Upgraded a bunch of stuff in my homelab last week! Added a new proxmox host and moved the plex server onto my old gaming PC with a new 16-bay JBOD from QNAP.

I’ve run into a couple issues and wanted to make some notes for my future self if I need to solve them again.

e1000 NIC hangs

Under increased load, the NIC on my old gaming PC would hang and fall off the network. It had only happened once or twice before and it wasn’t worth the extra investigation yet.

With the plex VM now on that box, the load averages were quite a bit higher and have already triggered the hang three times in the last week. Rebooting solved it temporarily but I needed a longer-term solution for this. It turns out that this is a relatively long-standing bug in the e1000 intel NIC driver and found some good tips on the proxmox forums.

I’m not sure if this is the entire fix but this is what I have for now in my network configs for that host:

root@tempest:~# cat /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface eno1 inet manual
        post-up ethtool -K eno1 gso off gro off tso off tx off rx off rxvlan off txvlan off sg off

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address 192.168.1.120/24
        gateway 192.168.1.254
        bridge-ports eno1
        bridge-stp off
        bridge-fd 0

JBOD Passthrough

The JBOD came with a PCIe HBA card to connect to an existing PC. Hooking this up worked well enough but debugging it was a bit of a pain until I forced the BIOS to only use the integrated graphics (I had to disconnect all the SFF-8644 connectors and lug the PC upstairs as the only monitor I had in the basement was VGA which the graphics card didn’t have).

I passed the entire HBA card to the plex VM in proxmox following their guide and it seems to be working perfectly fine but the VM hangs for a while on boot with some PCI slot errors.

[    0.649191] shpchp 0000:05:01.0: pci_hp_register failed with error -16
[    0.649202] shpchp 0000:05:01.0: Slot initialization failed
[    0.650519] shpchp 0000:05:02.0: HPC vendor_id 1b36 device_id 1 ss_vid 0 ss_did 0

This isn’t the actual PCI slot for the HBA card, but rather for the QEMU bridge:

05:01.0 PCI bridge: Red Hat, Inc. QEMU PCI-PCI bridge

Not a deal breaker but it would be nice to figure out what’s going on there.

Very thankful for ZFS and Proxmox’ live migration. Made this whole thing much easier!