Proxmox first impressions

by wbk | 27 October 2019 14:27

Once rebooted after installation I visited the IP of the server at port 8006. Unable to connect. Now what?

SSH does answer, a quick search for ‘proxmox installation complete no answer on 8006’ turned up someone without pve-manager installed. I did have it installed, but did not see proxmox repositories in /etc/apt/sources.list.

Servethehome has a checklist[1] for proxmox 6, I took the pve-no-subscribtion repository from there:

deb http://download.proxmox.com/debian buster pve-no-subscription

Apt update complains about missing keys for jessie. Not a problem for my installation as such, but might break something that does not expect warnings (even a simple apt update && apt upgrade -y will halt), so add the key:

# wget http://download.proxmox.com/debian/key.asc
http://download.proxmox.com/debian/key.asc
Resolving download.proxmox.com (download.proxmox.com)... 2a01:7e0:0:424::249, 212.224.123.70
Connecting to download.proxmox.com (download.proxmox.com)|2a01:7e0:0:424::249|:80... connected.
HTTP request sent, awaiting response... 200 OK
Length: 1703 (1.7K) [application/octet-stream]
Saving to: ‘key.asc’
key.asc 100%[===========================>] 1.66K --.-KB/s in 0s
# apt-key add key.asc
OK

Retrying the web interface. Still no go: “the connection was reset”. Hmm… That is no ‘not found’, should I perhaps take the trouble of manually pointing at the https-protocol? Yes, that did it, add https:// in front of the IP and log in.

Shiny interface, just like in the screenshots 🙂

The summary view in the second-level tree-menu will stay active while clicking through the first-level tree-menu on the left hand, with the datacenter and node list. It shows different statistics and in a different representation (meters or graphs), depending on the subject, which is helpful in recognizing and remembering what I am looking at.

I now realize that I do have close to 30GB of space for the basic install (my 15GB * 2 for copies = 2), but no separate partition for /var. I’ll let it be, keep an eye on the level of free space and add space when needed. Reinstalling based on Debian Buster is well-documented, but with no experience with proxmox I’ll keep the installation close to default.

To see how much of the assigned space is used in which way, I compared the different views and some relations are not directly clear to me. I expected around 30GB at some level, and 15GB at another. What I actually see, is:

I can see the relation between 28 and 54, and between 28 and 25.8, but not between 54GB on the datacenter and 29.5GB actual usage on disk.

After defining ‘copies = 2’, I had expected all downstream values to be half of what I see here. Some thinking further: is the read value of fdisk is inside the node, not on the actual hardware? Then I would not see the total size of the SSD. I posted a question on the proxmox-forum, awaiting moderation and a reaction.

Endnotes:
  1. checklist: https://www.servethehome.com/proxmox-ve-6-initial-installation-checklist/

Source URL: https://online.osba.nl/blog/en/2019/10/27/proxmox-first-impressions/