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Show HN: Proxmox -> Share your host's Bluetooth with a VM over the network

22 points by wmehanna

by zbentley

3 subcomments

Don’t download this. It’s a curl | bash installer for a binary whose sources appear to just … be the popular FOSS bluez btproxy tool, which it downloads and builds, and whose binaries are checked into the repo. But those binaries could just as easily be malware, and every Linux distribution under the sun has bluez as a first-class package.
Assuming that this repo is well intentioned, this should have been a blog post on how to install bluez for your platform and use its proxy tool, with some shell one liners provided to make that easy. Not a curl | bash installer for something totally opaque, which turns out to be another project’s software basically renamed into this repo.
This is not the way. Also potentially a license or trademark/name issue.

by poisonborz

0 subcomment

Or just buy a $15 dongle instead of the crap interference-laden onboard BT and have problem-free USB passtrough as well.

by spikk

1 subcomments

It is a little bit weird to me having a rule of first unauthenticated client side request winning here

by wmehanna

1 subcomments

Hi HN, I built this after hitting a wall with Bluetooth passthrough on Proxmox: Intel's onboard Bluetooth/WiFi combo chips (BE200, AX210, AX211, and others) are built so only the machine that boots them can drive them. Hand the chip to a VM via USB passthrough and it wipes its own firmware, no setting fixes it. It's how the hardware works. Also flaky on gaming distros like ChimeraOS/Bazzite even with add-on dongles :-/
Instead of fighting passthrough, this keeps the adapter on the Proxmox host, let's share it into the VM over the local network via BlueZ. 2 simple commands: run the installer on the host, run it again inside the VM pointing at the host's IP. The VM sees a normal Bluetooth adapter and pairs like usual. Both sides auto-reconnect on reboot.
Works for game controllers in a gaming VM, Home Assistant BLE sensors, headphones, anything that expects a normal adapter.
I would be happy to answer questions about the approach.