About

Nick–my real name is Nicola but that just feels weird so let’s stick with Nick–is as an apprentice to a systems administrator in a tech focused intentional community. After an important lesson in the need for documentation (a server crashed, we forgot how to set it back up, lost data, blah, blah, blah), Nick felt it was time to keep a record of the things he’d been learning, and his mentor told him to. 😑

The goal of this site is to have easy access to gained knowledge for later troubleshooting and help and inspire others to stand up their own personal grids, a.k.a. a home lab. And if you’re new to running your own server–so am I, I just became an apprentice–hopefully the guides and details recorded here will help you on your journey of self hosting, and disconnecting from the Public Internet, at least a little bit.

Nick is a fictional character, the persona of this site. Though the “narrative” is fictional, the actual information, tutorials, snippets, etc. are real and can be trusted. The real author, a Linux systems administrator who really has learned all of this information, is Michael Holley. Michael has been working in IT for 25+ years and felt it was important to make the knowledge he’s picked up over the years accessible to more people. He is also a writer of sci-fi and fantasy stories under the pen name Duke Holley. This site is a blend of those two interests. The technical documentation from his years in IT and a story of Nick and his journey to become digitally independent, as a sci-fi writer.