Category: Linux

  • Mounting a Samba Share Under Debian

    In this article we’ll permanently mount a Samba share on a Debian based system, this process will be similar for other Linux distributions too. It is assumed that you have a share somewhere else already configured and ready to go. Start by installing the required utilities, this will install a few other utilities as well.…

  • Setting up Sudo on Debian

    In this article I’ll set up the sudo system on Debian. By default the Debian installer only sets up sudo if you don’t supply a root password at install time. You don’t need sudo on a machine to to use it effectively and I have used Debian machines without it for years. The problem is…

  • Proxmox Firewall

    Today I’ll be looking at the Proxmox firewall and what to do about container and VM firewalls. Out of the box Proxmox comes with a firewall installed but not activated. At a minimum you should probably activate the Proxmox firewall for the cluster but it’s up to you how you protect the containers and VM’s…

  • Automatic Updates on Debian

    When you’ve got a few machines, virtual or real, to keep updated it can become quite a chore. There are tools like Ansible that can automate day to day jobs but right now that feels like overkill for what I need. I’m, instead, going to first install automatic updates for my Debian based systems (e.g.…

  • Installing Docker and Portainer on a Proxmox VM

    This article will cover installing Docker and Portainer on a Proxmox VM, we created the VM in the previous article. There’s a bit of a shift in the home server Proxmox world over to using containers rather than Docker. Personally, I’m on the fence with this. On the one hand containers are good because they…

  • Creating a Basic VM on Proxmox

    In this article I’ll be creating a new virtual machine that will run Docker. This machine will eventually host a number of services for my family such as a music server and photo viewing, but that’s for another day. Create a new Minimal Debian VM For a VM like this you want the bare minimum…

  • Installing Pi-Hole on Proxmox

    In this article I’ll be installing Pi-Hole on Proxmox. Pi-Hole is a DNS sinkhole or blackhole that can effectively block ads and other unwanted content. It works by replacing your usual DNS server with Pi-Hole and then dishing up non-routable addresses for unwanted content based on a block list. In this article we’ll be installing…

  • Building a NAS Using Proxmox – Part 3

    This is the third article in the series about using Proxmox as a NAS. For this article to make sense you’ll need to have a container set up and sharing host files via Samba similar to shat was set up in step one and two. In this article I’ll look at mapping container users onto…

  • Building a NAS Using Proxmox – Part 2

    The setup described in this article will work if you have a followed the first article in this series however it is not an optimal setup. Once you’ve read the next article in this series you’ll understand the weaknesses in the setup described here and how to fix them. This article also covers a couple…

  • Building a NAS Using Proxmox – Part 1

    The first thing many people do with their home server is set up file sharing. If you’re running an OS such as TrueNAS this is really simple, but I’m running Proxmox so that I can also easily run virtual machines and this has one big downside: Proxmox is not really set up to act as…

  • Automatically Scrubbing ZFS Under Proxmox

    I thought this one was going to be a challenge to set up but it turns out it’s set up automatically to scrub the disks on the server Sunday of every month. The important files for this setup are: The file in cron.d sets the schedule and calls the scrub script which actually performs the…

  • Understanding the Default Filesystem on Proxmox

    When you install Proxmox it’s quite common to choose just a single local disk and let the installer use LVM to partition it. This turns the drive into a physical volume (PV) onto which the installer will create a single volume group (VG) called pve. Inside that volume group the installer will create three logical…