A small engineering journal. Mostly notes to myself about networking, observability and the unglamorous parts of running servers.
Every homelab starts the same way: one box, a handful of containers, and a promise that this time the setup will be documented. Two years later the promise is gone and the box is running ninety-three containers. These are the habits that kept mine alive.
You do not need a vendor to know what your machines are doing. A metrics agent, a log shipper and a dashboard that loads in under a second cover most of it.
Most TLS problems look like "it does not connect". A few openssl flags turn that into a specific answer: wrong SNI, expired chain, missing ALPN, or a server that simply refuses the cipher.