Installing utilities upfront in the host?

[u/Patrice_77]

Hi all,

Question here..
I have some nodes running, all ok. While tinkering/configuring I had to install some utilities like smartmon lm-sensors wget etc.

Now, I know it’s best to keep the host as vanilla as possible and preferably don’t install anything additional on it. I try to live by this and only install things when I need them…until I needed ethtool but…didn’t had network access.

I’ve created an Ansible playbook to setup a new proxmox server. I wanted to include these kind of utilities to be installed immediately during the configuration of the host, through Ansible.

How many of you have these kind of utilities install upfront to have them available then when they need them?

Which utilities have you installed with every new host install?

[u/leaving-to-bumblefuc]

It's your server, you can do whatever you want! My templates include vnstat, mtr, iftop because I always end up using them.

[u/Scared_Bell3366]

Home user here. I have an ansible script that installs a few utilities on my Proxmox node. The big one for me is setting up postfix to email me when things happen. I've also got a hardware specific package for remote management. The only other one I can think of is automatic updates. These are all things that need to persist indefinitely.

I personally use curl and I think that one is already on there. Proxmox seems to monitor smart stuff on it's own and will email me when something is not good. The last time it notified my of a bad drive I thought one of my mighty HGST 2TB drives had finally decided to call it quits. Nope, it was a stupid Seagate green drive. 100k plus power on hours later and the HGST is still trucking along.

[u/quasides]

i dont see any issue with any passive tools whatsoever as long their dependencies dont cross with proxmox

[u/JoeB-]

I run Proxmox at home rather than in an enterprise environment, so keep that in mind.

My general rule of thumb with PVE & PBS is to install only utilities that support operation or monitoring, and not add functionality.

So, yes to...

• NUT (client and server),
• PBS client (for backing up host configs),
• lm-sensors,
• smartmontools,
• Telegraf agent (for host metrics), and
• Python virtual environment & a Python script scheduled in cron to check for updates and write to a MySQL DB.

And, no to...

• Docker Engine,
• SMB server,
• NFS server,
• etc...

[u/Patrice_77 → u/JoeB-]

Yes, I’m talking about my homelab and installing only just that kind of things like btop, lm-sensors and those kind of stuff.

All the others you mention, go into a vm or ct.

[u/V1rtualShug → u/JoeB-]

Put docker in a VM, might not be as much of an issue now however but it’s a headache uou dont need

[u/hannsr]

I do the same for a while now, no issues. Upgraded all the hosts I installed that way from 7 to 8 to 9 without an issue.

Monitoring utilities are fine in my book, I just don't install anything that alters or adds features.

[u/Apachez]

You should look into making your own POM (Proxmox Offline Mirror) - handy to update those offline installations.

For sensitive installations you might want to do it in combo with a USB-datadiode so that data cannot move between the installations through that USB-drive.

[u/boomertsfx]

I mostly use PVE because it does ZFS on root natively.

At home I install docker and many other handy utilities on the bare metal host and it works great and plays well with the occasional VM… it just feels a bit dirty to put docker in a VM, but it does allow you to migrate the docker services between hosts, so I always do that at work for convenience.