My First Steps With Proxmox
Last night I started installing Proxmox (Version: 3.3-a06c9f73-2) on my new barebone home server:
- Motherboard – Supermicro A1SRM-2758F-O
- RAM – KVR16LSE11/8 – 2x8gb kit
- PSU – Corsair CX Series 430 Watt
- Case – Carbide Series® Air 240 High Airflow
- HDD/SSD – Crucial Mx110 256gb
- USB to Boot From – SanDisk Extreme 16gb with idea to be used it as a home for the supervisor later
Building it was fun – the case is excellent, fun to work. It is separated so you have your mobo on one side;
all hard drives plus the CPU are on the other side with enough spacefor cables and so on.
It has three fans around lets name it motherboard(mobo) side which runs as low as 1500rpm with this board (unfortunately they can’t go lower than this, shame on you Supermicro – I know it’s supposed to be in a server room, but simple option in bios wouldn’t hurt anyone) and could be heard, however, it’s not that bad after I disconnected one of the fans, might try disconnecting more late. Another thing deserve mentiooning which I found very useful is the internal usb 3.0 port, which along with the molex connector on the board gives an oportunity to power up everythyng in a very minimalistic way.
From here I happily dd-it the iso on the usb trying to perform usb installation and bummer – I failed again and again with “no cd rom found” error no matter what I did. The wiki guide simply doesn’t work with 3.3 and this board (tried dd, tried os forensic, re-downloaded the iso, changed the usb stcik and did everything again, tried putting the iso in _iso/mainmenu folder, got stuck on chroot part of this post, SSD was recognized by the mobo, however, fdisk -l result was “no valid partition table” which I created with it, then it was ok), maybe it was working with version 2.* but not anymore. Suse ImageWritter on windows 8/8.1 x64 – no way, imho rufus is doing way better job than both of windows tools advised in the wiki. I couldn’t find any useful tip/guide/advice how to make USB installation working and this is supposed to be a relatively simple task, despite the fact that I am not using Linux every day. Out of patience I burned the iso on a dvd and just pulled dvd drive (which I didn’t used in the past year, these devices simply becoming obsolete) from my pc, connected it to the server and from this point my installation went smoothly as expected and following the advice of kobuki from proxmox forum installed everything on the SSD which was there with valid partitions written in my previous attempts. After the installation finished I left it running and went to bed – it is still running fine this morning. Please note that I do not reject the option that I did something wrong or not on the way it’s supposed to, may be missed something or my mobo doesn’t like me – it was just a frustrating experience for me and lack of good guide didn’t helped at all – if someone can provide me/help me with it I’ll gladly reinstall everything to test it, I am still mad and want to make the usb installation running, it’s almost 2015, it should work!!! To be honest I want to know why it wasn’t working on a first place.
Next thing to try was as another fellow forum member mir guessed:
“After installation are you then able to mount the usb stick? Maybe your problem is caused by the old kernel in proxmox not having a driver for your chipset/usb 3.0” – Not the case, I actually used the stick to transfer some images to the server and it worked flawlessly.
Full post could be seen here
Anyway, I’m still using proxmox and after I got the logic of it I should admit – it is a very solid product! Where I went from here check in the next post.
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