Homelab the Right Way: Proxmox, OPNsense & Home Assistant Without the Pain

Your homelab mostly works. This book makes sure it keeps working.

Homelab the Right Way is a practical, opinionated field guide for intermediate self-hosters running Proxmox, OPNsense and Home Assistant. It skips the beginner tour and goes straight to the lessons people usually learn the hard way: backup jobs that quietly stop covering new guests, NFS shares that fill the root disk, two-node clusters that freeze, linked clones that break when someone deletes a "junk" template, and VPN kill switches that leak.

Every chapter shows the trap, the fix, and a checklist, with copy-paste commands and scripts throughout. You'll build a firewalled servers network with an automatic fallback gateway, decide which services must exit on your home IP, harden DNS and the guest Wi-Fi, size Suricata to your RAM, get Home Assistant backups off-site, and set up Tailscale remote access. It finishes with a one-page Weekend Hardening Checklist.

What you get

• Backups you can trust: one job that covers every guest, loud failure alerts, and a tested restore routine.
• Delete without fear: a backup, verify, destroy recipe that never touches templates or linked-clone bases.
• A firewall that does what you think: DNS over TLS, DNSSEC, an isolated guest network and a VPN kill switch that fails closed.
• Servers behind OPNsense with a host watchdog that keeps them online if the firewall VM dies.
• A printable one-page Weekend Hardening Checklist, plus a command cheat sheet for Proxmox, OPNsense, Home Assistant, MQTT and Tailscale.

40 pages. Instant download: PDF (7x10 in) and EPUB 3.