Nathan Reynolds

Doing a fresh Fedora install while preserving your /home partition lets you wipe and rebuild the operating system without touching your personal files, browser bookmarks, dotfiles, or application configurations. That single concept saves hours of backup-and-restore work every time you need to clean reinstall Fedora. I have done this exact procedure on my own Fedora … Read more

Migrating a Linux install between machines by backing up and restoring package lists is the fastest way to reproduce a working system on new hardware without manually re-downloading every tool you rely on. I have migrated Ubuntu servers, Arch workstations, and Debian laptops over the years, and the package list method beats disk cloning for … Read more

If you already have Ubuntu Desktop installed and want to turn it into a headless server without reinstalling the operating system, this guide walks you through the whole process. I have done this on a Mini PC I use as a Jellyfin media box, and I will share the exact commands plus the mistakes I … Read more

A minimal Debian install gives you a fast, lightweight system with almost nothing preconfigured. That means timezone, keyboard layout, and locale settings are often left at defaults that do not match your actual location or hardware. I have set up dozens of headless Debian servers and containers, and getting these three settings right early saves … Read more

Running Ubuntu 24.04 on a 1 GB or 2 GB VPS? I have been in that spot more times than I can count, and swap is the difference between a server that survives a traffic spike and one that dies the moment a backup job starts. In this guide I will show you how to … Read more

If you have ever typed docker run five times in a row just to bring your media stack back online after a reboot, you already know why the docker compose stack structure matters. I built my first home server the same way — half a dozen containers started individually, scattered environment variables, and a sticky … Read more

Every system administrator has been there. You write a quick Bash backup script, schedule it with cron, and walk away thinking the job is done. Then two weeks later you discover your backups have been silently failing the entire time because a single command returned an error and Bash happily kept going. This guide covers … Read more

I’ve lost count of how many times a custom script crashed at 3 AM and I only found out the next morning when a customer complained. If you run any kind of background process on Linux, you already know the feeling. That’s exactly why I built my first systemd service for a custom script that … Read more

It is 3 AM and your monitoring system fires an alert. A critical service went down, and every restart attempt fails. You SSH into the server, run systemctl status, and stare at a wall of text with cryptic exit codes. If you have been there, you know the frustration. The good news is that systemd … Read more

Cron has been the default scheduler on Linux for decades, and it still works fine for simple tasks. But when I started running more complex jobs on production servers, cron’s limitations became obvious. After migrating a dozen jobs from cron to systemd timers on our team’s infrastructure, the difference was clear. Better logging, dependency handling, … Read more