Hello there. I was looking for help with a Homebridge VM on Proxmox. I go decades with Unix and virtualization, and a few years with Homebridge, however Proxmox/QEMU/KVM is news to me - like 24 hours new.
Background:
I have a few VMs running on an ESXi which, for testing purposes, I decided to migrate to Proxmox. One of them was a small, dedicated Homebridge VM. It has been working on the ESXi for ages. Since the migration changed quite a few things within the docker space, I basically wiped the Homebridge settings and started from scratch. For obvious reasons, the ESXi VM was shutdown before the Proxmox VM was brought online. All previous Homebridge bridges were removed from the Home app. While attempting to add the Proxmox hosted Homebridge to the Home app, this bridge is never found.
Setup:
This server runs Proxmox 8.4.5 pve-no-subscription, has 4 active interfaces, enp6s0 to enp9s0, bonded via bond0 (LACP) and this bond0 interface added to a vmbr0 bridge interface, with some VLANs tagged on top of the bridge where I have the Proxmox management IP address assigned. On the other side, I have a Cisco switch, set with the EtherChannel/port-group, and that works fine for the remaining VMs on this Proxmox, so I am confident the layer 2/3 settings appear good. On the Proxmox side, I don't have an active firewall for this VM, host or datacenter. And yes, the Homebridge VM is tagged to the right VLAN on its net0 configuration. For the Homebridge mDNS Advertiser, changing to any of the available four has no difference.
Findings:
On the Proxmox Homebridge VM, if I run a tcpdump, I see traffic from other bridges on the mDNS network. From the wireless network, I can browse to the Homebridge web portal, so I have full access to the device. If I turn the Proxmox Homebridge VM off and turn the ESXi Homebridge VM, then back to the Home app and try to add the Homebridge bridge, this ESXi bridge shows up right away, so not sure what is going on. More so since other VMs in this same Proxmox are working like a champ. I know I could run Homebridge as a LXC instead of VM, but I have other VMs that rely on mDNS, hence the Homebridge being chosen for this test.
Fix:
It looks like I had a poor choice of network layers. I changed from physical > bond > bridge > VLANs, to physical > bond > VLAN > bridge. Even though my bridge was VLAN aware since the beginning, seems like selecting the VLAN ID during VM setup wasn't cutting.
Background:
I have a few VMs running on an ESXi which, for testing purposes, I decided to migrate to Proxmox. One of them was a small, dedicated Homebridge VM. It has been working on the ESXi for ages. Since the migration changed quite a few things within the docker space, I basically wiped the Homebridge settings and started from scratch. For obvious reasons, the ESXi VM was shutdown before the Proxmox VM was brought online. All previous Homebridge bridges were removed from the Home app. While attempting to add the Proxmox hosted Homebridge to the Home app, this bridge is never found.
Setup:
This server runs Proxmox 8.4.5 pve-no-subscription, has 4 active interfaces, enp6s0 to enp9s0, bonded via bond0 (LACP) and this bond0 interface added to a vmbr0 bridge interface, with some VLANs tagged on top of the bridge where I have the Proxmox management IP address assigned. On the other side, I have a Cisco switch, set with the EtherChannel/port-group, and that works fine for the remaining VMs on this Proxmox, so I am confident the layer 2/3 settings appear good. On the Proxmox side, I don't have an active firewall for this VM, host or datacenter. And yes, the Homebridge VM is tagged to the right VLAN on its net0 configuration. For the Homebridge mDNS Advertiser, changing to any of the available four has no difference.
Findings:
On the Proxmox Homebridge VM, if I run a tcpdump, I see traffic from other bridges on the mDNS network. From the wireless network, I can browse to the Homebridge web portal, so I have full access to the device. If I turn the Proxmox Homebridge VM off and turn the ESXi Homebridge VM, then back to the Home app and try to add the Homebridge bridge, this ESXi bridge shows up right away, so not sure what is going on. More so since other VMs in this same Proxmox are working like a champ. I know I could run Homebridge as a LXC instead of VM, but I have other VMs that rely on mDNS, hence the Homebridge being chosen for this test.
Fix:
It looks like I had a poor choice of network layers. I changed from physical > bond > bridge > VLANs, to physical > bond > VLAN > bridge. Even though my bridge was VLAN aware since the beginning, seems like selecting the VLAN ID during VM setup wasn't cutting.
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