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  • Setting up a Proxmox home server

    I received a Beelink S12 Pro Mini PC as a Christmas gift and set it up as a home server over the holidays. My home setup has a unique challenge: I can’t access both an Ethernet connection and a monitor in the same location.

    Booting the Proxmox installer from USB

    I connected a keyboard and monitor to the Beelink, and followed these steps to start the Proxmox installer:

    1. Download the PVE ISO image
    2. Use Balena Etcher to flash the image to a USB drive
    3. Connect the USB drive to the server
    4. Power on, and on the boot screen hit F7 to boot from the USB drive

    Configuring Proxmox using the installer

    After booting, the installer will offer a graphical or terminal UI to start in. Select these steps to continue through the installer:

    1. Select “Install Proxmox VE (Graphical)”
    2. Accept the EULA
    3. Select the target disk (This will erase the disk and create partitions)
    4. Select region and time zone
    5. Set a password and email

    This brings us to the Management Network Configuration screen. Here the fields should be filled out following these considerations:

    • IP Address needs to be an unused address which is part of your subnet, which might be 192.168.x.x or similar. Run ip addr on Linux or ifconfig on macOs to find this out.
    • Hostname (FQDN) is the hostname for the machine. If you’re running your server locally and don’t need to register a certificate using ACME, you can enter anything you’d like here.
    • Gateway needs to be the address of your router, eg. 192.168.0.1
    • DNS Server can be the same address as the router, or any valid DNS server, eg. Google’s 8.8.8.8

    As I didn’t have a working internet connection on the ethernet port while installing Proxmox, I had to fill this in advance. I have an Eero 6 router, which creates a subnet in the IP range 192.168.4.2 - 192.168.7.254 with a subnet mask of 255.255.252.0 by default. Using these and an IP address I checked I haven’t been using, I filled out the settings like this:

    IP Address (CIDR)192.168.4.100/22
    Hostname (FQDN)beelink.local
    Gateway192.168.4.1
    DNS Server192.168.4.1

    After the Network Configuration, there’s a final confirmation screen, then the installer will proceed with formatting the disk and installing Proxmox. You can remove the USB drive after the installer reboots the machine.

    Additional setup after the installation

    After rebooting the system will load the console, show a login prompt, and also the IP and port of the Web UI. It looks similar to this, in my case it was:

    http://192.168.4.100:8006

    Visit this URL and use the username root with the password that was set up in the installer.

    That’s it, welcome to the Proxmox Web UI!