Ok, I bought an HP Prodesk 400 G6 with 64 Gigs of Ram and 2T SSD.
I want to use it as a hypervisor for my homelab, spawning virtual
machines.
I will use arch linux as a hypervisor.
First, I create a USB drive that will be used to boot arch install
media.
Following the arch wiki and prepping an USB drive
$ wget https://ftp.ek-cer.hu/pub/mirrors/ftp.archlinux.org/iso/2026.01.01/archlinux-2026.01.01-x86_64.iso
$ sudo cp archlinux-2026.01.01-x86_64.iso /dev/sdb
This cp took quite a long time, I guess because of the drive being USB2.
Once that's done, plugged in the device to the machine, on boot pressed ESC
to get to the boot menu and then was able to boot from USB. Again, booting is
not super fast, but we got there.
on the console, I changed the root's password with passwd, and then did
ip a to get my ip address, and could log in to the box from my laptop:
I then looked at what is my network interface's name, what is my network interface's
ethernet address, put them down into the script and ran it.
Here is the script that I ran
$ scp /home/matelakat/prj/matelakat/src/homepage/lakat.eu/content/statics/scripts/homes/install-script.sh root@192.168.0.31:
$ ssh root@192.168.0.31
root@archiso ~ # bash install-script.sh
After that I need to make sure that my efi environment will pick up the new system:
root@archiso ~ # efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0003
Timeout: 15 seconds
BootOrder: 0003,0004
Boot0001* IPV4 Network - ...
Boot0002* IPV6 Network - ...
Boot0003* SanDisk Cruzer Blade ...
Boot0004* Windows Boot Manager ...
Added a new entry for Linux:
root@archiso ~ # efibootmgr --create --disk /dev/nvme0n1 --part 1 --loader "\EFI\systemd\systemd-bootx64.efi" --label "Linux Boot Manager" --verbose
And deleting the non-required entries:
root@archiso ~ # efibootmgr -b 3 -B
root@archiso ~ # efibootmgr -b 4 -B
Again Listing what I have:
root@archiso ~ # efibootmgr
BootCurrent: 0003
Timeout: 15 seconds
BootOrder: 0000
Boot0000* Linux Boot Manager...
Boot0001* IPV4 Network - ...
Boot0002* IPV6 Network - ...
Looks good, time to reboot and pray.
It did not boot. I had to go to the bios and set the boot drive. Then
it was able to boot.
Next thing I checked was the network. Is it still available at the same address?
No, it wasn't. I was about to check my DHCP server, when I simply tried to access
it by its hostname:
$ ssh homes
[matelakat@homes ~]$
And voila, I was in!
To be continued...