About

I'm Remco Vallinga, an IT Architect by day and a homelab geek by every evening and weekend since. Homelab Haven is where I write up the fixes and root causes I don't want to have to rediscover in a year: the kind of post I wish I'd found myself the first time something broke.

Questions, corrections, or something broke in a way this site doesn't cover yet? Email hello@homelabhaven.com, or connect on LinkedIn.

Why this blog

Most homelab write-ups either stop at "here's the command that fixed it" or go the opposite direction and read like vendor documentation. I write these up so anyone who runs into the same problem (or even just the same question) doesn't have to start from scratch: what actually broke, why it broke, and a script or config you can copy-paste and adapt.

This isn't a Synology-only blog, or a Docker-only blog. If it runs in my house and it breaks in an interesting way, it's fair game: Synology DSM, Docker Compose, Home Assistant, Kubernetes, or whatever's next.

I run a small self-hosted stack at home: a Synology NAS plus a dedicated Linux/Docker host, a reverse proxy fronted by Cloudflare Tunnel, Home Assistant for the smart home side, and a handful of self-hosted apps for media, recipes, and automation. The posts here are the write-ups from actually running and breaking that stuff, not a tour of the infrastructure itself.

How these posts get written

Every post starts as something that actually happened on my own hardware: a container that wouldn't start, a sync that silently stopped, a VM that ate its USB stick after a reboot. I write up the root cause once it's genuinely understood, not just worked around, and every command and compose file is sanitized from the real one and re-tested before it goes in. If a post's fix stops working because upstream changed, I'd rather hear about it than leave it wrong. hello@homelabhaven.com or LinkedIn both reach me.

Where to start

If you're setting up something similar, the Docker management posts are the foundation everything else builds on. From there: self-hosted media covers the full Sonarr/Radarr/Prowlarr pipeline as an eight-part series, Remote Access covers Cloudflare Tunnel vs. Tailscale in three parts, Synology has the DSM-specific fixes that generic Linux advice misses, and Home Assistant covers dashboards, automations, and the experiments running on top of them. Or just browse every post. It's grouped by topic, with the recommended starting point pinned at the top of each section. There's also search if you already know what broke.

Following along

New posts land on the RSS feed: no newsletter, no tracking beyond cookieless, self-hosted analytics. If a post saved you an evening of debugging and you feel like it, there's a Ko-fi. It keeps the domain renewed and the site ad-light. Neither is ever required to read anything here.