A guide to automating the setup of new self-hosted services on Proxmox by converting a fully configured LXC container into a reusable template. I cover preparing the base container with standard software such as Docker and Tailscale, addressing clone-specific issues like host names, machine IDs, and SSH host keys, then cloning the template to spin up new containers quickly...
A walkthrough of my workflow for adding a new self-hosted service to my Proxmox homelab, using audiobookshelf—set up after abandoning Audible—as the worked example. It covers running the service as a Docker container inside an unprivileged Debian LXC, mounting NAS storage via fstab, Tailscale access, Ansible automation, monitoring with Uptime Kuma, and Proxmox backups...
When I ran Tailscale inside an unprivileged LXC container on Proxmox, it failed at tailscale up with a “no backend” error, because the container lacked access to the TUN/TAP device Tailscale needs. My fix was to stop the container, add a device allow rule and a bind mount entry for /dev/net/tun to its LXC config file, then start it and run tailscale up again...
My homelab post about BOINC, the successor to SETI@home, running in an LXC container. After an earlier setup attempt ended with limited success and doubt about the configuration, a pulsing CPU during a weekend maintenance routine showed the client was actually processing World Community Grid work. I also float the idea of using BOINC as a workload to experiment with Kubernetes...
While setting up an Ubuntu 20.04 LXC on Proxmox to run a TP-Link Omada controller, I found DNS resolution failing because Proxmox copies the host’s Tailscale-based resolv.conf into containers, and the container has no route to the Tailscale DNS address. In this post, I cover the diagnosis of why Debian templates behaved differently, plus two fixes: specifying DNS explicitly in the Proxmox GUI, or creating a .pve-ignore.resolv.conf file so Proxmox stops overwriting the container’s settings...
I found that backing up an unprivileged LXC container on Proxmox to an NFS share can fail with a permission denied error when the backup process tries to create a temporary file on the remote share. The fix is to edit /etc/vzdump.conf on my Proxmox node and set tmpdir to /tmp, so the temporary file is built locally before being copied to the share...
