At the beginning of this month, I bought a refurbished server on Amazon so I could set up a #homelab. I had in mind to run a bunch of virtual machines, so I planned to install a hypervisor. Based on the location I was planning to put the server, I also wanted to try using a wireless adapter to connect to my home Wi-Fi.
Well, let’s just say that this has been a fun but interesting experience over the last couple of weeks. 😉
My original intent was to install the free version of VMWare ESXi and then add the virtual machines while also learning more about ESXi. Unfortunately, with their recent purchase by Broadcom, the free version of ESXi has since been discontinued. My next choice was to install Proxmox, since it is open source.
The initial setup of the server went without a hitch. I set up a single drive to serve as the Proxmox environment as well as hold the ISOs for installing VMs. Then I created a three-drive hardware RAID5 virtual drive to run all the VMs on. The installation of Proxmox was easy and without issues.
However, the problem came about when I was trying to get the wireless adapter set up. Prior to purchasing the adapter, I researched and found that lots of people were using this specific adapter with Linux, so I knew it was possible, but it seemed that Proxmox didn’t have the libraries installed for it. So, I took the server into the living room and plugged it into the port of my router to get on the internet and pull the right libraries. This took me a little while and resulted in lots of learning about how to set up a wireless adapter in Linux. All good stuff, but not expected originally.
Then I went on to try to set up the wireless adapter to be used in Proxmox for the VMs to bridge to and connect to my home network. Well, here it got even more interesting. It just wouldn’t work. I’d set it up and then lose all internet connections. It turns out that Proxmox does not support wireless adapter usage for VMs.
So, I did the next best thing and ordered a set of Ethernet Over Power adapters. These were extremely easy to set up and once I had them in place, I was able to connect Proxmox, set up the bridging connection, and viola the VMs had connectivity to my network.
Next, I thought I’d be smart and use the wireless adapter as a backup connection to connect to Proxmox in case I messed up the network configuration while setting up a software define network later. But crazy thing, as soon as I turned on the wireless, I lost all connectivity to the Proxmox server again. So, at this point I’ll just pull the wireless adapter and leave it with the hardwire.
As is so often the case in IT, things don’t usually work just the way we think, but there is always an opportunity to learn a few new things!
Robba