WLAN

Important Notes

Avoid using WLAN if possible, it has several technical limitations making it not really suitable as single interface of a hyper-visor like PVE.

At least the following disadvantages apply:

• Wi-Fi adapters can only be used as Linux bridge interface through workarounds, as most Access Points (APs) will reject frames that have a source address that didn’t authenticate with the AP.
• compared to wired Ethernet connections you will experience more latency spikes, reduced bandwidth and depending on distance and barriers between host and the AP even spotty connections

Initial Setup

Setting up the Wi-Fi itself is not different in Proxmox VE than with a default Debian installation. But avoid installing advanced, network daemons like NetworkManager as those are normally suited for desktops only and may interfere with Proxmox VEs network requirements.

Checkout the following references for setting up the wireless connection:

• https://wiki.debian.org/WiFi/HowToUse
• https://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1238387
• http://forums.debian.net/viewtopic.php?t=17199
• https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/WPA_supplicant#Configuration
• https://w1.fi/cgit/hostap/plain/wpa_supplicant/wpa_supplicant.conf

Guest Network Setup

Masquerading (NAT)

See the Masquerading (NAT) section of the Network Configuration article

Bridge Port

Note, as Access Points (APs) will reject frames that have a source address that didn’t authenticate with the AP. This is a problem with Linux Bridges as they transparently forward the network packets with the original source address of the CT or VM, but the AP only knows about the host source address, so it rejects those packets.

You can try to still add the wireless interface directly as bridge port by using extra ebtable rules to rewrite the source MAC address.