Finally setting up my server

The day finally arrived that I told myself I would sit down and finish setting up my server. I had been having persistent issues with getting access for a few days before school took over and I had to put it on the back burner.

I had a few issues with it. For one, I was not able to access the web-based GUI to create any virtual machines. For this, I first changed from a wireless connection for the server to a wired connection. That did not resolve my issue, so I assumed there was an issue with the IP distribution. To fix this, I went into the /etc/network/interfaces file. It took me a while to understand what the function was of the vmbr0 adapter, which is to create a bridge for the VMs to connect to. It took even longer and more trial and error before I had the ports set up correctly (as you can see by my hastily commented lines in

I do not have a “before” version, but this is what it looks like after a result of my tinkering:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

#iface wlp2s0 inet manual

auto enp1s0
iface enp1s0 inet manual
#       address 192.168.1.56
#       gateway 192.168.1.1

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.57
        gateway 192.168.1.1
        bridge-ports enp1s0
        bridge-stp off
        bridge-fd 0

source /etc/network/interfaces.d/*

This helped me confirm access to the server by using ping, but I still had the issue of actually getting to the management portal.

After some time reading online about it, I saw some forum discussions mentioning that it might have been an issue with the certificates. I doubted that, as I wasn’t able to get access over HTTP, but at that time, I had tried a lot of potential solutions and I figured it wouldn’t hurt. So I ran the following commands:

The portal still wasn’t accessible.
To verify the port was open, I used the command ss -ln, which returns some pretty ugly output:

Obviously, something was wrong with the parent pve-cluster service on the host. So I shut it down and used journalctl to find out what was wrong. I found out after some extensive googling, forum reading, and poring over the documentation (this is a case of RTFM) that if there were any files existing at /etc/pve, the service would fail to start because the virtual file system could not be mounted. So I ran the following commands:

Lo and behold, I was able to start the service and access the web interface. This was an excellent way to get familar with the virtual networking systems used in proxmox, as well as the linux filesystem and general command line usage. Now, onto the fun parts: hosting virtual services!