After moving to an apartment, I downsize from 14 servers, many Enterprise grade machines. To VPS, NUC, mini and SFF machines. I will create a series of posts how I create my new lab. As I need to do a lot of travelling this year, this will take a long time to get ready. This is my story #proxmox #zfs #docker #vlan #samba #pve #pbs
Docker
This post will show the use of the Docker Socket Proxy with Portainer. It allows controlled and secure automation while still maintaining security. It's a reverse proxy that allows you to control what Docker API endpoints can be accessed by Docker clients such as Portainer, DIUN and Watchtower.
Docker
Container orchestration the easy way. Swarm mode is an advanced feature for container orchestration. Use Swarm mode if you intend to use Swarm as a production runtime environment. Docker Swarm mode is built into the Docker Engine. Docker Swarm mode is similar to K3s or even K8s, but it's lighter.
MyNewLab
Sometimes it's a better to have an easy-to-use system rather than one with everything. We need a secure VM and that's why we run Proton OS. Using the recommendations of the KSPP (Kernel Self-Protection Project), the Photon OS Linux Kernel is secure from the start.
Build
One of the supporting pillars of virtualization is the use of Cloud-Init and Cloud Images. Setting up VMs is easy and fast. The process is easy to automate and adapt to CI/CD.
MyNewLab
SmokePing is a deluxe latency measurement tool. It can measure, store and display latency, latency distribution and packet loss. SmokePing uses the RRDtool to maintain a long term data-store. It draws informative graphs of the state of each network connection to express up-to-the-minute information.
MyNewLab
TrueCommand is a ZFS-aware solution, allowing you to set custom alerts on statistics like ARC usage or pool capacity, ensuring storage uptime and future planning. TrueCommand also identifies and pinpoints errors on drives or vdevs, saving valuable time when troubleshooting and resolving issues.
Networking
Running services on a PVE node is a perfect place to simulate networking. For the basic setup, we are to use SDN and OPNsense. Setting up a virtual or dedicated NIC as WAN and set up an SDN network for our VM/CT to use.
Build
Proxmox Backup Server is flexible and can be installed on any device running Debian, a VM or a LXC. Here I show my Proxmox LXC setup. Having PBS on the PVE is making use of the large and fast SSD ZFS RAID 10 storage.
Ricing
As I as many of you spend most of my time in a terminal, why not make it shine a little. As everyone know, ZSH is easy to rice, but you can almost as easy rice your BASH shell.
Proxmox
This script automatically assigns tags containing IP addresses to virtual machines and containers running in a Proxmox environment. It is an alternative to lxc-iptags but is more extensive and flexible in many ways.
MyNewLab
You can make a new theme for Proxmox, and many have done so. The oldest came to PVE 6. The most feamose was "PVE Discord Dark", now we have some newer themes: Nord PVE, Solar PVE and new forks of PVE Discord Dark.
Docker
There are some instances when you need a Windows instance, but you don't need a full VM to do it. You can use a Docker Container for Windows XP – Windows 11 or one of the Windows Severs. Yes, this is possible, and it's a usable system.