Proxmox won’t boot after placement of new hardware

Problem

Your proxmox server does not startup after the placement of new hardware, or does not have a network connection anymore.

Solution

After adding or removing PCIe devices, the addresses of the PCIe devices may change. In particular, NIC names can change, which causes the network card to be no longer recognized. By updating the network interface to the new NIC name, proxmox will be able to find the network device again and boot properly.

Steps

To solve this, search with the following command: ip a. This should show you the devices of proxmox, including something with the format: ‘enpXsY’. The X and Y could be something like 3 or 0. Write this device name down. Now we can correct the id of the network interface, in the /etc/network/interfaces file. To do this you could use the convenient tool called nano. To do this use nano /etc/network/interfaces. Now we have to correct the interface for your network connection. In this file, you should see something like the ‘enpXsY’ format as before, but with a slightly different format, like ‘enp4s1’. Update this to the correct number, by changing all instances.

Images

Old situation:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface enp2s0 inet manual

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address 192.168.0.12/24
        gateway 192.168.0.1
        bridge-ports enp2s0
        bridge-stp off
        bridge-fd 0

New situation:

auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

iface enp4s0 inet manual

auto vmbr0
iface vmbr0 inet static
        address 192.168.0.12/24
        gateway 192.168.0.1
        bridge-ports enp4s0
        bridge-stp off
        bridge-fd 0