Home Server with Proxmox: What I Learned Building It From Scratch

It started with a simple idea: I wanted my own place where I could deploy something, break it, and fix it without consequences. Proxmox was the choice because it offers virtual machines and containers in one panel, and it teaches you to think about resources: how much memory, how many cores, where the disks are located.

What's Running On It

Several virtual machines for experiments and a separate container for services that just need to run. Plus Docker, because most things are quicker to spin up as an image than to configure manually. Backups run automatically, on a schedule, because I once lost a configuration and didn't want to repeat that experience.

Three Things I Learned

First: the network is always the first suspect. Before I started tinkering with a service, it usually turned out the problem was with the bridge or the addressing.

Second: if something doesn't boot, logs know more than intuition. I learned to read them from the end and look for the first error, not the last.

Third: it's worth documenting what has changed. A simple notes file saved me more time than many tutorials.

This isn't enterprise infrastructure, and I'm not pretending it is. But when I see a hypervisor, a VM, or a container at work, I'll know what I'm looking at.