30 янв. 2024

Trouble shooting Linux bridge on Promox VE server

A few days ago I have got my new Mini PC MinisForum 609s, which I have purchased for building a Home Lab server. The specifications of the mini PC as follows:

  • CPU : AMD Ryzen 9 6900HX 8 cores + 8 threads

  • RAM: 32 GB (can be extended to 64 GB)

  • DISK: 1 TB SSD

This mini PC is enough for building my home lab and self hosting services. So, I decided to install Promox VE 8.0 version on Debian 12 to configure my Home lab. Installing process of the Promox Virtual environment is very straight forward.

After successful installation of the virtual environment, I created my first linux bridge to use with the VMS. linux bridge starts running and the server lost the network connection (internal and external).

It was totally unexpected for me. Problem was that, I used Wifi NIC to create Linux bridge on Promox. Out of the box, Promox VE doesn't support Wifi Nic to create Linux Bridge. If I uses the Network card NIC with Ethernet cable everything goes well. Unfortunately, I don't have any ethernet socket available on my work place. After a few hours of investigation's I found a few solutions:

  1. Solution 1: use NAT instead of Linux bridge. NAT model is used for making the VM private. Using NAT, usually you don't have any access to VM from the outside world such as your local network. However, you can configure port forwarding to access VM behind NAT. But, port forwarding needs extra effort and network knowledge.

  2. Solution 2: purchase an old Wifi adapter and install it in your machine which will support linux bridge.

  3. Solution 3: purchase a 5-20 meter ethernet cable to connect the host machine with router.

  4. Solution 4: purchase a router with mesh support. Configure the new router as a re-translator traffic and connect the Promox host machine with ethernet cable with these router. As a result Promox host machine will use the network NIC and your problem will be solved.

For a virtual machines and LCX I tried to configure NAT and port forwarding, but after a while I was tired to do the same things for new VM. So, I bought a new router (Keenetic start) which help me to re-translate the traffic to the promox host machine through ethernet cable.

Actually, setup a new router is not a perfect solution rather than workaround. Perhaps the above workaround will help somebody to save a few hours of googling.