First time installing Proxmox - a bit stuck

[proxcd]

Hello all. I'm brand new to proxmox with no previous experience. Not an IT or networking professional, just enjoy tinkering at home.
I want to set up a homelab using Home Assistant but rather than install HAOS directly to my NUC-100 (GMKTec G3) I decided to install proxmox first. The theory being that the NUC-100 is rather overpowered for a basic HA install so I may want to run other virtual machines on it in future. And backups sound easier too.

I flashed a USB drive with the latest proxmox ISO (proxmox-ve_8.4-1) and started the installer with my NUC wired to my network.

Sadly I ran into an issue with HOSTNAME right away and im stuck. I dont know what to put in here.
I know it needs to be a fully qualified domain name, but i dont own any domains. I do have DDNS set up on my Asus router <routername>.asuscomm.com but I dont see how i could use that here because the purpose of the hostname is to identify the proxmox hardware, not my router.

I have read that its hard to change afterwards so I havent proceeded until i figure this out - but im going round in circles online.

Although i dont need my proxmox system to be internet facing I may want my Home Assistant to be internet facing, so I havent gone with some random internal name like pve1.internal or pve1.lan in case it prevents me from opening the virtual machines up to the internet later. Im probably over thinking this - and as i said, completley new to this.

My question is, in the absence of my own domain, but wanting to open up VMs to the internet later, and with DDNS on my Asus router, what should i use?
I thought this would be the easy bit!

 

[entilza]

What prefix is your asus router giving you at home.

if its .home or .lan use that pve1.lan is fine

It's easy to change the hostname later.

PS. I personally use a fixed static server IP for my pvx servers but that's me. ie: 192.168.2.10 depends on your DHCP pool.

 

[proxcd]

The only prefix i know of is the routing prefix, which in my case is 192.168.50. DHCP pool goes up from 2 to 254.
I've not seen the asus provide anything like .home or .lan before.

In the DHCP config page there is a box for "GT-AX6000's Domain Name" but its blank.

I will also assign a static IP to the proxmox machine.

 

[entilza]

You can reserve the IP on your router so it stays the same that's one option if you want to stick with all DHCP that works too.

 

[louie1961]

Sadly I ran into an issue with HOSTNAME right away and im stuck. I dont know what to put in here.

Quite literally you can use anything you want if it isn't going to be internet facing. But if you want to access Proxmox by a domain name and not an IP address, the router will need to recognize the domain name and know where to route the requests. In pfsense, I can do that with my DNS server. Not sure about an Asus router, I have never used one

I have read that its hard to change afterwards so I havent proceeded until i figure this out - but im going round in circles online.

Nope, not hard at all. You need to edit two files: /etc/hosts and /etc/hostname. If you don't know how to use a text editor from the command line, there might be a small learning curve, but its not hard. I use nano as my editor. Its much easier than VIM.

Although i dont need my proxmox system to be internet facing I may want my Home Assistant to be internet facing, so I havent gone with some random internal name like pve1.internal or pve1.lan in case it prevents me from opening the virtual machines up to the internet later. Im probably over thinking this - and as i said, completley new to this.

Yes you are over thinking this, in one respect. The domain name of your Proxmox machine doesn't matter, but you will want to segregate your network into VLANs. That's going to be a learning curve. you will want to put services that are exposed to the internet into their own VLAN, approriatly locked down with permissions and firewall rules. Non-internet facing stuff should be in a separate VLAN. You should NEVER expose your Proxmox managenment interface to the internet in my opinion

My question is, in the absence of my own domain, but wanting to open up VMs to the internet later, and with DDNS on my Asus router, what should i use?
I thought this would be the easy bit!

Anything you want so long as it makes sense to you. It may be wise to purchase a domain and use it, even if nothing is exposed to the internet yet. That way you can secure your home lab services with proper HTTPS certificates through Let's Encrypt. As an example you can purchase proxlab.cc as your domain, right now, on Cloudflare, for $8/year. I use .cc for my homelab. I like that suffix and its cheap.

 

[proxcd]

Thanks for your help and replies. Im up and running now, just about to run the community post installation script:
bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/raw/main/tools/pve/post-pve-install.sh)"

I will look into VLANs. Im aware of them but have never set one up myself.
Makes sense to segregate internet and non-internet facing devices.

 

[Johannes S]

Thanks for your help and replies. Im up and running now, just about to run the community post installation script:
bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/raw/main/tools/pve/post-pve-install.sh)"

Do you know, what this command is doing? You shouldn't run any commands as root from some website, if you don't know what's that command is actually doing.
One problem of the Script is, that it's changing ProxmoxVE default install to a non-supported setup (like disabling corosync and removing the nag screen). This is ok, if you know about possible outcomes and are prepared to deal with it. If not don't use them.

For similiar reasons I would highly recommend to not use the scripts to deploy your services. For most you could also setup a VM with docker and just use docker-compose or follow the instructions/documentation of the service you want to run (for example HomeAssistant OS, paperless-ngx or jellyfin).

The helper-scripts do stuff, which is not recommended (like putting docker containers inside lxcs), if you know how they are working this isn't much of a problem since then you also know how to troubleshoot them. They are also a great ressource for learning shell programming (understand them, tweak them, etc). But I consider them not very helpful for beginners who just want to run some services.

 

[proxcd]

Thanks for that, I will avoid running scripts i dont understand and will deploy services manually when the time comes.
I have some reading/understanding to do first though before i go any further. Proxmox is new to me so will learn more about it first.

 

[entilza]

How's your proxmox experience going?

 

[proxcd]

A very popular tteck script to install Home Assistant that i probably would have used, does exactly what you have warned about above - puts a docker container inside an lxc. So thanks again for your advice. I am installing Home Assistant manually in a VM. There is another script that installs HAOS into a VM but I ought to understand what im doing so going through the process myself will be helpful.

 

[proxcd]

How's your proxmox experience going?

So far so good thank you. Treading slowly and carefully

 

[louie1961]

Aside from very valid security concerns, you learn next to nothing if you rely on other people's scripts. Just saying. There are severl good home lab content creators on Youtube that have videos about how they set up Proxmox after first installation. I would recommend checking them out. Techno Tim comes to mind first.