#Proxmox
VM Sees the Dongle but Has No Internet Without a Windows ECM Driver
After passing a USB LTE dongle through to a Windows VM, the system sees the device but no network adapter appears. The cause is neither the SIM nor port passthrough, but the dongle exposing a CDC ECM interface that Windows has no built-in driver for, along with storage-mode pitfalls and dhclient overwriting the host's resolv.conf.
The Monitor That Hammered Devices Until the Whole Farm Went Down
A monitoring loop that runs every 30 seconds and tries to recover every device that fails a ping sounds useful, until one device hangs and gets hammered repeatedly until the whole bus goes down. This article walks through ruling out hardware, tracking what was accessing the devices, and the settings that fixed it.
Borrowing a VLAN for Windows Tools That Need the Same L2
Many manufacturers' device discovery tools use broadcasts that cannot cross L3, so connecting over a VPN still leaves devices invisible. A solution that leaves switch ports alone is to put a small Windows VM on Proxmox with its interface directly in that VLAN, with pitfalls around vlan-aware bridges, a full thin pool breaking other VMs, and virtio leaving Windows without a network adapter after installation.
Using Claude to Upgrade Proxmox 8 to 9 and Rebuild Windows VMs
A real case using VS Code + Claude to upgrade an entire Proxmox cluster from 8 to 9, then delete and rebuild all Windows VMs for VDI without ever SSHing into a host myself. I have laid out the commands and scripts Claude generated during the actual work as steps that a person or AI can read and run again.
Off-Site Backups with Pull Architecture + rclone/rsync
Add off-site Layer 3 to complete 3-2-1 with pull architecture (the destination host fetches the data), rclone + rsync, and lessons from real pitfalls involving NAT, RSA host keys, cwRsync, and PID recycling.
Rebuilding DirectAdmin Backups with NFS and POSIX ACL in Production
A record of rebuilding backups on a DirectAdmin server after migrating to a new machine — from FTP push that broke at three layers to an NFSv4 hard mount + POSIX ACL, with kernel-level lessons learned along the way.
qcow2 or ZFS — Why I Switched After 12 Years on the Same Server
The reasons behind my storage choices for a Proxmox server that has run for 12 years without a reinstall — why I chose qcow2 in 2014, why I only moved to ZFS in 2026, and what actually changed the calculus.
DirectAdmin from CentOS 7 to Debian 12 on Proxmox (Series Index)
Notes on migrating a DirectAdmin shared host from CentOS 7 (EOL) to Debian 12 on Proxmox, serving 80+ customers, split into 5 parts with an overview of the process and links to every part
Moving DA to Debian 12, Part 2 — Switching Storage to a ZFS Mirror
Replace the three storage layers of mdadm RAID1 + ext4 + qcow2 with a single layer of ZFS mirror + raw zvol while the old VM stays online, by degrading RAID to a single disk.
DA CentOS 7 → Debian 12 on Proxmox Part 1 — NAT pre-stage
Preparing a new VM on an internal bridge with NAT while the old VM continues serving customers, reducing downtime when migrating DirectAdmin from CentOS 7 to Debian 12 on Proxmox.