finding live eth ports during installation

[ctm-sysnet]

I had a question about installing ProxMox. I recently installed 8.3 on a Dell R620, that has four ethernet ports, two 10G SPF and two 10G RJ45. Only the first one is connected.
For some reason, it chose an unused ethernet port so the installation stopped and asked me for IP, gateway, dns addresses (which puzzled
and annoyed me at the time, because I have DHCP all set up and working (on previous OS) for this server). Once I got on (console only), I finally
discovered it had arbitrarily chosen the third eth port.

Now I can fix this all up by rummaging thru and editing the netplan or interfaces file
but I was curious about what happened here, and if maybe there's some other larger issue I need to address instead. This was my first ProxMox install,
though others have installed this on various servers in our network with no apparent issue.

 

[leesteken]

Proxmox VE (PVE) does not come with DHCP. Only the installer tries it one time to give values to some fields. PVE will then assume that IP address is static. Unless you setup DHCP manually after installing, it will never refresh the IP address (as is required by DHCP).
In short: what you see in the installer is not really important. Make sure you change it to an IP address that is reserved for PVE and/or later setup DHCP yourself if you want to use it.

 

[ctm-sysnet]

OK. Just found it odd it bound itself to an inactive port. I checked with the other folks in our network, and the installer picked up the active eth port on those and got info then w/o problem. But if there's no issue with editing the interfaces/netplan file then I'll just do that. It was just weird.

 

[leesteken]

Just found it odd it bound itself to an inactive port. I checked with the other folks in our network, and the installer picked up the active eth port on those and got info then w/o problem.

I can't explain that. I can only say that you should interpret the installer as a "best effort" and not something that should definitely always work or is very important.

But if there's no issue with editing the interfaces/netplan file then I'll just do that. It was just weird.

It simply installs Proxmox (as Debian does not install on ZFS directly AFAIK) but such configuration settings can be changed later: see the Proxmox documentation and Debian GNU/Linux in general.