I don’t have any books in particular to recommend, but with homelab’ing we should be learning about the command line of our OS(Powershell, terminal(bash, zsh)).

Learning the ins and outs of something like bash, cron, environment variables, for loops, systemd services(managing, creating your own), command line networking…all things I’ve had to learn to either setup, manage, and/or troubleshoot my homelab.

So maybe basic Linux command line books? Probably O’Reilly has some along with bash.

This is pretty much my setup as well. Proxmox on bare metal, then everything I do are in Ubuntu LXC containers, which have docker installed inside each of them running whatever docker stack.

I just installed Portainer and got the standalone agents installed on each LXC container, so it’s helped massively with managing each docker setup.

Of course you can do whatever base image you want for the LXC container, I just prefer Ubuntu for my homelab.

I do need to setup a golden image though to make stand-ups easier…one thing at a time though!

While I love and run Grafana and Prometheus myself, it’s like taking a RPG to an ant.

There are simpler tools that do the job just fine of “is X broken?”.

Even just running Portainer and attaching it to a bunch of standalone Docker environments is pretty good too.

I run proxmox for my own homelab and another instance for very small services inside my LAN.

Anyway, I have gotten into docker recently and my method so far has been to spin up a LXC container of just a base OS(like Ubuntu or Alpine or whatever) and then install docker and whatever else inside that container and then run my service.

So I have one container per service. Now my problem is how to manage the docker side without having to go into each container individually. I have tried portainer but it’s not clicking with me.

I’ve actually been trying to find a solution to just have docker on a bare metal OS install and that be my hypervisor, but I can’t get a clear answer on anything, so Proxmox seems to be my only option.

Proxmox is a very solid option, but it is not “less intensive” than Debian since it is built on top of Debian. Proxmox does not install a desktop environment(it has a web GUI), so that may help with keeping resources low, but it isn’t some magical solution.

I would recommend trying it 100%, there is a little bit of a learning curve getting to know Proxmox, but it’s the best hypervisor I’ve used for homelab so far.

Your situation sounds like a two server solution for local. So one server for hypervisor/vms and then snapshots and backups go to a separate box like a NAS. As for “house burning down”, a solution for that is off-site backups. I’m guessing building a small TrueNAS server and installing it at a friend’s house or your parents or whatever and then find a backup solution to sync(syncthing may be an answer here for you?).

I don’t care about my homelab much, but I do care about my family photos. For that I follow my own 3-2-1 where:

3 copies of my data

2 copies are local

1 copy is off-site

I have a NAS at my house and another NAS at my parents house. They are both linked with syncthing and I do a one-way backup to the other NAS. Now, my parents are a 10 minutes away by car, so I consider that NAS “local”.

And then I backup my NAS to backblaze for my off-site backup.

I like Bit warden for someone like my mom, but I have my keepass setup with sync thing and 2fa and I’m beyond happy with that. Simple and effective.

I showed interest at around this age and my dad showed me CentOS and building basic webpages. I didn’t take too much interest in that, but I asked him if we could build a Counter Strike server and he obliged. He’s a nerd himself so we had a static IP for the server and everything. Worked well!

Anyway, I would recommend getting an old desktop and installing Ubuntu server or desktop edition with a desktop environment. Show him how to navigate the command line and what that means if you follow the file explorer at the same time. And then hosting very basic things(webpages, local game servers, etc.).

He might really latch onto it, or might not be interested whatsoever. I latched onto it, ended up building my own PCs soon after, and have my own homelab and I work as a full time Linux sysadmin now.