Alex from KTZ Systems published an in-depth Proxmox installation tutorial. The following is a condensed version for my purposes.

Proxmox

Download the Proxmox iso here. Run the following commands to verify the checksum:

shasum -a 256 ~/Downloads/proxmox-ve_8.2-2.iso  # verify checksum

Flash it to a USB drive and then boot from it. During the setup process, you’ll be asked to specify several things like the hostname, IP address, and an email address. The hostname is just something for proxmox to use internally. I usually go with something like rackchoice.local since it does require a full FDQN name.

Run the Proxmox VE Helper Script to disable enterprise features like HA and the subscription nag among other things:

bash -c "$(wget -qLO - https://github.com/community-scripts/ProxmoxVE/raw/main/misc/post-pve-install.sh)"

Now is a good time to install sudo and `vim:

apt update
apt install sudo
apt install vim

Add a user for yourself:

useradd -m -s /bin/bash dominic   

Give yourself a password

passwd dominic

Put yourself in the sudo group:

usermod -aG sudo dominic

Give yourself some special proxmox permissions:

pveum useradd dominic@pve -comment "New Admin User"
pveum aclmod / -user dominic@pve -role Administrator

If you have any lingering SSH keys from previous installs, run these commands on your mac or whatever system you may have used to connect.

# clear any existing ssh keys for your server's hostname or IP address
ssh-keygen -R rackhoice  

# copy public key from mac to server 
ssh-copy-id dominic@rackchoice

Mergerfs

Log in as your new user if you haven’t already.

The command below pulls down the latest version of mergerfs from github instead of relying on the apt repository. You can run it however often you want. If you already have the latest version, it will do nothing.

curl -s https://api.github.com/repos/trapexit/mergerfs/releases/latest | grep "browser_download_url.*$(grep VERSION_CODENAME /etc/os-release | cut -d= -f2)_$(dpkg --print-architecture).deb\"" | cut -d '"' -f 4 | wget -qi - && sudo dpkg -i mergerfs_*$(grep VERSION_CODENAME /etc/os-release | cut -d= -f2)_$(dpkg --print-architecture).deb && rm mergerfs_*.deb

I also like to put the command in a update_mergerfs.sh script and set it to run every 3 months at 3AM on a cron job:

0 3 1 */3 * /home/dominic/update_mergerfs.sh

Install inxi to identify your drives.

sudo apt install inxi
inxi -xD  # list drives
ls /dev/disk/by-id # list drives by their immutable ids

Then identify the current sdX mappings for each drive:

ls -la /dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST400VN006-3CW104_ZW62V162  # for example
/dev/disk/by-id/ata-ST4000VN006-3CW104_ZW62V162 -> ../../sdb # output

Take note of the mappings as I did [[Rackchioice#Identifying Disks|here]]. We’ll need them for our etc/fstab.

Run sudo su to switch user to root.

For new drives (no pre-existing data you want to keep), run gdisk /dev/sdX where X is the drive you want to format. This will drop you into an interactive session. Follow these instructions:

  • o - (creates a new empty GPT partition table)
    • Proceed? (Y/N) - Y
  • n - (creates a new partition)
    • Partition number (1-128, default 1): 1
    • First sector (34-15628053134, default = 2048) or {+-}size{KMGTP}: leave blank
    • Last sector (2048-15628053134, default = 15628053134) or {+-}size{KMGTP}: leave blank
    • Hex code or GUID (L to show codes, Enter = 8300): 8300
  • p - (optionally validate that 1 large partition is to be created)
    • Model: HGST HDN728080AL
    • Number Start (sector) End (sector) Size Code Name
    • 1 2048 15628053134 7.3 TiB 8300 Linux filesystem
  • w - (writes the changes made thus far)
    • Until this point, gdisk has been non-destructive
    • Confirm that making these changes is OK and the changes queued so far will be executed

After you have done that for all your drives, create an ext4 filesystem on each drive’s newly created partition: ```

mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdX1

Now we can create mountpoints for our new partitions:

mkdir /mnt/disk{1,2}  # or however many you need
mkdir /mnt/parity1  # adjust this command based on your parity setup
mkdir /mnt/storage  # this will be the main mergerfs mountpoint

Finally, we can edit /etc/fstab to tell our OS to mount our new partitions to our newly created mountpoints. This will run every time our machine boots. [[Rackchioice#/etc/fstab|Here]] is mine for Rackchoice. The last line is essentially the mergerfs config.

In order to reload the new fstab entries you’ve created and check them before rebooting, use mount -a. Then verify the mount points with df -h. If you had any existing files on your data disks they will be visible under /mnt/storage.

Now’s as good a time as any to change the owner of your new mergerfs pool to dominic so that when you start using samba, you have write and read permissions at the Debian level:

sudo chown -R dominic:dominic /mnt/storage/

Samba

Install samba:

sudo apt install samba

Create/edit the samba config at /etc/samba/smb.conf. Mine is documented [[Rackchioice#/etc/samba/smb.conf|here]].

Samba requires setting a password separately from that used for login. You may use an existing user or create a new one for this purpose.

sudo smbpasswd -a dominic
sudo systemctl restart smbd

Docker

Install docker:

curl -fsSL https://get.docker.com | sh

Check your user’s uid and gid:

id dominic

You’ll need this info when setting up containers.

Jellyfin

Linuxserver.io has a Jellyfin image with instructions on how to set it up.

My docker-compose.yml can be found [[Rackchioice#docker-compose.yml|here]].

Run docker compose version to make sure you have docker compose on your server.

Then make sure you have created a folder for your jellyfin files (config, cache, etc) to live.

mkdir /home/dominic/jellyfin
chown -R 1000:1000 /home/dominic/jellyfin

I had to run the following commands to add my user to the docker group so that I could run docker commands without being root:

groups dominic
sudo usermod -aG docker dominic

I also had to log out and log back in.

Then make sure your docker-compose.yml file is in your jellyfin directory and run docker compose up -d from the jellyfin directory.

You should now be able to setup Jellyfin at the server’s IP address on port 8096.