Pauls Big Linux Blog

So under my desk here I have an old tower, it’s kinda nice but not over powered so I decided to set it up as a Proxmox node on my cluster (which is in Germany!).

Because I’m in a shared office I’m not even sure if they can provide dedicated IP and as it was for my own use I thought you know not a problem I’ll just set up a static IP of my own.

The problem with DYNDNS is really you have to set up all kinds of port forwarding on the router – which I have no access to here.

So to solve all the tickets and issues, I decided to set up a PureVPN static IP.

(You can get to their site here)

They supply a static IP with your VPN connection for around £50 a year.

The advantages are mainly that I don’t have to hack into a router I shouldn’t be using, if I move the machine somewhere else the static IP goes with me! So that means this could be taken and shifted somewhere else and the cluster would be still complete when I booted it.

How to’s.

So I set up proxmox and then created an OPEN VPN client file. If you get stuck with this the guys at Pure VPN are more than happy to help!

Then set OPENVPN up to autostart and connect on boot – so that when the machine comes up it sees it.

This involves some config files and “fiddling”.

Proxmox Gotchas

So it’s pretty important you change the hosts file on the proxmox node. If you don’t when you try and connect to the cluster it will get all confused and try and connect on the local IP which it won’t have access to.

Here’s /etc/hosts on the proxmox node.

127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost
<STATIC IP HERE> servername
<STATIC IP HERE> domainname.com

::1 ip6-localhost ip6-loopback
fe00::0 ip6-localnet
ff00::0 ip6-mcastprefix
ff02::1 ip6-allnodes
ff02::2 ip6-allrouters
ff02::3 ip6-allhosts

Then when you join the cluster with it, it will find the server and connect.

The only downside I’ve had is backups are a bit slow mainly because the machine is under my desk in the UK and the cluster backup is in Dusseldorf! But I think tonight’s backup should be quicker due to the fact that it doesn’t do a whole machine backup but an incremental one.

---

Filed under: Proxmox - @ 26 January 2023 09:41