Been a long time.

Recently, I got interested in the whole “homelab” stuff. So I got myself a used Mini PC to run Proxmox on it.

Initially, it was to be just for fun, but soon after I received the PC, my Raspberry Pi (PiHole - running as DNS server) died in a dumb chain of events. (“Why is it blinking funnily? Oh, it blinks when the voltage is too low? Let me get my multimeter. Huh, it’s now too low. If anything, it’s to high. Mh, let me change the power supply and check again… Uh? Damn, what happened? Why won’t it boot again?” - Turns out I probably shorted something. After some research it turns out the whole blinking stuff WAS THE STUPID OS DOING THIS AS A “HEARTBEAT”. So I broke my Raspberry Pi which serves my whole network as a DNS server for nothing).

So anyway, I installed Proxmox, fiddled around with it, got PiHole running in a container, everything is fine.

Since, as the same time, I changed to work-from-home, I wanted to isolate the work PC. With VLANs. After a lot of head scratching and internet research, I still couldn’t find out how to properly set up VLANs with Proxmox. (I already had a managed switch at that point).

I ended up with this setup initially:

+--Proxmox---
|
|
+-eno1 ------- vmbr0 --- VM*/container
| |
| +- eno1.20 - vmbr1 --- VM*
| 
* I decided to run OpenWRT

With vmbr1 being a “VLAN aware bridge”, because, obviously, I wanted to use VLANs, so I have to use it, right?

Well, after a lot of experiments, internet research, and a seemingly wrong answer on StackExchange stating “If you attach a network interface on a bridge, you can’t use VLANs anymore” (maybe I read it wrong) it turns out, this is not necessary.

Just throw the vmbr0 into the VM, and do the VLAN separation inside there. Good enough for my use case. Although I understand that’s probably “bad” because “rogue VMs/containers” could access the traffic they shouldn’t see. But like I said, I don’t consider that to be a problem.

Meanwhile, I consider replacing my current router (FritzBox) with the virtualized OpenWRT router, but have no idea how to properly implement that, I also want to avoid the migration headache (I either need to put the FritzBox into another network / address space, or reconfigure my whole network). Also, I probably should consider whether I want to do that “exposed host” stuff on the FritzBox so I only have one NAT. Bearing in mind OpenWRT installed by a n00b like me inside a virtualization software being practically “open on the internet” is not a good idea.

Not to mention I also had a look at OPNsense, but found it too confusing and overloaded for now.