hpr-knowledge-base/hpr_transcripts/hpr3769.txt

Episode: 3769
Title: HPR3769: Crouching laptop, hidden server (part 0).
Source: https://hub.hackerpublicradio.org/ccdn.php?filename=/eps/hpr3769/hpr3769.mp3
Transcribed: 2025-10-25 05:10:30

---

This is Hacker Public Radio Episode 3,769 for Thursday the 12th of January 2023.
Today's show is entitled Crouching Laptop Hidden Server Part Zero.
It is part of the series' virtualization.
It is hosted by some guy on the internet and is about 14 minutes long.
It carries a clean flag.
The summary is Virtualized Battlegrounds.
Hello and welcome to another episode of Hacker Public Radio.
I'm your host, some guy on the internet, and I'm here with...
Art.
72.
Alright, so we're here with Art.
72.
He just posted something amazing in the chat room and I was like, oh man, we gotta talk
about that.
Now it's not fully put together yet, but we're going to discuss it anyway because it feels
good to get in on the ground before the machine is fully assembled.
So Art, you want to tell us a little bit about what you posted in the chat?
It had no laptop and set up a Proxmox server on it and I just got to the install and made
one change since I had installed it.
So we're running Proxmox, ladies and gentlemen here at our Proxmox on a laptop.
What kind of specs are we talking about here, Art?
I believe in I3, but I'd have to go back in the notes in the computer and look up the
specs.
Roughly in I3, you got a good idea for the amount of RAM we're going to have on this bad
boy, or are you playing an upgrading it in the near future, or...
No, I think 8 gigs of RAM, I can't remember what I have.
Oh, that's going to be a close one right there.
8 gigs?
What's the...
What's the plan?
What was the minimum number of VMs you're thinking you're going to be able to get on this
thing?
Three possibly.
Let me look at the web UI, it probably tells me what the RAM is.
So if we're looking at about 8 gigs of RAM, 3 VMs, that's going to be kind of close.
From understanding this Proxmox system has devian as a base?
That's right.
I don't know.
It's showing on the UI that I only have 4 gigs of RAM.
That's weird.
I thought I'd put more in there.
That's going to be playing it very close.
That will.
I think I need to get more RAM.
I've got to have some extra line around, right?
Now I have to look at the specs closer and see what I can put in it.
Well, for a laptop, I wouldn't go above.
Well, if it's a guy 4 in it, now I just slap an 8 gig stick next to it and call it
good.
I could do that.
So we might have to get back together later.
Oh no.
This is still going to work.
We've got a roughly an i3, 4 gigs of RAM.
That means you can still get 1 VM off the ground for now, right?
Right.
All right.
Now, that 1 VM that we're talking about, what are you playing?
I'll deal with it.
I think I'll start with Arch, because it's pretty lightweight.
Actually, that's the funny thing is that's where my username comes from, because I used
Arch for six years or so.
Oh, so we got a little background story here.
User name plus the distro, you're going to be running on it, and I'm assuming this
is going to be Arch headless.
Yes, it is.
Now, oh boy, Arch headless.
What are you going to be running on a headless Arch system?
That sounds pretty crazy.
Like I said, it's the ground floor, so I don't quite know what I want to do yet.
I just saw a video on how to do prox marks, and I thought it might be an interesting challenge
to do.
I'm thinking a little crazy.
What do you say you just run it out there on the wild for a little while on the open
net?
You can maybe host the next cloud instance out there.
On Arch?
Maybe.
Yeah.
I mean, well, with four gigs, it'd be kind of tight with the lamp stack.
So maybe not, maybe not a next cloud, that might be a bit tight.
Yeah, it is.
You kind of build it up as you go, and that's why I had liked it before, and then I don't
remember what happened, but I tried to talk about Slackware, and so I was like, oh, I'll
try that.
I still like both.
I never use Slackware, and I've only set up Arch once a long time ago in the VM, but
I didn't actually use it as a system.
I just wanted to say I set up Arch.
Any chance we can convince you to self-host something out there in the wild on the raw,
untamed internet.
Yeah, sure.
That's worth a try.
Now this, this is going to be great.
My laptop that I'm going to be running, it's an HP, one of those cheaper HP laptops
that have the, what is it, the I3 in it?
It's the model 14-CK0052CL.
Mine is an Intel Core I3 2350 CPU with 2.3 GHz.
I think we're running roughly the same type of system here.
Right, that's about right.
Now mine the last time I checked, I think I got either 8 or 16 gigs in there.
Maybe it had 8 and I put 16 in it because I still got the laptop RAM from other older
laptops or whatever.
It's mine running a boom to 2004, and I'm thinking I'm going to put this puppy out there
in the wild as well.
I'm going to be taking a different approach using some of the documentation I got from
Red Hat.
Yeah, I tried Vert Manager to, it's a second-level hypervisor, unless the difference between
Proxmox and VertManagers, VertManagers, our Proxmox is on the bare metal.
All right, here we go.
I just found it right here.
All right, so it's going to be using a VertManager with QEMU and KVM, or you use VertInstall
to create your disks, or not your disk, your VMs.
So the rail documentation I found for building and setting up your VMs, just all from the
command line, is excellent.
They obviously want you to run it on rail or sent off stream or whatever, but the same
packages work over on Ubuntu as well.
So that's the root I'm going to go with it, and I'm doing it mainly just to get my command
line food up there, because the other method was just to use VertManager, the GUI, build
your VMs there, and then migrate them over to the system and then run them that way.
That's what I was doing through the GUI.
So far, yes.
I didn't have to do anything after the install, just plug in my ethernet, and then after
that log-n-d.com, and comment out those things where you can close the laptop lid.
Oh, yeah.
Got to definitely hit up that log-n-d.
Yeah, that did work.
I can put that in one else later.
With my setup getting started, I'm going to have to install the packages QEMU-KVM,
the package libvert, and the packagevert install.
And from there, I'll be able to use a couple of simple commands to build a VM.
This laptop isn't going to be running large VMs, obviously.
So I guess it'll be like, you know, I'll just be testing it on small and medium.
Now have you toured with any of the bridging in Proxmox to be able to get this thing out
on the network that the VM?
I know.
I've just gone as far as the log-n-d.
That is going to be interesting as well.
I really want to know how this process is going to work with me just trying to do it all
from the command, just trying to set up a bridge and get this thing.
It's an IP on the network.
I was just wondering the same thing because I can't even get a basic VM.
I got VM tiny, missing some of the functionality of VM.
Oh, in your VM?
You already got launched?
Yeah, they have a web interface, web UI.
They have a place you can go to the shell.
I was using that to change my log-n-d.
That's one of the things I like about it.
With that UI, you get that flexibility of like using a VPS where you can jump on the
node or wherever and use the delish terminals that they have online.
So with Proxmox, they're giving you that same sort of flexibility, but on the land using
the web tool.
All right.
We just got back.
We were looking at a few bits of documentation and anything interesting you found there,
Archer?
No.
You found more documentation than I did.
Yeah.
I mean, we both stumbled across some really good bits and pieces, a couple of YouTube videos
and lots of docs from Proxmox.
It seems that they allow you to, let me go pull that up here.
So from the Proxmox website, if you were to, from the main page, go over to the Downloads
tab at the top, scroll all the way down.
You'll then find the downloadable PDF documentation, which gives you a lot more information to work
with.
So even if you haven't downloaded and ran Proxmox yet, you can get that documentation
at least get a good peak at what you'd be getting yourself into if you were to use Proxmox.
And Archer ran across a lot of other wonderful docs out there from a, there's a site called
Bob Cares that has some great information on breaking your VMs out, setting up their
virtual bridge and some VLAN information.
That's all going to be included down in the show notes.
And also the YouTube link.
That's where I actually got what got me interested in the beginning.
Right, right.
The YouTube link shows just how easy it is to get set up in Proxmox.
And Archer, you pointed out something earlier about how lightweight it is.
Could you tell us a little bit about that?
I apparently only have four gigs of RAM and I thought I had more, but it's only one
running using one gig around.
So we're talking about a system with four cores and four gigs of RAM.
You loaded up Proxmox on there as your operating system, which is a devian base with the
Proxmox hypervisor.
You're only running right now up and running with only one gig of RAM.
That means in the future when you're ready to expand, you've got plenty of room to, you
know, plenty of wiggle room to give your VMs more, uh, process, well, maybe not too much
processing power because it's tonight three, but you don't have to starve them on the
RAM side.
No, and it has four gigs of swap to and I'm guessing that we'll change if I add more
RAM.
Yeah, I think for now, because you're limited on the RAM, they probably put in a swap
and there's a good idea, you know, any services start filling up that RAM pretty quickly.
You want some swap?
And I think it creates that automatically.
I actually made no changes except for that, like I said, log in D. Next step is to expand
the storage from the video, yeah, I mean, delete the one of the volumes and then expand
the remaining volume, but I didn't do that yet.
We're going to take two approaches here, ladies and gentlemen.
Archers going to be using the fantastic Proxmox with all this wonderful documentation right
here.
I mean, honestly, I'm kind of jealous just looking at it.
It looks great.
Looks easy.
There's lots of nice videos to help guide you along.
This is, this is wonderful.
I'm going to attempt something similar.
I'm going to be running a Ubuntu and doing mine through the command line, but I'm very jealous
of this UI and I'm thinking for a UI of my own, maybe running a cockpit.
I think a Ubuntu has a version of cockpit that can be downloaded, installed and, you know,
quickly configured to run on the network.
And from cockpit, maybe I won't be able to set up VMs from there, but I can still migrate
VMs over to the system if I need to from my desktop.
I'm going to try to do it all through the command line.
They'll just get the system set up that way and just use scripts whenever I want to
log a new VM.
And of course, I'm going to put it out on a great wide open.
So in a future episode, when me and Archer get back together, I want us to have some information,
you know, our highs and lows of this entire setup and some information on what to expect
when running on your home network.
Alright, so Archer and I just ran through a little bit more documentation, finally some
great DNS services out there.
And Archer, any of them, you want to recommend?
Duck DNS, if you don't mind that Google is one of the login options and GitHub.
Well, for what we're doing, I think it'll be just fine.
But for those of you out there listening, depending on what kind of services you're
running and what information you're moving through those services, if you're not running
something like WireGuard to encrypt that traffic, I think you're going to want to be careful.
But look, it's a service that's available at no cost to the user and notice I did not
use the word free because we are in the product.
Indeed.
Well, Archer, we did a great job bringing up a lot of information for the folks to have
something to look forward to.
You run in Proxmox on a Debian-based system.
And with the current stats in your box, let's go ahead and do a quick reminder, you're
going to be running at I3 with four gigs of RAM currently with an upgrade in the future,
hopefully.
And any other information you want to add on top of that?
Just that the web UI is pretty user friendly.
Now, here's hoping we can also get a little bit of containerization later on.
We have to wait and see how that works.
We have to first make it out the gate.
I'll probably crash and fail and weeping the night away and switching over to Proxmox
as well, but I won't do so without giving it a go.
So that'll wrap it up for today's episode.
You guys, thank you all for listening.
I'm some guy on the internet here with I3702 and we're out of here.
You have been listening to Hacker Public Radio at HackerPublicRadio.org.
Today's show was contributed by a HBR listener like yourself.
If you ever thought of recording podcasts, you can click on our contribute link to find
out how easy it really is.
Hosting for HBR has been kindly provided by an honesthost.com, the internet archive and
rsync.net.
On this advice status, today's show is released under Creative Commons, Attribution 4.0 International
License.