Nathan Reynolds

Self-hosting your own Git server gives you complete control over your code, ensures privacy for sensitive projects, and eliminates dependency on cloud services. Gitea is a lightweight, open-source Git service that provides a familiar GitHub-like interface while using a fraction of the resources. In this guide, I’ll walk you through how to self-host a Git … Read more

If you have ever spun up Uptime Kuma and then watched it break the moment you put it behind a reverse proxy, you are not alone. The dashboard spins, the “Connecting…” badge appears, and a few seconds later you get the dreaded “Cannot connect to the socket server. [Error: websocket error] Reconnecting…” message in the … Read more

I still remember the morning my home server went silent. Plex was buffering, my Nextcloud sync stalled, and I had no idea whether it was a CPU spike, a dying disk, or just a loose cable. That was the day I committed to monitoring home server Prometheus properly, and I have not looked back since. … Read more

I have hit this exact wall more times than I can count, and it is one of the most confusing problems in the Grafana stack. You open Prometheus, run a query, see clean metrics, then switch to your dashboard and every panel screams “No Data”. This guide is the diagnostic path I now use whenever … Read more

An imported Node Exporter Grafana dashboard renders empty panels when the dashboard’s PromQL queries cannot find matching time series in Prometheus. The most common causes are a datasource name mismatch on import, unresolved template variables, wrong job label, missing uname module, or Node Exporter version drift that renamed metrics. I have rebuilt this dashboard for … Read more

You open the Prometheus targets page and see it: a target you depend on is marked DOWN, and the error column reads “context deadline exceeded.” I have been there more times than I can count, and so have hundreds of engineers on the Prometheus mailing lists and community forums. The error looks simple, but the … Read more

Updating Docker containers by hand gets old fast. I ran 18 services on a homelab box and noticed some of them were quietly running six-month-old images with known CVEs. That is when I built my first Watchtower setup. A week later, three of those services had auto-updated themselves without me lifting a finger. This guide … Read more

It’s 3 AM. Your deploy script just failed for the third time. The error log screams Permission denied when your container tries to write to a bind-mounted volume. You tested everything on your Mac yesterday – it worked perfectly. Now production is down, your phone is buzzing, and someone in Slack is suggesting chmod 777 … Read more

I have spent more weekends than I want to count staring at a 502 Bad Gateway page served by Nginx Proxy Manager. Most of those hours came down to one of five repeatable causes, and almost every fix was a one-line change I could have applied in five minutes if I had known where to … Read more

Running multiple self-hosted services behind a single domain without manually managing SSL certificates used to be a tedious chore. I’ve spent the past two years testing reverse proxy configurations across home lab and VPS environments, and Caddy consistently removes the friction that makes people delay securing their services. Setting up Caddy as a reverse proxy … Read more