Recovery
Well, it finally happened; now you need to restore a Virtual Machine, Container, or worse yet, the hypervisor host.
Snapshots
It goes without saying, but the easiest way to recover is from a snapshot which you made before you made a change that broke your Virtual Machine or Container — you did take a snapshot, right? The easiest way is to increment or rollback snapshots via the GUI under the Snapshots option for each of them, but if you need to do it by the command line, then you can.
First, obtain a list of your Virtual Machines or Containers in order to obtain their ID:
Virtual Machine | Container |
---|---|
qm list | pct list |
To make a snapshot:
Virtual Machines allow you to save the state of RAM with a snapshot (vmstate
) on top of their storage and configuration, while as Containers can only snapshot their storage and configuration.
Virtual Machine | Container |
---|---|
qm snapshot \ | pct snapshot \ |
To list the snapshots:
Virtual Machine | Container |
---|---|
qm listsnapshot 100 | pct listsnapshot 100 |
To restore a snapshot:
Suppose that something went awry while I was on Christmas vacation, and I wanted to pave over the changes with the last working state and boot the Virtual Machine or Container after a successful snapshot rollback (start
):
Virtual Machine | Container |
---|---|
qm rollback \ |
|
Console

WARNING: when these steps are completed, this will expose your Proxmox host’s GUI and SSH to the Internet.
Please ensure that you’re using a difficult password for your Proxmox root account, which you can reset after launching it via the QEMU emulator.
Remember the initial installation process above? Reboot the server into Rescue mode so that you can load Proxmox via QEMU and login with root
and your password:



List the Virtual Machines and/or Containers to get their IDs and turn off auto-booting for each.
Using the ID of 100
as an example for a Virtual Machine or Container, and to disable it from booting, use:
Virtual Machine | Container |
---|---|
qm set 100 --onboot 0 | pct set 100 --onboot 0 |
Turn off the Proxmox firewall for the entire cluster if you enabled it:
sed -i \
's/^enable: .*/enable: 0/' \
/etc/pve/firewall/cluster.fw \
;
Replace /etc/network/interfaces
with the recovery configuration:
cp -va \
/etc/network/config-recovery \
/etc/network/interfaces \
;
Now you can shut down Proxmox from within QEMU:
shutdown -h now
In the rescue shell, reboot the physical server, which should load into Proxmox:
reboot
4 replies on “Deploying Proxmox 7 behind a firewall VM”
Excelente post
Thanks, John!
Great post. Thank you so much – exactly what I was looking for!
But I’m missing a step-by-step guide to include Traefik 2 to your setup.
Or can’t I simply find it?
Hi Fred,
I try to split complex topics into their own articles. You can find my Traefik 2 guide at https://LTG.FYI/Traefik-2. Please let me know if you have further questions, and I’ll try to answer them here or perhaps write additional articles.
Best regards,
Louis