A Machinist Wires CNC Mills Into a Proxmox Server
At a lot of machine shops, one person ends up as "the IT guy" without asking for the job or training for it. It happens because the actual IT department is three buildings away, doesn't answer emails and treats the shop floor like it runs on magic. So you do what machinists have always done and figure it out yourself.
That is what happened here. An old workstation got repurposed, an old Asus router became the backbone, and a private LAN went up with no WAN access and no corporate oversight. There are two CNC mills, file transfers of a few megabytes each, and FileZilla Client handling FTP, but only from the one PC that is physically wired to the machines. That is the breaking point, because walking files around on USB sticks in 2026 feels ridiculous.
The problem isn't Proxmox
On the surface, the question sounds technical:
Should I spin up a Windows VM to run FileZilla? Or is there a better way?
The underlying question is how to stop a CNC workflow from being physically tied to one machine. Right now the flow looks like this:
- CAM software on PC
- Export program
- Transfer to USB or directly wired PC
- FTP into the mill
- Run the job
It works, barely. It is fragile, manual and slow, and it won't scale once the Mazak lathes arrive later.
The shop floor reality
A machine shop is a long way from a data center. There's oil in the air, chips everywhere and someone running a horizontal that sounds like a jet engine, and somewhere in the corner a beige PC is the only thing allowed to talk to the mills.
Other people in the thread chimed in right away:
Tired of using USB sticks and floppies on the old ones.
That line lands because the thread is really about dragging legacy manufacturing workflows toward modern networking. Some people even suggested Gotek-style floppy drive emulators that let old machines read USB as if it were still 1998. The range runs from floppies to Proxmox virtualization clusters, which sums up manufacturing IT pretty well.
So should you run FileZilla in a Windows VM?
Not if you can avoid it. Running FileZilla Client inside a Windows VM recreates the current problem in a fancier box. You would still be logging into a specific VM, using a specific interface and acting as the middleman. That is virtualization cosplay.
What you want is a central FTP server that every CNC machine connects to and every shop PC can reach.
The answer hiding in the comments
Someone mentioned it almost in passing:
If all you need is FTP access, Proxmox helper scripts have FTP LXC options.
That points in the right direction. Instead of a Windows VM running FileZilla Client, you spin up a lightweight Linux container (LXC), install vsftpd or another FTP server, create shared storage and point every CNC machine at that central server. Every PC on the private LAN can then drop programs into a shared folder, the mills pull from the same source, and the USB shuffle ends. Because it all sits on a private LAN with no WAN access, security stays manageable.
The frustration boils over
The conversation then turned tense. Someone asked about architecture, protocols, wiring and data flow, and the reply came back sharp:
Sorry for not being an IT Admin with 5 years of Proxmox experience. I downloaded Proxmox 4 days ago for the first time in my life and I'm learning it all as I go.
The person asking is a machinist reverse-engineering networking because nobody else will help. "Basic questions" are relative, and what is basic to a sysadmin isn't basic to someone who runs a vertical mill all day. The machinist's comparison was perfect:
That’s like you walking into my machine shop and I get pissed off because you don’t know the names of basic tools.
Every field has things that seem obvious to the people inside it and nobody else.
What's actually running on the mills?
Another important detail slipped into the thread: the mills run Fanuc controls. They aren't conversational machines, and they likely support FTP. That matters a lot, because native FTP support makes the architecture straightforward:
- Static IP for each CNC
- Central FTP server on Proxmox
- Shared storage inside that container
- Permissions per machine or operator
That needs no Windows VM and no GUI, only network plumbing.
The future-proof angle
Remember the edit at the top of the post:
Down the road, I will need other VMs to connect to other machines. I’ll be adding Mazak lathes later.
That is why Proxmox makes sense here. The goal is infrastructure that outlasts today's two-mill problem. Later you might want a VM for monitoring, a database for job tracking, a web interface for program versioning, backups and network segmentation. Starting with virtualization gives you that runway, even while today's workload is megabyte-sized NC files.
The right way to think about this
Stop asking how to run FileZilla and ask what your data flow needs to look like. Right now it is:
PC → Machine (directly)
You want:
Any PC → Central Server → Any Machine
Once that shift is clear, the solution is about services instead of Windows.
What I'd build in that shop
If this were my shop floor, here's the playbook:
- Create a Linux LXC container on Proxmox.
- Install a lightweight FTP server (vsftpd).
- Mount storage inside the container.
- Assign static IPs to all CNCs.
- Configure each CNC to connect to the central FTP server.
- Give each operator credentials.
- Map that same FTP share to every shop PC.
After that, CAM exports go to the central share, the mills pull programs directly, and nobody walks USB drives across the floor. Because it's a private LAN with no WAN, you're also insulated from corporate firewall drama.
The bigger story
This is also a story about a shop floor modernizing itself, with machinists who stop waiting for IT approval and someone who downloaded Proxmox four days ago already planning infrastructure for Mazak lathes. That is initiative, and it is how most small manufacturing IT systems get started: out of frustration more than policy.
The emotional undercurrent
The thread has a raw feel to it: pride in building your own server, irritation at vague questions, the exhaustion of juggling two trades, and a stubborn refusal to stay stuck in floppy-disk purgatory. Underneath all of it is a machinist learning infrastructure on the job.
The line between manufacturing and IT has blurred. Sometimes the person who knows feeds and speeds better than anyone in the building is also the one racking the server, and that is a good sign for shop floors.