Intro

Proxmox Hell Part 1

So i have been wanting a homelab for a long time... like the raw power of a small server just for you..;. running a pihole as a personal DNS and ad blocker, TruNas to hold all my media and files, and various virtual machines for testing and fun or simulating a network.

To do this the go-to software seems to be Proxmox, Proxmox is a type 1 hypervisor. It allows me to do all these things and more.

So basically from what I could understand you just install proxmox on all the devices you want as a node then you just plug in your Ethernet cable and play from there...right?....RIGHT???? well silly me had barely any networking experience and apparently that's pretty important.

How I choose to think about the following experience is a fast track learning experience in these topics I lack in, because if i don't think about it that way I might just have a breakdown.

WARNING: I do ALL THE NO-NO’s and the oopsies in a span of 9 hours so… just managing expectations

Hardware

basically something you will find out about me is that i like to go IN to the best of my ability

I needed something power Efficient but powerful cores upgradable, SSD Storage and DDR5 Ram

With that said I ended up with three Bee link EQi12 mini PCs with 10 cores 12 threads with 500gb of upgradable SSD storage and 24 gb of DDR5 ram.

Some pretty noise specs if i do say so myself and I have two 1TB SSD Drives that will end up in the nodes.

Installation and Pain

So the trauma induced... I mean accelerated learning started when I started the installation process.

Now the installation for proxmox is pretty straight forward.

It holds your hand through what's your timezone, email and password for the account, then the networking.

SO this is where the funk started and I quickly realized that raw dogging the networking with no experience is not optimal.

Here is the screen in question. So what I was having problems with was actually pretty simple, It was all of it.

What is the management interface? Do i do a .arpa or a .local hostname also do i need the pve at the beginning of the hostname? What is CDIR? For the gateway do I use the beginning of the ip range or the end or maybe the device's ip address??? Also for the DNS do I use the local address or do I offload that to googles 1.1.1.1 DNS server.

Well I just happened to count all the times i had to reinstall proxmox… yes reinstall. I'm going to be honest I didn't really think about using commands or editing files…. I just didn't even google it. It didn't come across my mind.

The next 2 hours

So first off the ip address… I had problems… like a lot.

First off let's say that the router's ip address is 172.900.3.244

I thought you could just give it a random ip address like 192.168.200.30 and when I put in https://172.900.200.30:8006… nothing. I also tried to just do exactly what other people put in in tutorials and again nothing.

So it turns out that assigning that random ip address does not work. Something about a “IP range”

I thought “okay so something between the start and end ip range?”

And that's what I did.

And it didn't work again and again. So I went to the magical oracle known as google… so it turns out it has to be outside the ip range. Okay great… So why didn't the previous ip not work?

Turns out ipv4 addresses are these octet things which are four groups of 8 bits. Each ranging from 0 to 225 and it was this 225 number that led me to understanding the problem. In fact the 255 number was essential to figuring out the problem. As I was browsing my router portal in frustration I noticed a section called “subnet mask” and had a number 255.255.255.0

And after an hour on wikipedia and toms hardware I think I figured it out something that works in my head. Max ip is 255.255.255.255 and the sub-net mask is 255.255.255.0 the “range” to where the device (router) sees is anything with the exact 3 groupings of numbers and the valid unique range of possibilities are as follows

I like to think of the mask as taking away possibilities. Here is another example.

After I thought about it for a second I started to think about it as a matter of subtraction of the highest possible ip address like this

Well anyways the problem is the mask is 255.255.255.0 and the ip address of the router is 172.900.3.244

I was trying to do ip addresses that had something like 172.900.490.33 which the sub net mask would not allow due to the binary of the first 3 groups didn't match up

With the start as 172.900.3.60 and end of 172.900.3.243 think of this range as a set range of ip addresses for a specific reason.If ip address falls inside this range its for new devices to connect to the network wireless, like your phone or your friends laptop.

So from what I now understand I need a ip address out of this range but inside the submask range

So I set the ip to 172.900.3.1 and the gateway as the router's ip address and ran into the room and when it finished the install I hooked it up to the and typed in https://172.900.3:8006 and….. IT WORKED!!!

A wave of relief and dopamine washed over me. Holy crap the dopamine rush was insane

Finally after 2 hours of pain and frustration I FINALLY GOT IT… the hard part is finally over!! easy sailing from here on out!!

I do the same exact thing with the other clusters just with different ip addresses and update all the nodes and I go to the cluster and…. “Failed to Cluster : name resolution failed”.

Dammit......

14 re-installs at this point of the story

Part 2 coming soon...

Its also worth pointing out that this mask can also use finer binary's

Disclaimer: I have some fundamental misconceptions in regards to IP addresses and sub-masking I kinda jumped into it and I have no experience in networking prior to this. But in my opinion there is value in understanding why I thought this. And there will be an article of me picking apart my own blog and correcting myself. Think of this entry as what I was thinking at the point of time experiencing this. So take it with a grain of salt and enjoy!