Setting up a QDevice
Some may wonder what the heck is a QDevice? It is a device that is not a full proxmox server but is set up to break quorum in the case of only having two main nodes or having to take full nodes offline temporarily but still needing votes setup. Quorum is a form of distributed computing and the voting system that Proxmox used to make sure that systems where VM’s that rely on other VM’s are all able to start up. The issue with this though is that if you have only two nodes and one goes offline the other goes into read-only mode and will not boot up any VM’s without some tricky maneuvering.
Installing Debian and corosync on Wyse thinclient
I had to start by turning off the secure boot and then installing Debian from a flash drive install. There were a few quirks but the documentation that Debian provides cleared that up quickly. I usually make sure to install SSH server on Debian so I can just do the rest of the commands on another machine. At this point, I install the corosync item necessary and move on to the next step.
Setup the cluster in Proxmox
I learned a few interesting things attempting to make a cluster after finally having a third voter. The only reason I waited as long as I did was because I have heard horror stories about the issues that only having two nodes can cause. This gave me some issues because I had VMs running on both nodes and thus you are not supposed to be able to join them but I followed this guide to join two nodes to a cluster that are both running VM’s. I also had to disable TFA for my root account because it would not let me join with TFA but I was able to re-enable it afterward since it knows it’s a known good node.
Now to add the Qdevice
I add the device by using the command
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pvecm qdevice setup <QDEVICE-IP>
I ran into some issues since it needs to ssh into the qdevice to set it up and it was getting denied since root was not allowed to be sshed into by default. I fixed this by following a couple of guides mashed together since none of them gave all the correct steps. First you need to go to
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nano /etc/ssh/sshd_config
Then comment PermitRootLogin yes after that you need to save it and run
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systemctl restart sshd
After that, I added the Qdevice as in the wiki site from the very first linked item on this page and then I had a cluster of three set up that would have something to break quorum.
As of now there are still several things that I have in mind to do.
- Self-Host Website
- Have VPN back to my home network
- Set up my servers in a server rack
- Get a third computer that will be able to break quorum between my two proxmox servers
- Setup a separate computer that will ping my servers and send wake up packets if it doesn’t get a response
- Self-host Bitwarden an open source password manager
- Setup a baremetal backup for Proxmox as a whole
- Setup a NAS that has at least 50 tb of storage