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Proxmox - Solutions to random errors.

This- is a short post which details how to resolve a few random errors you may experience with proxmox.

This post is for you, IF, you are experiencing any of these errors:

  • "System booted in EFI-mode but 'grub-efi-amd64' meta-package not installed! Install 'grub-efi-amd64' to get updates."
  • "Couldn't find EFI system partition. It is recommended to mount it to /boot or /efi."
  • "/etc/kernel/proxmox-boot-uuids does not exist."

Detecting a weird packet loss issue.

So- I recently installed a Quad 100G Mikrotik CRS504-4XQ-IN Router into my lab recently and moved a few servers over to 100G NICs.

Around the time I did this- I also started experiencing tons of random, hard to pinpoint instances of latency across my network.

I validated flow-control was enabled for the network- and I checked various port counters to look for errors.

This- issue took me around a week or two to finally pinpoint.... this post- is going through a bit of the steps taken.

Proxmox - Setup Debian Cloud-Init Templates

This post documents the steps needed to create a minified debian cloud image template, which you can easily clone, and have a running VM in seconds with no configuration needed.

This includes common packages, ssh-keys, IP information.

The end result of this project is...

  1. You clone a template, and start it.
  2. The cloned VM automatically starts up, updates itself, and starts running, with common packages installed, and your ssh details pre-configured.
  3. A slimmed down distribution, without excess (My end result was a 400M image.)
  4. No need to edit the VM after cloning, other then adding CPU/RAM, or other hardware as needed.

Proxmox - Import OVA

A random thing I recently came across while testing out LibreNMS-

I discovered they have a published .ova, which I wanted to import into Proxmox. However, proxmox as of this post, does not have a easy option to support importing this.

This- is a quick post, containing the commands you need, to import the ova.

Removing a stripe from a zfs pool

In my quest to optimize on power usage, One of my servers has a zfs pool consisting of 4x 8T disks, in striped mirrors configuration.

For this particular pool, IOPs and performance is not needed. As well, I am using barely 10% of the available space in this particular pool.

So- I decided to remove a pair of disks, to save a miniscule amount of energy.

Reusing EMC Drives in other systems

So, I picked up a EMC-branded 1.92TB PM1633 SAS drive off of ebay, to toss into my ceph cluster.

After acquiring it, I slapped it into my Dell MD1220, and was surprised that it was not appearing in proxmox.

This is a short post to help correct this issue.

Building a ceph cluster

My adventures in building out a small clustered ceph environment for redundant VM / Container storage.

Quote

Ceph is a great way to extract 10,000 IOPs from over 5 million IOPs worth of SSDs! -XtremeOwnage

2023 Prime Day Deals

Interested in home automation? Here are a few of the prime day deals I would personally recommend.

Note, this is not a kitchen-sink post full of non-relaxant links, but, rather, a list of things I have hands on experience with.

Every single product linked below, will work with Home Assistant, 100% LOCALLY, without any required cloud services or subscriptions.

If, you need reasons as to why required cloud services are bad, see Reasons to avoid cloud products

  • in Solar
  • 11 min read

Lessons learned from a local disaster

Continuation of the home solar project.

Around Midnight, Saturday June 17th, a very strong storm passed over my house, and hit my town and surrounding areas with a 115mph wind gust.

Power was out for around two and a half days, in which case, I powered my house fully off-grid.

While- this doesn't sound like a huge deal- do note, I was able to maintain climate control in my home, along with my ENTIRE rack of servers.