Okay, let’s talk about this whole ‘ppvs’ thing I messed around with recently. It stands for my little Personal Project Virtualization Setup, nothing too fancy, just needed a space to tinker without breaking my main machine or paying through the nose for cloud stuff every month.
So, first things first, I had to find some hardware. Didn’t want to buy anything new, honestly. Found an old desktop tower sitting in the corner, collecting dust. It wasn’t exactly a powerhouse, probably from like, five or six years ago? Had an okay-ish processor and some RAM, maybe 16 gigs? Good enough for what I wanted, I figured. Pulled it out, blew the dust off, the usual ritual.
Next up was picking the software to run the whole show. Looked at a few options. Some seemed way too complicated, like enterprise-level stuff. Others were simpler. I ended up going with Proxmox. Heard about it from a buddy, said it was free and pretty capable for home lab tinkering. Seemed like the path of least resistance, you know?
Getting it Installed
Now, the installation part. Thought it would be straightforward. Burn the image to a USB stick, boot it up, click next-next-finish. Right? Well, mostly. The initial install went okay, but then came the network configuration. That was a pain. My network card wasn’t immediately recognized properly. Spent a good couple of hours searching forums, trying different commands I barely understood. Felt like banging my head against the wall. Finally found some obscure setting I had to tweak in some config file. Why can’t this stuff just work out of the box sometimes?
First Steps and What Happened Next
Once the network hurdle was cleared, things got a bit smoother. The web interface came up. Felt like progress! Decided to spin up my first virtual thingy. Kept it simple, just a basic Ubuntu Server instance. Wanted to see if I could get something, anything, running.
- Downloaded the Ubuntu Server ISO image.
- Uploaded it to the Proxmox storage.
- Went through the VM creation wizard. Gave it a couple of CPU cores, maybe 4 gigs of RAM.
- Started it up.
And hey, it actually booted! Managed to SSH into it from my main computer. Success, kind of. Felt good to see it working after the earlier struggles.
Since then, I’ve added a few more things. Set up a Pi-hole container to block ads on my home network – that was actually pretty useful. Tried running a simple web server too, just for kicks. It’s become this little sandbox where I can try out software or configurations without worrying about messing anything important up.
Honestly, setting up this ‘ppvs’ was more work than I initially thought, especially dealing with that network driver nonsense. Sometimes I wonder if just paying a few bucks for a cheap cloud server would have been easier. But then again, I learned a bit, and now I have this local setup completely under my control. No surprise bills, no weird limitations from cloud providers. It’s mine, warts and all. Sometimes doing it yourself, even the frustrating parts, feels more… real. You know what I mean? It’s not perfect, but it’s my little corner of the digital world I built myself, dust and all.
