Information related to Virtual Machines and LXC Containers
It is common to need to create Ubuntu Server VMs to host various applications. To facilitate the creation of such VMs, we’ve created a Proxmox template using the procedure in this video: Create VM Template Including Cloud-Init
The template can be used to create the VMs to support Docker Swarm, Kubernetes, and other applications running on Ubuntu Server. The QEMU Guest Agent should also installed on each VM after they have been cloned via the template.
Several Ubuntu Linux desktop VMs support general-purpose desktop applications and our DXalarm Clocks. The following steps create the base VMs for these applications.
The VMs are created as follows:
The CPU and Memory parameters are chosen to be on the high side for most applications. This enables a quick installation and setup of the resulting VM. These parameters can be adjusted lower to match the actual workload for each provisioned VM.
Run the Ubuntu installer on the initial boot as follows:
I also installed SSH access for all logins. The procedure for doing this can be found here.
Next was a few post-setup configuration steps:
Finally, we installed the following via the Ubuntu Software apps:
Outbound e-mail is set up via nullmailer using the procedure outlined here.
# Run this as root
sudo bash
# Install nullmailer and mail apps
apt-get install nullmailer mailutils
# Move to the nullmailer directory
cd /etc/nullmailer
# Create configuration files
vi defaultdomain
...
anita-fred.net
:wq
vi adminaddr
...
<my-email-address>
:wq
# This file sets up TLS access to smtp2go
sudo vi /etc/remotes
...
mail.smtp2go.com smtp --port=587 --starttls --user=<my smtp2go login ID> --pass=<my stmp2go password>
:wq
# The next three steps are important!
chmod 644 defaultdomain adminaddr
chmod 600 remotes
chown mail:mail defaultdomain adminaddr remotes
# Check status of nullmailer
service nullmailer status
# Send a test e-mail
mailx -s "Test e-mail via nullmailer MTA" <email address>
...
The xRDP extensions enable sound from our Ubuntu VMs via Remote Desktop. The procedure to install the necessary extensions in Ubuntu VMs can be found here.
The steps are as follows:
# Must run these commands as normal user, not root su - fkemmerer # Download script, unzip it, & make it exeutable wget https://www.c-nergy.be/downloads/xRDP/xrdp-installer-1.4.3.zip unzip xrdp-installer-1.4.3.zip chmod +x xrdp-installer-1.4.3.sh # Must use -s to install sound drivers ./xrdp-installer-1.4.3.sh -s # Shutdown machine, then reboot sudo shutdown
Installed the following applications
Install the Python IDE interface as follows:
sudo apt install idle
The fully set up VM has been converted to a template. The template can you used to create Ubuntu Desktop VMs using the following steps:
One of our HomeLab environment’s goals is to run our desktop OSs on virtual machines. This enables us to get at standard OS environments such as Microsoft Windows easily from a web browser.
We use the following procedure to set up our Windows VMs –
The following ISO images are downloaded to the PVE-templates Share on our Proxmox cluster –
Each Windows VM is created with the following options (all other choices used the defaults) –
Start the VM and install Windows. Some notes include –
Setup Windows applications as follows –
Using this procedure, we set up docker using the Turnkey Core container (Debian Linux). The container is created with the following resources:
We will manage docker using the Portainer instance on one of our NAS drives.
This is done via the Portainer Edge Agent. The steps to install the Portainer Edge Agent are as follows:
docker run -d \ -v /var/run/docker.sock:/var/run/docker.sock \ -v /var/lib/docker/volumes:/var/lib/docker/volumes \ -v /:/host \ -v portainer_agent_data:/data \ --restart always \ -e EDGE=1 \ -e EDGE_ID=<replace with id from portainer> \ -e EDGE_KEY=<replace with key from portainer> \ -e EDGE_INSECURE_POLL=1 \ --name portainer_edge_agent \ portainer/agent:latest
More work needs to be done here. Here’s some information to help get started –
We’ve set up several Proxmox LXC containers to host several WordPress sites on our server. LXC containers are more efficient in terms of server resource utilization. You can learn more about Proxmox LXC containers vs. Virtual Machines here. We went through the following steps to set this up.
The setup uses the WordPress LXC container from Turnkey Linux. This lightweight Debian Linux environment uses MariaDB and Apache2 to complete the LAMP stack. I followed the following YouTube video to complete the installation –
Once the container was set up, I set the timezone for Debian as follows:
# timedatectl set-timezone "America/New_York"
Next, I updated the Debian installation via the following:
# apt update && apt upgrade
I also installed nslookup and apt-utils via the following:
# apt-get install dnsutils # apt-get install apt-utils
The following addition was made just before the “…Happy publishing” line in the wp-config.php file to enable the WordPress installation to take advantage of the additional memory.
/* Increase WP Memory limit */
define('WP_MEMORY_LIMIT', '1024M');
/* That's all, stop editing! Happy publishing. */
The PHP OPcache stores the compiled versions of the PHP scripts that make up our websites. The default size of the cache is 128 MB. We’ve increased our OPcache to 512 MB to improve performance. OPcache memory is shared across all of the WordPress sites in the host LXC container. The steps to modify the size of the OPcache are as follows:
# vi /etc/php/8.2/apache2 ... Modify the following lines in the file ; The OPcache shared memory storage size. ;opcache.memory_consumption=128 opcache.memory_consumption=512 # systemctl restart apache2
The supplied postfix MTA did not work, so we’ve installed the WP Mail SMTP plugin and configured it to forward email through our email service.
SPF and DMARC records need to be set up for the domain. This needs to be done properly to accommodate the multiple servers that can send e-mail on behalf of our domain. The DMARC step is simple – the necessary steps can be found here. The DMARC setup for a domain can be confirmed here.
This procedure was used to set up apache2 with a signed SSL certificate – click here. It uses Certbot with Let Encrypt to obtain and install a signed SSL certificate in Apache. A DNS-01 challenge is used, which does not require an external Internet connection for Apache.
Once the initial certificates are installed, a script can be created to run the certbot commands to check if the SSL certificates need to be updated.
The final step was to schedule weekly checks for SSL certificate updates using the cron. This is done by executing the script mentioned above once a week.
We are using the Redis persistent object cache on our sites. Information on Redis and how to install it may be found here and here.
The following changes in each site’s wp-config.php must be made first:
<?php /* Enable Redis cache - this line must be right after the opening <?php line */ define( 'WP_CACHE', true );
Then add the following to the “salt” section of wp-config.php:
/* Redis cache salt - unique for each WordPress
site on this host */
define('WP_CACHE_KEY_SALT',
'homelab.anita-fred.net');
The WP_CACHE_KEY_SALT can be anything, but the value must be unique for each WordPress site host on the LXC.
The next step is to install the redis and the php-redis packages on the LXC as follows:
# apt-get update # apt-get install redis-server # apt-get install php-redis # systemctrl restart apache2
The final step is to install the Redis Object Cache plugin on each WordPress site and use the plugin to enable the Redis cache.
Gzip compression helps users with slower internet connections to have a better overall experience. This feature can be enabled as follows (more info here). First, run the following command for the LXC container to enable gzip compression for all websites.
# a2enmod deflate
Next, use a plugin in each WordPress website to enable Gzip compression in the associated .htaccess file.
With these steps done, restarting apache2 will enable compression.
# systemctl restart apache2
You can confirm that Gzip compression is working via the GiftOfSpeed web tool.
First, install the apache2 mod_expires extension using the following command –
# a2enmod expires # systemctl restart apache2 # apachectl -M | grep expires
Next, set the static caching expiration header to 365 days using the caching plugin installed in each WordPress site.
A public/private key pair is created and set up for Proxmox VE and all VMs and LXC to ensure secure SSH access. The following procedure is used to do this. Access via password should be disabled once the SSH keys are in place and working.
Apache2 can support multiple websites using a single IP address. This is the configuration that we are using for our home lab. The following procedure explains how to set this up:
Once an additional WordPress instance is installed and an associated database is set up, the following steps should be performed:
WordPress sites need periodic visits to each site to ensure that the internal scheduler runs properly. This can be a problem early in developing a new site when there are few visitors. To address this, we’ve installed a cron job for our sites as follows –
# Modify root crontab cd /var/spool/cron/crontabs vi root ... Add these lines... ... The first ensures SSL cert updates... # m h dom mon dow command 0 4 * * sun /bin/sh /root/install_cert.sh */5 * * * * /usr/bin/curl https://travel.anita-fred.net/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron */5 * * * * /usr/bin/curl https://homelab.anita-fred.net/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron */5 * * * * /usr/bin/curl https://www.anita-fred.net/wp-cron.php?doing_wp_cron