Proxmox on davegallant.ca

pvectl: A CLI for Managing Proxmox

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 13:00:00 -0400

My home Proxmox cluster has grown into two nodes, a few dozen LXC containers, and a handful of VMs. Recently I’ve been exploring ways to make this experience more streamlined, especially when creating new containers, shelling into containers, running migrations, restoring from backups, etc. Usually when I need to do this, I either SSH into one of the Proxmox nodes or open up the GUI. When on a node, I usually run pct or qm, and then immediately run into the issue: which ID was the thing I actually wanted? Which node was it running on?

Using a Realtek NIC with OPNsense

Mon, 21 Apr 2025 17:17:46 -0400

For the past few years, I’ve been running pfSense (and more recently OPNsense) in a virtual machine within Proxmox. This has been running fine with a single onboard Intel NIC. A few months ago, I upgraded to a machine that has a CPU that supports hardware-accelerated transcoding, has more SATA ports, and has more PCI slots for future expansion. With the goal of having a dedicated NIC for WAN, I bought an inexpensive 1Gbps PCIe NIC (TG-3468) despite reading about some of the concerns around Realtek NICs (sluggish performance, driver instability, and in some cases system crashes).

I’ve been running a Realtek NICs reliably on Linux and Windows desktops, so I figured I could make it work without too much effort, but it turns out Realtek NICs really can be problematic when it comes to FreeBSD-based routers, and commonly documented workarounds did not solve my problems.

Virtualizing My Router with pfSense

Sat, 02 Apr 2022 18:50:09 -0400

My aging router has been running OpenWrt for years and for the most part has been quite reliable. OpenWrt is an open-source project used on embedded devices to route network traffic. It supports many different configurations and there exists a large index of packages. Ever since I’ve connected some standalone wireless access points, I’ve had less of a need for an off-the-shelf all-in-one wireless router combo. I’ve also recently been experiencing instability with my router (likely the result of a combination of configuration tweaking and firmware updating). OpenWrt has served me well, but it is time to move on!

Running K3s in LXC on Proxmox

Sun, 14 Nov 2021 10:07:03 -0500

It has been a while since I’ve actively used Kubernetes and wanted to explore the evolution of tools such as Helm and Tekton. I decided to deploy K3s, since I’ve had success with deploying it on resource-constrained Raspberry Pis in the past. I thought that this time it’d be convenient to have K3s running in a LXC container on Proxmox. This would allow for easy snapshotting of the entire Kubernetes deployment. LXC containers also provide an efficient way to use a machine’s resources.

What to Do with a Homelab

Mon, 06 Sep 2021 01:12:54 -0400

A homelab can be an inexpensive way to host a multitude of internal/external services and learn a lot in the process.