Step 1: First Byte, Wipe old PC securely and flashing ProxMox to it.

If you are looking for a story filled with efficiency, speed and cutting edge hardware, I’m afraid you (nor I) will find any of that here. Instead, this is a tragic account of a decrepit machine, a single overworked keyboard, and a desperate attempt to breathe life into a PC so ancient that archaeologists would consider it an artifact.

My bittersweet tale begins with an old PC, one that had been exiled to the shadowy depths of my wardrobe, beneath a thick layer of dust. This relic of a bygone age of gaming was to be reborn as a Proxmox server, and if the universe had chosen to cooperate this would have been a much shorter first blog post.

The first challenge arose immediately: there was but one keyboard, and yet two machines required its services. Swapping between them became a perilous dance of unplugging and re-plugging, an act that surely shaved years off the lifespan of both USB ports and my back. Each time I thought the flashed USB was ready and I’d gotten all the necessary old files off the old PC there was yet another time I needed to swap the keyboard to my current PC.

After quickly solving an issue caused by the outdated display drivers not functioning when running the Proxmox GUI I ran into a much bigger problem: network connectivity. I had planned initially to just use a WiFi dongle but then discovered that you need to physically connect Proxmox VE to internet (at least for the first-time setup). Even after I had rummaged around the box of old tech bits to find a 30M CAT5e cable, and performed some much needed cable management, The Proxmox server insisted that my DHCP server was inaccessible.

But after an hour of struggle, questioning all the while “do I really want to setup a homelab?”, and carefully balancing the keyboard-sharing duties, the reinstalled Proxmox VE login finally was accessible. Certainly not as fast a start as I had envisioned to my homelabbing journey but a start nonetheless! Onwards and upwards.

• Weighed pros and cons of various hypervisors for my specific intended use case

• Used an old PC to repurpose as a Proxmox VE.

• Flashed Proxmox VE

• Swapped a single keyboard between two PCs repeatedly to transfer old files and set up the install.

• Encountered display issues due to old drivers; resolved quickly.

• Planned to use a WiFi dongle but after some digging found that Proxmox requires a wired connection for setup.

• Found a 30M CAT5e cable (about 30M too long!), set it up, and did some cable management.

• Faced DHCP server issues, preventing network connectivity.

• After an hour of troubleshooting, finally accessed Proxmox VE login.

• Successfully set up the Proxmox server—the homelab journey begins!