Setting up Mosquitto MQTT broker with Zigbee2MQTT and Home Assistant is the backbone of a reliable local smart home. I have run this exact stack on three different installations, and the configuration pattern you are about to follow is the one I keep coming back to. Once you have the MQTT broker wired in, every … Read more
I have seen the look on someone’s face when they realize their self-hosted photo library, password manager, or Git server just vanished. Usually the culprit is a stray docker compose down -v, a well-meaning docker volume prune, or a host failure with no recent backup. If you are running any self-hosted service in Docker, learning … Read more
I built a Vaultwarden server in my home lab two years ago and never looked back. The whole thing runs on a small VPS with under 200 MB of RAM, syncs across my laptop, phone, and a spare tablet, and gives me full ownership of my password database. This guide walks you through setting up … Read more
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