How I fixed my laptop hoarding problem by chucking Proxmox on all of them
The main goal of this site is to show what projects I am working on, whether they are security-focused or just me messing around with something I found in my home lab. This first post will be about how I put my old laptops into a cluster so they became useful again rather than expensive paperweights.
This isn't an exact guide on how to set up a Proxmox cluster, as there is much better documentation out there to carry out what you need to do. See some examples below
Frank Joseph
When you have a problem of going through lots of laptops, you start to think what you'd do with them. Most people would just chuck them in the bin, probably with the drive still in it.
However, I kept hearing the word “Proxmox” being mentioned by the homelab community, I'm new to it, so I thought I’d give it a try. To put it in simple terms—and to stop myself going on a tangent—it is an open-source virtual environment platform that allows multiple devices to be seen as a cluster.
This was perfect, as I had a few laptops and a mini PC from an clear-out I could use. The benefits of using laptops are the low power draw, and I have no concerns about the batteries being a fire hazard, as one has already exploded (because it was a Razer…) and the other has been dead since 2019.
The network adapter problem...
The problem with the two laptops I use the XPS 13 from 2019 and the Razer from 2021, is that they don't have any Ethernet ports, meaning you have to rely on USB-C adapters with Ethernet. Another thing that doesn't help is that my only USB Ethernet adapter is a USB-C hub with a dodgy connection.
Once I managed to carefully prop up the laptop so the USB-C hub wasn't interfered with, I got Proxmox working on the laptop and the old Lenovo mini PC. This was all going well until I decided to move my Razer laptop and pushed the Ethernet connector slightly out, inadvertently making me have to start the setup process all over again for the Razer.
When this was all back up and running, the next goal was to join them together as a cluster.
As you can see above, I currently only have two nodes. I am aware of the lack of redundancy in my current environment and am working towards adding the other laptops to the cluster.
The next node to be added will be an old XPS; however, I am currently trying to work out an efficient power solution and Ethernet solution, as Proxmox and Wi-Fi is not a redundant setup due to limitations and the ‘janky’ workarounds that make the USB-C Ethernet adapter look like it has the redundancy of AWS on the 20th of October.
And with that, the initial steps of setting up my Proxmox environment are done. A few other things I did included setting up Twingate so I can remotely cause my old PCs to sort of catch fire and send my electricity bill up at the same time—it’s all about running tasks in parallel...
The old Lenovo after running a few VM's on it
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