this rate. On 4 cores and 8GB RAM. More extensive migration to LXC will improve this number over time. However, I'd like to go further. Once I've been able to build a Linux which was just a kernel and busybox, backed by the musl C library. The thing consumed only 13MB of RAM, which was a VM with its whole 13MB of RAM consumption being dedicated entirely to the kernel. I could probably optimize it further with modularization, but at the time I didn't due to its experimental nature. On a chroot, the kernel of the host is used, meaning that said setup in a chroot would border near the kB's of RAM consumption. The busybox shell would be its most important RAM consumer, which is negligible.

I don't want to settle with 20-30 VM's. I want to settle with hundreds or even thousands of LXC's on 8GB of RAM, as I've seen first-hand with my own builds that it's possible. That's something that's very important in webdesign. Browsers aren't all that different. More often than not, your website will share its resources with about 50-100 other tabs, because users forget to close their old tabs, are power users, looking things up on Stack Overflow, or whatever. Therefore that 8GB of RAM now reduces itself to about 80MB only. And then you've got modern web browsers which allocate their own process for each tab (at a certain amount, it seems to be limited at about 20-30 processes, but still).. and all of its memory required to render yours is duplicated into your designated 80MB. Let's say that 10MB is available for the website at most. This is a very liberal amount for a webserver to deal with per request, so let's stick with that, although in reality it'd probably be less.

10MB, the available RAM for the website you're trying to show. Of course, the total RAM of the user is comparatively huge, but your own chunk is much smaller than that. Optimization is key. Does your website really need that amount? In third-world countries where the internet bandwidth is still in the order of kB/s, 10MB is *very* liberal. Back in 2014 when I got into technology and webdesign, there was this rule of thumb that 7 seconds is usually when visitors click away. That'd translate into.. let's say, 10kB/s for third-world countries? 7 seconds makes that 70kB of available network bandwidth.

Web 2.0, taking 30+ seconds to load a web page, even on a broadband connection? Totally ridiculous. Make your website as fast as it can be, after all you're playing along with 50-100 other tabs. The faster, the better. The more lightweight, the better. If at all possible, please pursue this goal and make the Web a better place. Efficiency matters.

Some people just need to go fuck a blender.

My client's using some legacy server side software. I set it all up nice and isolated with proxmox, tunneled it through cloudflare, got the folks to do their install on a windows vm, passthrough their licensing usb. Hosted GLPI on it too (system inventory) and so on.

Wait for it. Windows Server refuses to accept local or domain passwords. WTF. Even went ahead and did a Utilman reset on it which lets you use an admin cmd prompt to the login screen where you could reset the password. Insane that it was even possible, but no good.

Client blamed linux for it, I switched over to Windows Server on baremetal. I setup Hyper-V thinking it should be just as capable as KVM.

Nope.

Guess what, you can't pass through usb for licensing (the legacy software). MOFOS DECIDED TO install it baremetal. I couldn't even get hyper-v to create a decent virtual network. It keeps changing all my network adapter settings. I COULDN'T EVEN PASSTHROUGH PCIE NETWORK CARDS.

This feels like an eternally stagnated, mossy soup of abandonware.

FUCK YOU WINDOWS. You've been sore pain the ass for EVERYONE.

Anyone an idea? Trying to install proxmox on my HP Proliang again but no matter what I do, it can't find a bootable disk. I've done this about 20 times before (and that worked well) and I did change the boot order but I already set that back again.

Anyone? Help 😥

Oh look. The monitoring channel is in flames, smartphone is vibrating so hard it's having a seizure.

Hm. Nah it's fine. Not my...

Damn it. Incoming call. -.-

I'm actually on vacation (more like you need to trim down overtime before management get's angry).

They decided to test the new hardware / os stack I set up in the last weeks. I'd actually be happy about it If I wasn't on vacation and would be part in something that I invested a lot of time...

Well now I am. Guess what. It's running too good.

And that's not a joke. It's partly due to an upgrade in infrastructure (got rid of some last remaining 1 Gbps networks)… but also because I changed quite a lot on the OS / VM side plus we changed from XEN to Proxmox... With major tweaks, too.

The whole stack can now handle peak traffic where it would choke before, and even go beyond the old peak traffic.

Enough of introduction, the simple reason why shit burned down was because they tried out the current development branch and let it ran.

The development branch had an currently unfinished ratelimiter framework, since I didn't had time for an full burn in and didn't knew what the maxima / limits were. And since I hadn't finished that, I didn't finish the traffic shaping either.

Hm. Guess it's not good when you let a bunch of heavy parallelized data generators / analyzers run for free....

In the end, we simply shotgunned the docker development machines, because thanks to network congestion / retransmissions and feedback, they were not really cooperative via network / REST.

But hey: To infinity and beyond. XD

Having heart attack during "share screen" session cause Proxmox' icon looks like some porn site's icon

Added a bond interface in my Proxmox installation for added cromulence, works, reboot again, works, reboot once more just to be sure, network down.. systemctl restart networking, successfully put the host's network back up.. lxc-attach 100, network in containers is still down apparently.. exit container, pct shutdown 100, pct start 100, lxc-attach again... Network now works fine in containers too.

Systemd's aggressive parallelization that likely tried to put the shit up too early is so amazing!
I'm literally almost crying in despair at how much shit this shitstaind is giving me lately.

Thank you Poettering for this great init, in which I have to manually restart shit on reboot because the "system manager" apparently can't really manage. Or be a proper init for that matter.

/rant

And yes I know that you've never had any issues with it. If you've got nothing better to say than that then please STFU. "Works for me" is also a rant I wrote a while back.

Creating a cluster with shared storage in Proxmox

Once you've learned how to configure a single Proxmox host and Linux and Windows guests, the next step is to expand...

Want to continue reading this article? Register here with your corporate email address. Because your private email address isn't good enough, we need your corporate one.

No TechTarget, how about you go fuck yourself? As if anyone is going to register just to read one fucking article on your goddamn shitty site. Fucking wanketeering dickheads.

Question

What server monitoring do you use, both for statistics and security?

--------------------
tl;dr ends here

Ideally I would like to have one clean dashboard that shows me all the nodes I have, proxmox already offers a great range of stats - but it is a page per container etc. so not ideal, I thought of having datadoghq, but their per host pricing is huge, since I have more than 5 hosts to track.

Bloody mother fucking jesus christ....

It's working.

Sometimes I really wish I had the gift to be creative and to e.g. draw a (metaphoric) image of the shit I had to fix and how it felt to fix it.

It's sad not being able to share stuff in a way everyone can understand it :/

I uncludged the last bits of the networking / loadbalancer / craptastic network.

The whole chart that includes most of the associations / information for the network fits easily on a A2 paper. Internal only.

Just migration of a few remaining servers to Proxmox and a large MySQL to Postgres migration outstanding....

1.75 years and it's the first large milestone achieved. Large milestone as in it will not be a total clusterfuck anymore.

Still a lot of stuff to do...

But down to one major OS, Debian, for everything (container / VMs)... only LTS supported versions for services...

No more stuff that's so old it's near fossil state. We stillhad Ubuntu 12.04 running... :) ;) And XenServer is nearly gone...

Too many feels. Too many brain poofs. And way too much pain.

Defaults are great.

Especially if they change and suddenly cause havoc.

:)

When will I learn that some defaults should be explicitly set.... *sigh*

At least Proxmox has an REST API to change the default value of aio=uring to aio=native....

Otherwise I'd have to update a few hundred VMs manually. :(

Proxmox team, go fuck yourselves.

Now I'm sure that I'll receive a lot of flack for this, but hear me out.

I've tried Proxmox and was quite pleased with its web UI. But I hate how much it locks me into their own little ecosystem.

I want to use btrfs on my drives. Why is this impossible, yet the hack that is ZoL is your obvious alternative? An alternative wherein I can't even compile and run my own kernel, because then ZoL suddenly fails? And don't you tell me to compile your stock config, when it's well over 15GB large in your source tree.

Proxmox is literally the MacOS of Linux distributions. Which was even more so made clear by me being called an idiot by possibly wanting to run Same on the PVE host. Because why on Earth would sysadmins want to?! Why on Earth would sysadmins be competent for wanting to?!!

You know what? I'll just convert those Proxmox servers to Arch and say fuck you to all the bells and whistles that's Proxmox' web UI. Because at least Arch allows me to make my own fucking choices, limited only by what's supported by the Linux operating system.

Perhaps Proxmox will consider btrfs stable in 2021. Because you know, despite it being stable today in 2018, Debian and Proxmox alike live 3 years in the past, i.e. 2015. I hate the Debian ecosystem because of that, but boy do I hate Proxmox even more so. Bloody fucking piece of shit it is!!! 😡

just installed Pop! Os moving from Ubuntu 18.04 on my desktop. damn Ubuntu is so bloated, a lot of halt (freeze) spiking, cannot recommend it to anyone anymore.

Currently installing Proxmox on my server moving from Ubuntu 16.04 Server, recorded 4126 Hour of uptime. Damn it's gonna be a loooooong day

Have a question about my career:

So far my career out of uni has been like this:

8 months in first place working as C# .NET dev, creating native desktop apps for windows. job was shitty, was not getting any best practices skills so I left.

12 months in 2nd place working as android dev in a startup. was working all alone and had to rebuilt my app up to 5-6 times to learn best practices. startup didnt care about android app at all so I left and now doing just some small freelance work for them.

3 months in new startup as android dev.Today I was told that its decided to focus on iOS and do all marketing (also uplift of new design) only on iOS. basically for next 3-4 months they don't plan to do much on android side. they saw that I showed some interest in backend and now they are asking me to talk with two other senior guys about starting with some small tasks for me on backend.

Our backend is mainly using python. Also backend guys will be pretty busy for next few months because they will have to deliver many new features in next few upcoming months. I've talked with one of them and he said that this is a bad idea to force frontend to start working on backend. However I feel that he's sort of gateekeping and probably just doesn't want to help me with getting up to speed.

In my defense, my knowledge doesn't end with C# .NET desktop apps and native mobile apps for android.

I have hobbie projects (gameservers) where I worked on websites (php,html,css,javascript,mysql) and also was taking care of a java based gameserver which is hosted in a linux vps.

Also I've had a small hosting "company" where with available tools I've managed to automate VPS(virtual private server) ordering, web hosting ordering and domain ordering. Basically I owned a dedicated server and did everything using whmcs, cpanel and proxmox virtualization.

I trust myself in learning this backend stuff and doing whats required, however I learned everything by myself and I won't follow all of these best practices.

Should I accept more responsibility on backend or should I continue focusing on android?

!Rant

Just for blatant curiosity; how many people would ++ this just to help me get a stressball to get through this day.

Rant
So today I woke up to a message that my jobs webserver was down; and that all personal webpages for the Uni went down with it. We had no idea why or how it went down but eventually someone got it up- just in time for our Proxmox server to go down; which runs our new web server (thankfully it's not live yet), our print server, our PXE server, and more... Loving today. Such stress. Very shit.
We have a memo on the window "Watch your FPMs" (fucks per minute)

to;dr: I think I'm retarded. I don't know how to networking.

got Proxmox set up on my server... sorta. I suck at networking. I bought a domain name, and I'm trying to have each container have a subdomain of the domain name I bought. each container has a unique internal IP address, but they all share the host's public IP address. so after a couple hours of googling, I THINK what I need to do is run a reverse proxy server on the public IP and route each subdomain manually to an internal IP address with something like nginx..... or am I retarded?

I am messed up at installing a bunch of server app in proxmox, messed up the config, privileges etc.

Guess i need to start over -_-

The end of today was extremely fun.

Imagine the surprise. I was importing a simple 8 GB big virtual machine into the Proxmox hypervizor.

First issue: It was in the Open Virtualization Format (.ova) for easy import into... most hypervizors... Not Proxmox, however.

But really, not that bad, there are ways around it. Create a blank virtual machine through the UI, scrap the disk you create, then extract the two disk QCOW2 files from the .ova file, which by itself is just a POSIX TAR archive. Then import them through the commandline.

...So I did just that. The larger of the two was about 8 GBs, the other just like... 50 MBs.

The larger imported fine. The smaller?

Color me surprised, when it created a FUCKING. 1. TB. LOGICAL. VOLUME.

...

That it then proceeded to try and fill full of zeros...

Oh yes, it was one of the fancy dynamic storage files that expand as space is needed.

...
Tomorrow, I'll have to try if I can export just the filesystem data into an individual, shrunken down, normal, plain, old disk. None of this fancy black magic shit.

...Also... I don't get why Proxmox doesn't support that... The filesystem was only a few megs big... Ugh.

Why the fuck does a windows server 2016 guest with ballooning service on proxmox take the full 10GB RAM from the host I assign to it?

I have installed all the virtio drivers and it does show in the guest summary itself the real usage of 1GB RAM, but if I check in htop or the datacenter summary, it shows the usage is 10/11GB all the time.

Hey devs or sysadmin here in devRant I wanna know what hypervisor are you using in production or dev environment??

I will annex the hypervisor that I know and I work on, but are free to add more.

Vote with a "++" in the hypervisors that you use.

Why the fuck does proxmox change its primary network interface name after I installed a new SSD?
Thought I broke my poor server :c

UGH.

I hate when I have to debug an issue and find out its somewhere entirely else, than I was looking.

>Installs a virtual server on the Proxmox VE platform
>Reboots and grub be like "No such device *UUID*"
Whut?

Okay, so... reinstall grub, maybe a bug in the automated install?
>Nop.exe, still an issue
Huh...
>Partition tables all good, drives all visible when booted from a live environment, grub is up to date
>Finally gives up and goes to mess in the (terrible) grub rescue environment
>Grub only sees (hd0) while root is on (hd2), what?
>A whole lot of cursing ensues, wtf?

Turns out it was a bug, but not in grub... Rather, in the QEMU-KVM agent daemon, wtf!

I never had to deal with a bug in the virtualization agent itself.

Downgrading from pve-qemu-kvm 5.0.x to 4.0.x solved the issue.

Now, maybe, I can finally go have my lunch...

I finally got my new home server.
A Lenovo ThinkCentre M720q in one of the higher configurations.
Any ideas what top level OS I should put on it?
ATM, I'm thinking Proxmox, ESX or Alpine.
I like proxmox because of the neat UI for everything but I'm kinda worried about how it basically takes the most important parts of the system over.
I like Alpine since I already use it for quite a while as my goto server OS and because of AWALL, which IMHO is the best linux server firewall.
I didn't get to evaluate ESX yet.

I'd love to get into a career within the cyber security industry.

Anyone got advice?

I've played around with Kali/Parrot and setup a proxmox box to perform pen testing and have a fair number of PDF ebooks and audio books on networks, security and pen testing

Today was fun, i set up a dedicated minecraft server on my old laptop, to increase fps when I play on my shitty phone now it runs real smooth. The server is running on a proxmox vm - ubuntu server.

I wish I knew that fps would be this high , i would have done this wayy earlier, am loving it

&& rant

spent all fucking day fucking around with my server. installed gitlab to mydynamicdns.service.com/gitlab. but, gitlab still handles requests at mydynamicdns.service.com/ but it's just a 404. couldn't figure out how to host anything else. fucked around with it for like 5 hours, tried installing some shit called passenger, but by that point, I had already fucked up my environment pretty good so that didn't work at all. spent like 3 more hours fucking with it.

fuck it. time to learn about virtualization. someone here suggested Proxmox. how exactly does it work? is it running a fully blown vm for each server or is it running something like docker under the hood? and does each server then have it's own IP address?

I spent the easter weekend migrating a bare metal Windows installation to a Proxmox VE server with a Windows VM (and set up an rdp client).

@VirtualizationPeasants
@SysAdmins
XenServer or Proxmox? Or other solutions and why?

- LibreNMS
- Proxmox
- Ceph

Good quality code, frequent updates and EXCELLENT documentation.

What Hardware specs should I focus on when buying a server which runs virtual machines using ProxMox or XenServer?