Nathan Reynolds

Running self-hosted services on your home network without HTTPS means dealing with browser warnings every single time. Self-signed certificates do not fix that problem because your browser still does not trust them. The real fix is a free, trusted certificate from Let’s Encrypt, and the Let’s Encrypt DNS challenge is the method that makes it … Read more

If you have ever launched two Docker containers and tried to make one talk to the other, you have probably hit the same wall I did the first time. You connected to the first container, typed ping db, and watched the request die with ping: bad address ‘db’. The container was right there, two seconds … Read more

If you run Jellyfin in Docker on an Intel CPU and your fans spin up to full speed every time someone plays a 4K HDR movie, hardware transcoding is not working. The good news is that Intel Quick Sync Video, often abbreviated QSV, is built into almost every Intel processor from 8th-gen Coffee Lake onward. … Read more

I have run Jellyfin at home for years, and I can tell you with absolute certainty: opening port 8096 to the internet is a security nightmare you do not want. Bots hit that port within minutes of going live, your login page ends up in Shodan, and unencrypted traffic means anyone on your coffee-shop Wi-Fi … Read more

If you manage a Nextcloud instance in Docker, you have probably seen a yellow banner in your administration overview that reads “The database is missing some indexes.” This warning is common after upgrades and it is easy to fix once you understand what Nextcloud is asking for. In this guide I will walk you through … Read more

Nextcloud background jobs are automated maintenance tasks that run quietly behind your instance, cleaning up file versions, emptying the trash bin, processing notifications, syncing external storage, and tidying the database. Out of the box, Nextcloud ships three ways to schedule these jobs: AJAX (the default), Webcron, and system cron. If you want to move Nextcloud … Read more

I set up my first Linux mini PC as a kitchen dashboard a few years ago, and the hardest part was not the hardware. It was convincing the OS to skip the login screen and boot straight into a single browser window, then keep that window alive forever. This guide walks through the exact workflow … Read more

Fedora uses the Btrfs filesystem by default on most installations, but unlike openSUSE, it does not enable automatic BTRFS snapshots out of the box. That means your system is one bad dnf upgrade away from a broken boot. In this guide, I will walk you through configuring automatic BTRFS snapshots on Fedora with Snapper, Btrfs … Read more

Switching from X11 to Wayland on Linux Mint sounds intimidating, but the actual process takes about 30 seconds once you know where to click. The harder part is knowing what to do when an app misbehaves after the change. I have rolled back more times than I can count across my own test machines, and … Read more

When I rebuilt my homelab for the third time in two years, I knew I was done with manual setups. Setting up NixOS declaratively for a reproducible home server configuration turned a weekend of frustration into a 10-minute rebuild. In this guide, I will walk you through the exact workflow I use on my own … Read more