Project 701 ~ Proxmox
Networking is one of the IT sectors that I have yet to spend much time in. My only exposure has been a NET501 class where we covered the basics of things like booting a virtual machine, routers/IPs, certificates, dhcp, and a few others. Since then I haven’t really touched anything to do with networking except for creation/use of virtual machines on the cloud platforms (GCP, AWS and Azure). This blog is going to be my path to installing and running open-source server virtualization environment called ProxMox. I am not endorsed by ProxMox, this is just an open source solution that the company I work for is going with.
At first glance of their website I was able to easily find the get started section, which led to an ISO download link. After loading the ISO onto a USB via Rufus on my desktop (since my laptop is arch Linux), I plugged it into the desktop I was given to use for the server. Once the machine booted, a screen came up with 4 options, one being to install ProxMox VE. After this I encountered my first problem… I searched the error and quickly found a hopeful solution, in this instance it seems that Rufus is not suggested for the installation process. I’ve disliked that I needed to use windows in order to use Rufus anyway so this problem is actually a nice opportunity to learn a new live-boot software that is available on Linux. I’ve been meaning to learn how to burn an ISO to a USB on Linux for a while now so this is just a bonus for me.
After a quick ddg search for Rufus alternatives I found a couple lists to draw from. I chose the first one that was suggested on 2 or more site (within the highest rankings) that were cross-platform. Etcher was what I ended up trying out first. It is GUI based which is something that I don’t really like most often, but I have to give it to Etcher, they pull it off quite well. It is a simple 3 step process starting with the image, then device, and finally a check to make sure the process completed successfully. Booting up the tower with the newly flashed USB worked fine and the error didn’t occur; success! Not a very hard problem, but one that felt good solving none the less. The wizard following was simple enough, some typical time formatting, the storage device, and one that I only knew how to do because of duckduckgo and my previous experience in setting up static IP addresses (for my raspberry pi(s)). The thing I had to search ddg for was what a hostname (FQDN) was. I ended up going with pmve.venusinformatics.com, will find out down the road if it was the correct choice or not. I had to do a quick search to find the default username to login, and after finding out it was root I was in.