Monthly Archives: April 2018

Virtualization

Run ProxMox in local mode when part of a quorum

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When moving my desktop (which I had joined to my ProxMox cluster) to a new environment I found I couldn’t start any VMs because there was no quorum. I couldn’t even get it to run “pvecm expected 1” because corosync wouldn’t start. I would see these errors in the log:

Totem is unable to form a cluster because of an operating system or network fault. The most common cause of this message is that the local firewall is configured improperly.

I found on this forum post that you can tell proxmox to run in local mode (not trying to be in a quorum)

sudo systemctl stop pve-cluster
sudo /usr/bin/pmxcfs -l

Success! This caused my node to run in local node, which let me run my Windows gaming VM in another location.

CLI, Virtualization

VGA Passthrough with Threadripper

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An unfortunate bug exists for the AMD Threadripper family of GPUs which causes VGA Passthrough not to work properly. Fortunately some very clever people have implemented a workaround to allow proper VGA passthrough until a proper Linux Kernel patch can be accepted and implemented. See here for the whole story.

Right now my Thrdearipper 1950x successfully has GPU passthrough thanks to HyenaCheeseHeads “java hack” applet.  I went this route because I really didn’t want to try and recompile my ProxMox kernel to get passthrough to work. Per the description “It is a small program that runs as any user with read/write access to sysfs (this small guide assumes “root”). The program monitors any PCIe device that is connected to VFIO-PCI when the program starts, if the device disconnects due to the issues described in this post then the program tries to re-connect the device by rewriting the bridge configuration.” Instructions taken from the above Reddit post.

  • Go to https://pastebin.com/iYg3Dngs and hit “Download” (the MD5 sum is supposed to be 91914b021b890d778f4055bcc5f41002)
  • Rename the downloaded file to “ZenBridgeBaconRecovery.java” and put it in a new folder somewhere
  • Go to the folder in a terminal and type “javac ZenBridgeBaconRecovery.java”, this should take a short while and then complete with no errors. You may need to install the Java 8 JDK to get the javac command (use your distribution’s software manager)
  • In the same folder type “sudo java ZenBridgeBaconRecovery”
  • Make sure that the PCIe device that you intend to passthru is listed as monitored with a bridge
  • Now start your VM

In my case (Debian Stretch, ProxMox) I needed to install openjdk-8-jdk-headless

sudo apt install openjdk-8-jdk-headless
javac ZenBridgeBaconRecovery.java

Next I have a little script on startup to spawn this as root in a detached tmux session, so I don’t have to remember to run it (If you try to start your VM before running this, it will hose passthrough on your system until you reboot it.) Be sure to change the script to point to wherever you compiled ZenBridgeBaconRecovery

#!/bin/bash
cd /home/nicholas  #change me to suit your needs
sudo java ZenBridgeBaconRecovery

And here is the command I use to run on startup:

tmux new -d '/home/nicholas/passthrough.sh'

Again, be sure to modify the above to point to the path of wherever you saved the above script.

So far this works pretty well for me. I hate having to run a java process as sudo, but it’s better than recompiling my kernel.

Update 6/27/2018:  I’ve created a systemd service script for the ZenBaconRecovery file to run at boot. Here is my file, placed in
/etc/systemd/system/zenbridge.service:  (change your working directory to match the zenbridgebaconrecovery java file location. Don’t forget to do systemctl daemon-reload.)

[Unit] 
Description=Zen Bridge Bacon Recovery 
After=network.target 

[Service] 
Type=simple 
User=root 
WorkingDirectory=/home/nicholas 
ExecStart=/usr/bin/java ZenBridgeBaconRecovery 
Restart=on-failure # or always, on-abort, etc 

[Install] 
WantedBy=multi-user.target 
~

Update 8/18/2018 Finally solved for everyone!

Per an update on the reddit thread motherboard manufactures have finally put out BIOS updates that resolve the PCI passthrough problems. I updated my X399 Tachi to the latest version of its UEFI BIOS (3.20) and indeed PCI passthrough worked without any more wonky workarounds!

CLI, Networking

Update /etc/hosts with current IP for ProxMox

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ProxMox virtual environment is a really nice package for managing KVM and container visualization. One quirk about it is you need to have an entry in /etc/hosts that points to your system’s IP address, not 127.0.0.1 or 127.0.1.1. I wrote a little script to grab the IP of your specified interface and add it to /etc/hosts automatically for you. You may download it here or see below:

#!/bin/bash
#A simple script to update /etc/hosts with your current IP address for use with ProxMox virtual environment
#Author: Nicholas Jeppson
#Date: 4/25/2018

###Edit these variables to your environment###
INTERFACE="enp4s0" #the interface that has the IP you want to update hosts for
DNS_SUFFIX=""
###End variables section###

#Variables you shouldn't have to change
IP=$(ip addr show $INTERFACE |egrep 'inet '| awk '{print $2}'| cut -d '/' -f1)
HOSTNAME=$(hostname)

#Use sed to add IP to first line in /etc/hosts
sed -i "1s/^/$IP $HOSTNAME $HOSTNAME$DNS_SUFFIX\n/" /etc/hosts
CLI

Use grep, awk, and cut to display only your IP address

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I needed a quick way to determine my IP address for a script. If you run the ip addr show command it outputs a lot of information I don’t need. I settled on using grep, awk, and cut to get the information I want

ip addr show <interface name> |egrep 'inet '| awk '{print $2}'| cut -d '/' -f1

The result is a clean IP address. Beautiful. Thanks to this site for insight into how to use cut.