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.
Connect with me 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 want the middle: what actually broke, why it broke, and a script or config you can copy-paste and adapt — sanitized, tested on my own setup, no fluff.
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.
Elsewhere
For deeper operational runbooks and guides beyond what lands here, I keep a running set of homelab notes and scripts — some of what turns into a post here starts life there first.
Got a fix or a war story for the same kind of problem? I’d like to hear it — reach out on LinkedIn .