Tagged: Proxmox
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Host-Based Detection Part 4: Standing Up a Manager, Two Different Ways
Two real Wazuh managers already exist on this site's infrastructure, built for opposite reasons. What the contrast between a shared homelab instance and a disposable lab one actually teaches about sizing and placement.
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From Dropbox to Daily Driver Part 6: Standing Up a Wazuh Manager, and Why the VM Wouldn't Boot
Every layer this series has built so far assumes I'm the only one who'd ever notice if something went wrong. Standing up a Wazuh manager on pve to actually change that, plus a VM that dropped straight into a rescue shell and a small Proxmox API gotcha on the way there.
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From Dropbox to Daily Driver Part 8: An Ansible Control Node, a Second Pi, and What changed=0 Actually Proves
Turning seven parts of manual hardening into something a machine can run: a dedicated Ansible control node, a second Pi built specifically to prove reproducibility, a real gotcha in check mode explained honestly, and a second playbook run that changed nothing at all.
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Proxmox qm CLI VM Build, Part 1: Creating a Debian 13 VM and Surviving the Build Loop of Death
Building a Debian 13 VM on Proxmox entirely from the qm command line: checking host resources, fetching the ISO with pvesh instead of the GUI, and a real boot-order bug that trapped the VM in its own installer.
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Proxmox qm CLI VM Build, Part 2: The Same VM via Cloud-Init, and What It Actually Costs You
Building the same Debian 13 VM again, this time from a cloud image instead of the netinst ISO: qm disk import, cloud-init identity and networking, and a real comparison of what you gain and what you give up against Part 1's interactive install.
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Proxmox qm CLI VM Build, Part 3: Jumping Between pve and the VM
Testing qm terminal, noVNC, and SSH against both VMs from this series, and finding a real quirk: when a VM's display is redirected to its serial console, noVNC and qm terminal turn out to be two viewers on the same channel, not two independent sessions.
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Proxmox qm CLI VM Build, Part 4: A Real Use Case, DNS with Unbound
Putting the ISO-built VM to actual use as a DNS resolver with unbound, a real sudo gotcha from Part 1's install choices, and an hour spent debugging a phantom firewall that turned out to be a much simpler mistake.
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Proxmox qm CLI VM Build, Part 5: Templates, Clones, and What a Clone Actually Copies
Closing the series by turning VM 103 into a reusable template with qm template and qm clone, and finding that a clone copies everything on disk, including identity files most people wouldn't think to check.
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Lab Environments Part 2: The Hypervisor Foundation
Before EVE-NG, GNS3, or CML, something has to run them. Proxmox, ESXi, and VMware Workstation compared as the compute layer underneath the rest of this series.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 1: Architecture and Installation
Opening the promised Proxmox deep dive: what Proxmox VE actually is under the hood (Debian, KVM, LXC, pmxcfs), the subscription model recapped in more depth, and how the pve host behind this site's own labs got its start.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 10: Backup and Disaster Recovery
vzdump's three backup modes, retention scheduling that actually matches how homelabs get used, and Proxmox Backup Server as the companion product worth running instead of vzdump alone.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 11: PCI and GPU Passthrough
Handing a real GPU or PCI device directly to a VM through IOMMU and VFIO, the IOMMU grouping problem that catches most first attempts, and the use cases that actually justify the setup work.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 12: Users, Permissions, and the API
Realms, roles, and ACLs underneath the GUI, scoped API tokens for automation, and where Terraform and Ansible actually fit against the same API surface the web GUI itself uses.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 13: Monitoring, Maintenance, and Homelab Best Practices
Closing the deep dive: watching the whole stack with Prometheus and Grafana, ongoing repository and certificate maintenance, and a homelab best-practices checklist pulling every part of this series into one place.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 2: Storage Architecture
Every storage type Proxmox supports, what content each one can actually hold, and the local-versus-shared distinction that quietly decides whether live migration and HA are even possible later.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 3: ZFS, the Default Recommendation
Pools, RAIDZ versus mirrors, the RAM math ZFS actually needs, and the one setting (ARC sizing) that trips up more homelab builds than any other single ZFS decision.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 4: Networking - Bridges, VLANs, and SDN
From the single vmbr0 bridge the installer creates, through VLAN-aware bridges and bonding, to the newer SDN stack with EVPN and BGP over VXLAN, and where the extra complexity is actually worth it in a homelab.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 5: The Built-In Firewall
Three separate levels, datacenter, node, and VM, each guarding a different kind of traffic, plus security groups and IP sets for keeping rule sets manageable as a homelab grows.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 6: VMs vs LXC Containers
Full hardware virtualization and OS-level containers are both first-class in Proxmox. The actual decision between them, and why unprivileged containers should be the default rather than the exception.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 7: Clustering and Quorum
What actually happens when a second node joins: corosync, pmxcfs synchronization made real, the quorum math behind how many nodes can fail before the cluster stops trusting itself, and why two nodes is a genuinely awkward number.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 8: High Availability
HA groups, the watchdog-based fencing that makes automatic failover safe, and an honest answer to whether HA is worth the complexity in a homelab at all.
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Proxmox Deep Dive Part 9: Ceph Hyperconverged Storage
Ceph turns the cluster's own nodes into shared storage, no external NAS required, at the cost of a genuinely higher complexity and hardware floor than most homelabs actually need.
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Building a FortiManager Lab on Proxmox — Part 1: Lab Goals, Compute Sizing and Proxmox Host Preparation
Part 1 of a five-part series on building a FortiManager lab on Proxmox. Covers lab goals, compute sizing for FMG and FGT VMs, host prerequisites, and a clean Proxmox 8.x baseline before the qcow2 build in Part 2.
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Building a FortiManager Lab on Proxmox — Part 2: Obtaining the Image, qcow2 Conversion and First Boot
Part 2 of the FortiManager-on-Proxmox series. Walks through obtaining the KVM image from the Fortinet portal, validating the qcow2 files, building the VM shell with the right machine type and SCSI controller, importing both disks, and first-boot verification.
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Building a FortiManager Lab on Proxmox — Part 3: Proxmox Networking, Linux Bridges, VLAN-Aware Bridges and SDN for the Lab
Part 3 of the FortiManager-on-Proxmox series. Designs the four-segment lab network, compares Linux bridges, VLAN-aware bridges and Proxmox SDN, walks through the /etc/network/interfaces shape, and explains why the lab bridges should never have an IP on the host.
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Building a FortiManager Lab on Proxmox — Part 4: A Lab Edge FortiGate VM in Front of FortiManager
Part 4 of the FortiManager-on-Proxmox series. Builds a FortiGate-VM as the lab edge in front of FortiManager, with four NICs mapped to the lab bridges, a scoped policy set, FortiGuard pinhole, local-in policy hardening, and the deny-with-log rule that proves the boundary works.
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Building a FortiManager Lab on Proxmox — Part 5: Registering Managed FortiGates, ADOMs and Policy Package Installs
Part 5 of the FortiManager-on-Proxmox series. Builds two managed FortiGate VMs, registers them via FGFM through the lab edge, splits them across two ADOMs, deploys a shared policy package with FMG, exercises revision history and rollback, and turns the lab into a snapshotted training platform.