Unless you’re hosting VHDs and need maximum throughput (in which case use NFS), SMB is going to be the easiest to setup and maintain across those 4 platforms.
The Linux SMB implementation is decent and supports the latest version of the protocol (or close to, at least) whereas NFS in Windows ain’t so great and is a bit of a pig to get working in my experience.
Thirded. It’s helped me a lot with picking up the compose syntax, to the point that I’m now comfortable combining disparate services into their own stacks. And I can spin something up from an example compose in less than a minute.
Thanks, I’ll muse over this when I next get the chance!
Was looking into Docker volume backups just yesterday so this is perfect timing!
Thanks for the re-upvote. My guess is it was someone who sets timers on their phone. 😂
Dammit, now you’ve got my head swimming with ways to improve the washing machine stuff. I bet a vibration sensor on top could be combined with the smart plug power monitoring to detect when it’s being emptied.
How did you do the Google-turning-on-the-smartplug thing? I feel like I’m missing a lot of tricks by not having HA integrated into those. I just use them for audible notifications currently.
Yes please, I might revisit it with a fresh pair of eyes.
Thanks for the suggestion. I spent a good hour or two trying to make Wireguard work for me last night but failed. If I set it to only apply to Immich, nothing else would have Internet access at all. Likewise if I set the peer IP range to just my LAN subnet.
After pulling my hair out for a while I gave up and uninstalled.
The whole point of home automation is that it’s automated. Setting a timer on your phone is for chumps.
I have a similar thing to notify us when the washing machine is done, only without the cool presence stuff - I’ll have to look into your setup for that!
I also use a smart plug to monitor our toaster. Not for notifications but because it uses a mechanical timer that if it fails, will also fail to turn the element off, so it comes with dire warnings about always unplugging it after use. Instead I just have HA setup to turn off the plug if it ever draws power for more than 4 minutes.
Hmm I must be doing something wrong then because it doesn’t work for me.
If it was just me, or if Tailscale wasn’t such an insatiable battery leech then I’d absolutely do that but the wife (and kids) acceptance factor plays a big role, and they’re never going to accept having to toggle a separate service on and off to get to their photos.
Maybe I’m being overly paranoid but I work in IT and see the daily, near constant barrage of port scans and login attempts to our VPN service and it has an effect!
Very useful insights, thanks.
I do currently have external stuff running via a Cloudflare tunnel (which is why I need DNS based LE certs for the internal proxy) but I don’t know if it’s setup correctly (beyond doing basic reverse proxying) and the admin backend for it feels like massive overkill for a home setup. Plus with Immich I run into the issue of a) dire warnings about it being in active dev and potentially insecure and b) filesize limits making away-from-home backups difficult.
I could well be over thinking the whole thing.
Yeah I’m running a Cloudflare tunnel for external access (which is why I need DNS based LE certs), but that’s another thing that I don’t really know what it’s doing beyond basic reverse proxying.
I have a country-based whitelist for where my Immich instance can be accessed from but I find the Zero Trust admin backend to be massive overkill for my needs, and it doesn’t help that they’ve recently moved everything around so none of the guides out there point to the right places anymore!
Ah, that’s useful thanks!
it will either be underpowered or power hungry.
Or both!
Z2M. I had a ZHA setup and I’ll give it to them, it was super easy to setup (barely an inconvenience). Then I bought a set of sockets with power monitoring but found that they used a non-standard way of reporting those stats.
They were seemingly quite new and both ZHA and Z2M had ‘quirks’ submitted very quickly to make them work, but while the Z2M quirk was approved and added almost straight away, 2 or 3 months later I was still waiting for the ZHA one to be approved.
Then, like you, I wanted to change the Zigbee channel and took the opportunity to switch to Z2M where the sockets and their power monitoring have been working perfectly ever since. It’s definitely more complicated to setup initially but you get more control overall and, at least from my experience, the overall device support is much better.
Note: I did initially have loads of stability issues when making the switch, but it was due to me flashing the combined Zigbee+Thread firmware to my Sonoff stick. The fix was to turn off the OpenThread Border Router in the Silabs addon and then everything was stable again. I don’t have any Thread devices yet, of course.
This looks neat, will definitely give it a go, cheers!
I just recently put in an N100 mini PC to run as a Plex server. Cost me about £160, pulls all of 6W when idle, and it doesn’t break a sweat when transcoding no matter what I throw at it. As a media server I can’t recommend them highly enough.
This is the correct answer. Due to wear levelling, a traditional drive wipe program isn’t going to work reliably, whereas most (all?) SSDs have some sort of secure erase function.
It’s been a while since I read up on it but I think it works due to the drive encrypting everything that’s written to it, though you wouldn’t know it’s happening. When you call the secure erase function it just forgets the key and cycles in a new one, rendering everything previously written to it irrecoverable. The bonus is that it’s an incredibly quick operation.
Failing that, smash it to bits.
Very little. I have enough redundancy through regular snapshots and offsite backups that I’m confident enough to let Watchtower auto-update most of my containers once a week - the exceptions being pihole and Home Assistant. Pihole gets very few updates anyway, and I tend to skip the mid-month Home Assistant updates so that’s just a once a month thing to check for breaking changes before pushing the button.
Meanwhile my servers’ host OSes are stable LTS distros that require very little maintenance in and of themselves.
Ultimately I like to tinker, but once I’m done tinkering I want things to just work with very little input from me.
I have my dock plugged into a smart plug and the laptop set in the BIOS to turn on when it receives power. I have an NFC tag on my coffee machine that I bloop while I’m making my morning brew, and that turns the dock on so that everything’s ready when I move into the office.
For turning things off I have HASS.Agent installed and sending state updates (locked, unlocked, etc, which is useful for other automations) and when that sensor goes unavailable for 15 minutes it turns the plug off. I find that’s long enough to allow it to reboot for updates and what not.
The sensor does report shutdown, reboot, and sleep states but I found that it often happens too quickly to get the change sent, so the unavailable state is more reliable.