I wanted to plug my PBS (== Proxmox Backup Server) server on an electrical outlet separate from my Proxmox server (so that, if s*** happens, they don’t go toast together). Since I don’t have Ethernet wiring in my house, I had to fall back to a USB wi-fi adapter for now.

Here are the steps I followed to connect PBS with wi-fi.

Step 1

Install and setup wpasupplicant through the following:

# Get interface names
ip a

apt install wpasupplicant -y
wpa_passphrase Achari > /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Step 2

Put the following in the /etc/network/interfaces file:

auto wlxa047d70084f9
iface wlxa047d70084f9 inet dhcp
        wpa-driver nl80211
        wpa-conf /etc/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Caveats

  1. The file change had to go above the existing Ethernet block, otherwise it didn’t work.
  2. The machine doesn’t automatically switch between wi-fi and Ethernet - that only works after I reboot! Not a big deal for me right now, so not looking into it more.
  3. The server didn’t have an internet connection - it was just available on the LAN. So, kind of useless.

Resources

  1. https://pve.proxmox.com/wiki/WLAN - not too helpful.