Proxmox setup

Introduction

This document lists all of the modifications I apply to my proxmox instance after an install. Feel free to copy them or to send me suggestions to improve/grow this list.

Power consumption

Running a server 24/7 can eat up a lot of watts and proxmox uses a pretty power hungry cpu governor: performance, which just puts the CPU at its max freq 100% of the time. Chosing the powersave governor can drastically reduce the power usage of the machine. First, check your available governors with:

cat /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu0/cpufreq/scaling_available_governor

Then, if powersave is available, do:

echo "powersave" | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor

This modification will not be persistent after a reboot (it happens sometimes), adding it to your crontab will fix that. To do so, add the following entry:

@reboot echo "powersave" | tee /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor >/dev/null 2>&1

You can also install powertop to see what process uses the most energy. I had totally forgotten that I had suricata running on my pve node, and it was the second hungriest process on the machine.

Subscription nag

Sorry to the Proxmox team, but I can’t really afford the license right now, and the nag is rather annoying. If you can buy it, please do: this software runs all your services and you’re actually getting all of this for free; please support the devs by purchasing a license. I have removed the nag by running this command (as root):

cat << EOF > /etc/apt/apt.conf.d/no-nag-script
DPkg::Post-Invoke { "dpkg -V proxmox-widget-toolkit | grep -q '/proxmoxlib\.js$'; if [ $? -eq 1 ]; then { echo 'Removing subscription nag from UI...'; sed -i '/data.status/{s/\!//;s/Active/NoMoreNagging/}' /usr/share/javascript/proxmox-widget-toolkit/proxmoxlib.js; }; fi"; };
EOF