Nathan Reynolds

I have been running Docker containers on every kind of VPS you can imagine for the past five years, from budget 2GB instances to full bare-metal boxes with 64 cores. Picking the best VPS for hosting Docker containers is not about finding the cheapest server or the one with the most cores. It is about … Read more

Running large language models on your own machine has gone from hobby to mainstream, and the best NVIDIA GPU for Ollama local LLMs can turn an old desktop into a private AI workstation. I tested 10 cards over the past three months, running Llama 3.1 70B, Qwen 2.5, DeepSeek R1, and Phi-4 at different quantization … Read more

Running two home servers from a single monitor used to be a headache. I used to keep a spare keyboard and mouse on my desk just so I could physically swap them between boxes whenever I needed to check on a backup job or reboot a container host. Then I finally picked up a proper … Read more

If you live in a terminal, IDE, and a dozen browser tabs at the same time, you already know a 16:9 panel starts to feel cramped fast. We have spent the last several weeks testing ultrawide displays on Ubuntu 24.04, Fedora 41, and Arch with both Wayland and X11 sessions, and the difference is dramatic. … Read more

I burned through three different keyboards in my first year as a Linux sysadmin before I understood what actually matters. A Razer Huntsman died after a Synapse firmware update that refused to flash without Windows. A Corsair K70 worked as a basic HID device, but every RGB feature sat behind iCUE. The lesson was hard: … Read more

When your home server freezes at 2 AM and SSH is dead, you need a way to power-cycle it without driving across town. I’ve run self-hosted services for over a decade, and the single most reliable safety net I ever installed was a smart plug wired into the rack. A smart plug to remotely reboot … Read more

I built my first homelab in a corner of my home office with a Raspberry Pi, a 12-port switch, and a half-dozen old laptop parts. Within a week I had stripped three Phillips heads, lost two screws behind a server rack, and cursed at a Torx fastener I did not own the right bit for. … Read more

I learned this the hard way after my third re-cabling job in two years. I had printed little stickers from a basic home label maker, slapped them on the patch cables behind my rack, and six months later I was peeling cracked, faded squares off every Cat6 run. Half of them had disappeared entirely. The … Read more

I built my first Raspberry Pi cluster on a precarious stack of cardboard boxes, and within two weeks I was cleaning up spilled coffee from a shorted Pi 4. That mess taught me one thing: if you’re running multiple Pis as a homelab, Kubernetes testbed, or self-hosted server, you need a real rack. After spending … Read more

I built my first homelab in a closet, with three mini PCs stacked on a wire shelf held up by zip ties. Six months later, the cables looked like a sea creature and the shelf was sagging. That is the moment I fell down the rabbit hole of 3D printed rack mounts for mini PCs, … Read more