Tag: proxmox

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Repurposing HDDs from my HP DL380 rack server in a downsized HP Elitedesk 800 g5 homelab

I used to run an HP DL380 G7 2U rack server for my homelab, but it would have been too expensive to ship during an international house move so abandoned it during the move. In the meantime I went back to running Proxmox on my 2008 MacPro (which I did have shipped), but after a few years of service (I got it used from eBay in 2017) it’s now started to have some random hardware issues:

  • the RAM has slowly been dying, stick by stick
  • one of the RAM riser boards is showing a red error LED when any of the sticks are in a certain position on the board, so I think the whole board might need to be replaced

Anyway, short story is I’m down in 16GB in the Mac Pro.

In the meantime I’ve been browing r/homelab and other places, and eventually settled on the realisation that a used small form factor office desktop, like the HP Prodesk and Elitedesk PCs is more than enough for what I need (and substantially quieter). Given that you can pick them up in various specs around £100+ I even thought about getting a couple to set up a Kubernetes cluster, but I just picked up one to start with, an Elitedesk 800 G5 SFF with an i7 and 32GB. The SFF model has room inside for a few HDD and/or SDDs, and a slot on the mobo for a NVMe SDD too.

I wanted to do a stock check of what I had on the shelf that I can repurpose for the new Elitedesk – most of these were pulled from the DL380:

Purchased 2017- first HDDs in the DL380, but replaced because of the fan noise (I’m not sure if I still have these):

  • HGST 7K750-500 HTS727550A9E364 (0J23561) 500GB 7200RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 2.5″

Purchased in 2017: Second set of disks added to the RAID array to my DL380:

  • 2x WD Black 2.5″ 750GB

Purchased in 2019 to add additional space to the RAID array on my DL380 – these were refurbs from Amazon:

  • 2x WD Blue 1TB Mobile Hard Disk Drive – 5400 RPM SATA 6 Gb/s 128MB Cache 2.5 Inch – WD10SPZX (Certified Refurbished)

The SDD that came with the Elitedesk is also used (wasn’t lucky enough to get a new one), and according to SMART it has 13300 power-on hours on it. No errors, but about half way through it’s life. Although it’s probably ok for a while I’ll probably swap it out. Now I’ve looked at the stats I may go for a new NVMe for the boot disk, and add the 2x WD Blacks for storage.

Before I start moving things around though, I need to get some SATA cables…

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Proxmox inplace upgrade – v8 to v9

I have Proxmox 8 installed on my Mac Pro 2008 which I’ve run for a few years. Noticing that there was recently an update to 9, I followed the inplace upgrade instructions here, followed all the prompts during install as per the guide and everything went well.

Before:

After upgrade and reboot:

The only question I ran into was this prompt about updating an UEFI boot loader:

Removable bootloader found at '/boot/efi/EFI/BOOT/BOOTX64.efi', but GRUB packages not set up to update it!
Run the following command:

echo 'grub-efi-amd64 grub2/force_efi_extra_removable boolean true' | debconf-set-selections -v -u

Since I’ve tried installing OCLP on this Mac Pro before, I assumed this was something to do with that … so ignored it, rebooted…. and everything was ok …

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ssh to solaris 10 error: “no matching key exchange method found”

I first ran into this error after installing Solaris 10 on a Sun Ultra 60 that I had a while back, but I’ve recently ran into it again installing Solaris 10 on Proxmox:

Unable to negotiate with 192.168.1.95 port 22: no matching key exchange method found. Their offer: gss-group1-sha1-toWM5Slw5Ew8Mqkay+al2g==,diffie-hellman-group-exchange-sha1,diffie-hellman-group14-sha1,diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

The solution to configure my Mac to be able to use older key algorithms was a combination from here and answers on this post.

I edited my ~/.ssh/config and added a Host entry for the ip of my Solaris 10 instance, adding:

Host 192.168.1.95
    HostKeyAlgorithms=+ssh-rsa
    KexAlgorithms +diffie-hellman-group1-sha1

And now I can just ssh in as normal (no need for any additional params as shown in the first post, as the required options are configured in my .ssh/config.

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GitLab Runner “Runner has never contacted this instance”

I just installed and configured a GitLab Runner on a separate Ubuntu 22.04 server. Following tips here and here, I’ve started the runner with ‘sudo gitlab-runner start’ and I’ve verified the config with ‘sudo gitlab-runner verify’, but the GitLab server is still showing the ‘never contacted this instance’ error:

Following the troubleshooting steps here, I used journalctl to view the logs:

sudo journalctl --unit=gitlab-runner.service -n 100 --no-pager

and this gave me a clue:

Oct 19 14:36:24 proxmox-ubuntu2204-server systemd[1]: Started GitLab Runner.
Oct 19 14:36:25 proxmox-ubuntu2204-server gitlab-runner[1264]: FATAL: failed to get user home dir: $HOME is not defined
Oct 19 14:36:25 proxmox-ubuntu2204-server systemd[1]: gitlab-runner.service: Main process exited, code=exited, status=1/FAILURE
Oct 19 14:36:25 proxmox-ubuntu2204-server systemd[1]: gitlab-runner.service: Failed with result 'exit-code'.

To set a home dir for the gitlab-runner user, I checked /etc/passwd, found the line for gitlab-runner and it has an entry towards the end of the line for /home/gitlab-runner, so that seems ok.

Following tips here, I edited the service config with:

sudo systemctl edit gitlab-runner

which edits
/etc/systemd/system/gitlab-runner.service.d/override.conf and added this section:

[Service]
Environment="HOME=/home/gitlab-runner"

Restarted the service with:

sudo systemctl restart gitlab-runner

checked the logs again with jornalctl and now we’re up and running, and the runner is reported as available on the Runners page. Done!

Oct 19 14:51:48 proxmox-ubuntu2204-server gitlab-runner[1400]: Runtime platform                                    arch=amd64 os=linux pid=1400 revision=66a723c3 version=17.5.0
Oct 19 14:51:48 proxmox-ubuntu2204-server gitlab-runner[1400]: Starting multi-runner from /etc/gitlab-runner/config.toml...  builds=0 max_builds=0
Oct 19 14:51:48 proxmox-ubuntu2204-server gitlab-runner[1400]: Running in system-mode.                           
Oct 19 14:51:48 proxmox-ubuntu2204-server gitlab-runner[1400]:                                                   
Oct 19 14:51:48 proxmox-ubuntu2204-server gitlab-runner[1400]: Configuration loaded                                builds=0 max_builds=1
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