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The Homelab Decision Guide: A book about decisions, not commands.
Paperback
Publisher: Independently Published
Published: Jul 24 2026
Pages: 82
Weight: 0.27
Height: 0.17 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
A homelab is a hobby, and the moment it stops being one, something has gone wrong.
This is not a click-by-click tutorial. Install commands rot, version numbers rot, screenshots rot fastest of all. This is a book about the decisions that don't: what to virtualize, how to segment a network so a smart plug can't reach your files, what deserves to be code and what deserves to be written down, and what's worth monitoring versus what's just noise with a dashboard.
What's inside:
- Hardware: what to buy, what to wait on, and what a used enterprise machine actually costs you
- Platform: Docker, Proxmox, or Kubernetes, and how to tell which one your lab needs
- Network segmentation that survives contact with real devices, not just a diagram
- Infrastructure as code: what to script, what to write down, and what to leave alone
- Choosing services you'll actually use, and dropping the ones you won't
- Backups that restore, not just run
- Monitoring you don't eventually learn to ignore
Victor Da Luz built and rebuilt his own homelab through failed migrations, a DNS leak that took months to notice, and services nobody ever used. Every chapter opens with one of those failures, pulls the reusable questions out of it, and ends with a decision tree and an exercise for your own lab.
Ten worksheets. Real decision trees. Nothing to buy before you've decided you need it.
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