Homelab Setup on a Laptop

An “Old” Laptop

Ever since I entered the corporate world of work, I’ve been using my PC less and less, which resulted in my “old” laptop from uni days being not used for weeks on end.

So, to have a test-bed for my digital shenanigans as well as a to self-host services, I’ve considered turning the unused bare metal into a virtualized data center :)

Virtaulization FTW!

With Red Hat unilaterally terminating CentOS development in favor of CentOS Stream¹, I considered what OS/hypervisor to run for virtualization.

After considering Ubuntu, Debian, Rocky Linux, and others, I choose to move on with Proxmox².

Proxmox is opensource, built on Debian, and uses the native (type-1) hypervisor KVM³, which supports QEMU⁴, in this context.

Also, we end up with a great community and documentation, win-win!

Starting Out

Following Proxmox docs on installation media preparation⁵, I tried creating a bootable USB with dd (which can come in handy for anything from ripping an optical disk to destroying SSDs and beyond!), but did not succeed in booting (personal error, probably). Ended up with a bootable USB using Etcher⁶ (on Ubuntu).

After adjusting the BIOS settings on my ASUS X540U for booting with USB, I proceeded with the Proxmox installation.

Networking, not for Dummies

Proxmox recommends using Ethernet for connecting to the router, but my laptop doesn’t have one. Also, while I’ve a USB-to-Ethernet adapter lying around, I did not want to use it.

While I tried connecting the laptop to the router via WiFi once the installation was done and following a reboot, I did not succeed. Then I understood that the guide I was following⁶ was not using a router with WPA/WPA2.

So, I tried following the instructions on Debian WiFi docs⁷ to have the Wireless Card hooked up with the WPA2 router.

Then I was met with a catch-22⁸, almost. We need the wpa_supplicant package installed to connect to the router, but the internet connection provided by the router is required for installing the wpa_supplicant package. Funny, eh?

A couple web searches later, I stumbled upon apt-offline⁹, which facilitates downloading updates/packages through apt from a machine with an Internet connection, and installing the same on an airgapped machine—perfect for our use-case.

Although I was able to install a couple dependencies (figured from installation errors) with that approach, wasn’t able to get the job done (probably personal error again).

Once I figured the dependencies¹⁰, this answer with 0 votes on SO¹¹ helped get the job done :)

/etc/network/interfaces

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

allow-hotplug wlp2s0
iface wlp2s0 inet dhcp
	wpa-ssid "Your SSID here"
	wpa-psk WPA_PSK_hash_for_your_SSID_calculated_with_passphrase_goes_here

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet manual
	address 192.168.100.1/24
	bridge-ports none
	bridge-stp off
	bridge-fd 0

	post-up echo 1 > /proc/sys/net/ipv4/ip_forward
	post-up iptables -t nat -A POSTROUTING -s '192.168.100.0/24' -o wlp2s0 -j MASQUERADE

	post-down iptables -t nat -D POSTROUTING -s '192.168.100.0/24' -o wlp2s0 -j MASQUERADE

	# See https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/Network_Configuration#sysadmin_network_masquerading
	post-up iptables -t raw -I PREROUTING -i fwbr+ -j CT --zone 1
	post-down iptables -t raw -D PREROUTING -i fwbr+ -j CT --zone 1

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

Overall Network Architecture

Overall network architecture

Above is pretty self-explanatory if you are me, shoot me an email if you follow the same and need help :) we’ll see what we would be running on our “brand new on-prem datacenter”, which should have it’s own post(s)…hahaha!