Getting Started
New to homelabbing? This is the order I would read these posts in if I were starting over. Each stage builds on the one before it.
1. Start Here
The overview post. Read this first to see the whole shape of a homelab before diving into any one piece.
2. Get Services Online Safely
Expose services to the internet without opening a single firewall port.
3. Automate Provisioning
Stop SSH-ing into hosts by hand. Ansible and a web UI in front of it handle VM lifecycle and config drift.
4. Monitor Everything
If a service matters enough to run, it matters enough to monitor. Zabbix is the backbone here.
5. Put the GPU to Work
Hardware transcoding and local LLM inference, both running from LXC containers, sharing two GPUs.
6. Add AI on Top
Once monitoring and automation exist, a local LLM can read alerts for you and Claude can talk to the whole stack directly.
7. Learn From the Failures
Two real debugging stories: a subtle Ansible/Zabbix PSK bug and a Proxmox networking quirk that silently drops LXC containers off the network. See the full list on the Lessons Learned page.
Want the full list of posts, or the infrastructure diagram this guide is built on top of?