Euphemistically, arr containers. But my use case was to find an amusing way to learn Docker Compose and eventually kubernetes (which I have yet to try). A great bunch of container apps that let you find public domain media.
Never got around to getting a physical button, but I got a few dozen NFC tags from amazon a while back. They are quite unobtrusive so it's no bother to just quickly tap the phone.
For my bedtime routine I have it fire when I start charging my phone. There’s an iOS shortcut that fires an HA event when I plug or unplug my phone, and if we’re all home and it’s after bedtime it turns everything off and sets the alarm
Huh, that's a pretty great idea/workflow! I'm still figuring out HA's scripting. I find the JSON based DSL to be pretty awkward so far, so I haven't experimented with it much.
I felt that way too and didn’t like the point and click interface of nodered. Instead, I’m using appdaemon which lets me write all automations using actual code (python) along with the VSCode plugin for HASSOS (not my editor of choice but it’s the only available one)
I wanted sleep tracking without a fitness band or watch, so I got a sleep mat from Withings. It works as intended and is also great for bedtime triggers.
I've got an msi desktop gaming PC, an LG CX OLED TV, and a Yamaha RX-A2A receiver and they never played well together. The kids always had a hard time getting them all on at once and set to the right inputs and launching steam.
So I created a Home Assistant automation that does all that, bought a Zwave button that sits on the coffee table, and now they just turn it all on with one button like it's a video game console.
Nice. Though about adding blinds? I got some from IKEA about a year a go and have been super happy with them. Have them set to open 45min after sunrise, and close 30min before. Love em.
With the Ikea blinds, the motor is built into the tube the shade rolls around (for roller shades) or in the top of the blind (for the cellular blinds). There is a rechargeable battery pack that slots in at the top and a remote to control the shades. Nothing to hard wire. Search "Ikea TREDANSEN motorized blind" and you'll find the product page.
The only issue with the Ikea shades is that they can't be cut - so they'll only work for you if your window is the size of shades they carry. None of the Ikea sizes worked for me, I ended up taking the measurements and just ordering custom cut shades from a company called Select Blinds. A little more expensive than Ikea, but the quality does seem a bit better.
Gotcha. I was asking because we just got a new set of blinds that are decidedly not motorized. I think I've seen some third party motors you can add though.
What is the modern/idiomatic platform to do IoT? Specifically the rudimentary stuff like light bulbs, electrical outlets, etc. Is zigbee the way to go?
Tracks (GTD style ToDo webapp, wrote an Android app for it)
HappyAPI: I use it to maintain a chat accessible villager trade inventory for our Minecraft server (HappyAPI allows players to associate an IP with there Minecraft name on that server, so you can send "/h RedNifre Mending" and get a response with all villagers that sell Mending)
Do you federate your Matrix server with the main network? Which implementation do you use, if you don't mind me asking, and what has been your experience?
Yes, I do federate (I also use it for IRC and you need federation to access the liberachat IRC-Matrix bridge). Besides that I have just one other active user.
I use synapse as the server and Element as the client. I had tried out a bunch of other clients a few months ago, but found Element to be the most mature.
My experience has been pretty great overall. There were a few early issues (relating largely to a slightly weird network setup) but otherwise it works very well once setup.
Recently when I was trying to setup Mastodon, I realized how much more mature the setup process for synapse was. The setup needed for networking is better documented and they have a tool for testing if federation is working (and if not, attempting to provide an explanation why). This made it relatively easy to set things up correctly for my network compared to Mastodon, where I finally just gave up and setup a digitalocean droplet instead.
Functionality wise, everything works pretty well, E2EE requires a bit of preplanning to maintain across devices (ie. Keeping a backup of the keys or having the key store setup) but that's reasonable. The spaces feature needs a bit of UI polish but otherwise provides a similar hierarchical channel grouping system as Discord and Slack.
I can't really think of any other particular criticisms I have of it except that to administrate a server we still seem to have to lean on a third party application, synapse-admin (or hand write curl requests), it would be nice for it to just be incorporated into the client or into the server. I haven't had to use it much due to not having many users, but I imagine it's pretty relevant for servers with more users.
I've tried running Synapse (and was partially successful) a little while ago but didn't try to federate as I never took the basic hosting of it anywhere.
I will try again when I have my new home infra set up.
I’ve never been one for the managed password apps like onepass or lastpass. Instead for years now I’ve kept everything in keepass shared out through Caldav. There’s an application on every single OS or marketplace that’s compatible.
I do the same thing with NextCloud as the host for the password database. Combined with it keeping old versions, I've been able to recover from accidentally corrupted files from bad cell connections (though this hasn't happened in a long time)
I've used keepass for close to a decade, and synched via dropbox originally but utlimately switched to nextcloud for the synching...but, curious how and why you are sharing via *Caldav*? Care to share the "how" and the "why"?
I REALLY want to start self-hosting but I can't afford a separate homeserver. I have a personal list of software to self-host and have looked into VPS providers like DO, Vultr, Linode & Hetzner.
While they're cheap, should I really self-host on shared CPUs because that's all I can afford right now.
My basic system would be Pi-Hole, Miniflux, Linkding. Maybe Bitwarden.
What would be a good way to get started? Any suggestions are welcome.
A Pi will run a lot. Next step up is an Intel Nuc. An old one is fine but the newer the better. The 11th gen is rather powerful, but even the 8th is pretty great.
This is exactly my setup. I build a new desktop from scrath every 5-7 years (upgrading incrementally in between) and my last desktop is now my server. Added 5 pairs of 10tb drives using zfs and the thing is so reliable I sometimes forget I'm hosting it at home.
I have it connected to a small UPS due to the occasional random brown-out in my neighborhood. The server only runs on the UPS for about 15 minutes, but during the rare substantial power outage, that's enough for me to power it down gently.
I also have a little desktop Lenovo PC I found cheap (used) at microcenter that I use as my primary zwave hub with a custom MQTT/JS based home automation script. This replaced a Raspberry Pi, which I loved, but after losing the storage a couple times, I no longer rely upon as a primary server
You can pick up an HP MicroServer for around $400 on ebay… this is my plan, as I am also on a tight budget, and burning cash, even a $5/mo Droplet, is just more than I wish to spend.
Bonus, those MicroServers are supported by ESXi, IIRC
I got an ecc-ready used workstation on Ebay. After adding a smallish SSD for the system drive and upgrading the memory to 16GB I think my total cost was in the neighborhood of $200. Cost about as much as two top-end fully-equipped (case, heat sinks, disk) Pi4s, but is much more powerful, and, conveniently, includes space & ports for my SATA spinning-rust bulk storage disks.
It is a (fairly small) desktop tower, so it takes up quite a bit more space than a couple of Pis, though, again, it also encloses some internal hard drives, which is nice. I'm not sure about power use but I'd just gut-instinct guess it's equivalent to four or five Raspberries Pi, even if you take out the power to run the hard drives, so it is (probably) worse on that front.
Rent a Linux server, deploy the Tailscale client, run apps on it.
> should I really self-host on shared CPUs
That shouldn't generally be a problem unless you're a very high value target (or really unlucky), but if you're that worried, rent a bare metal server.
A Raspberry Pi is the perfect playground to get started with self-hosting. It is cheap and barely takes up any physical space.
Pi-Hole and bitwarden are simple enough applications that you can host both of them on a pi. Plus there are plenty of guides available online to guide you thru the process if you do get stuck.
I got started with self-hosting pi-hole on a raspberry pi myself.
Yes but only a Raspberry Pi 4. The improvement compared to 3 is so big, that it's not worth getting a 3.
And it's nearly impossible to get any of them. I've been trying to buy another 4 with 8 GB for over a year now, but am not willing to go beyond 80 € for just the board.
The "Always Free Tier" stuff will get shut down when the expanded free tier expires unless you have a credit card plugged in. You can turn it back on... They don't always take cards they should. So, navigating their always free tier is somewhat complicated.
Also, there is a LOT of resource congestion for the arm systems. Be prepared to try every day to fire up new instances for a couple of weeks until you can find free capacity.
I haven't seen them be mentioned, another good option is to buy a thin client or multiple thin clients.
You can get them on eBay for <$100, they will typically have a fair amount of RAM and a quad-core AMD CPU (enough to outperform a raspberry pi pretty easily), and they will typically be on the order of <20W of power usage, meaning that even running 4-5 of them with k8s/Docker-Swarm won't murder your power bill.
My first home server was an old beaten laptop, the CPU was not even 64 bit. Even the current one is assembled of basic office hardware and some HDDs. My suggestion is that you grab the first unused hardware available, and use that.
I bought a second hand Acer chromebox with a celeron and 4GB ram for $15 on ebay (plus another $15 for shipping). It's much more powerful than a pi4 and a lot cheaper too. Plus, it's x86, not arm. I'm running docker swarm on it and using Cloudflare's Argo tunnels.
The main limiter to what you can host is RAM. RPI4s currently go for a premium. Additional they have hidden issues like being picky about power supplies. bottlenecked by IO via USB3 if you want an additional NIC and non-SD storage.
You would be better off with a like-new Dell Wyse 5070 off ebay for ~100 (and occasionally less if you're patient). Supports up to 32GB ram and an M.2 SATA slot.
You'll have much better IO, stability, and capacity compared to RPI4 for not much more cost. Power envelope of the system is pretty similar, the 5070 idles around 5W and loaded down it goes up to ~15W and is fanless which is in the neighborhood of the pi.
Plex
Audiobookshelf - Kind of like plex, but for audiobooks
n8n - automation tool
Heimdall - browser start page with shortcuts to all of these apps
Nginx Proxy Manager - Reverse proxy and wildcard cert hosting.
Bookstack - note taking app.
Pihole - ad blocker and local DNS.
YoutubeDL-material - archiving youtube videos.
FileRun - gdrive replacement.
iCloudPd - sync's pics and videos from iphone to local server
Gitea - git server
Code-Server - webbased IDE/VS code in browser.
Shiori - like pocket or wallaby or read-it-later bookmarking.
Seeing that this is turning into a comment section with answers to the question in the title of the article, instead of comments on TFA, here goes my list:
* Miniflux as an RSS reader
* Home Assistant for home automation stuff with various door/window/movement sensors, Hue management, workflows like bedtime and welcome home
* AdGuard for DNS adblocking
* An OpenVPN VPN for me to get into my home network, and another to a VPS in another country that my network gets routed over when connecting to geoblocked content ( ip sets are awesome)
* Not really self-hosted per se ( just local) and as a replacement for what some here self-host, Obsidian for note taking and wiki.
However to get it actually simple, Tailscale. It’s truely ludicrous. I had it running inside 10 mins, but only because I wasted 5 minutes trying to work out what to do next, when it was already running.
I use ZeroTier, which you can host yourself or use a hosted service. I haven't tried tailscale, though, which is what a lot of others seem to be using here.
455 comments
[ 4.3 ms ] story [ 321 ms ] threadI like it much better.
What I have right now:
- integration with Tuya lights/electrical outlets
- integration with AirThings air quality sensor
- integration with EcoBee thermostat/presence sensors
- integration with an LG Oven (status only as far as I can tell)
- integration with Garmin ecosystem
- integration with presence detection via the iPhone app
- integration with the sound system/spotify
So far my favourite feature is the ability to tap an NFC tag by my bed and execute the "bed time" workflow:
- ensure the lights are off
- dim the lights in the hallway, for kids
- reduce the speed of the bathroom fans
- sunset the lights in the bedroom for 10 minutes, so that when they finally turn off it's bed time.
> Out of the box, AppDaemon has support for the following automation products:
> Home Assistant home automation software. > MQTT event broker.
So I created a Home Assistant automation that does all that, bought a Zwave button that sits on the coffee table, and now they just turn it all on with one button like it's a video game console.
The only issue with the Ikea shades is that they can't be cut - so they'll only work for you if your window is the size of shades they carry. None of the Ikea sizes worked for me, I ended up taking the measurements and just ordering custom cut shades from a company called Select Blinds. A little more expensive than Ikea, but the quality does seem a bit better.
[0]: https://miniflux.app/
Tracks (GTD style ToDo webapp, wrote an Android app for it)
HappyAPI: I use it to maintain a chat accessible villager trade inventory for our Minecraft server (HappyAPI allows players to associate an IP with there Minecraft name on that server, so you can send "/h RedNifre Mending" and get a response with all villagers that sell Mending)
I use synapse as the server and Element as the client. I had tried out a bunch of other clients a few months ago, but found Element to be the most mature.
My experience has been pretty great overall. There were a few early issues (relating largely to a slightly weird network setup) but otherwise it works very well once setup.
Recently when I was trying to setup Mastodon, I realized how much more mature the setup process for synapse was. The setup needed for networking is better documented and they have a tool for testing if federation is working (and if not, attempting to provide an explanation why). This made it relatively easy to set things up correctly for my network compared to Mastodon, where I finally just gave up and setup a digitalocean droplet instead.
Functionality wise, everything works pretty well, E2EE requires a bit of preplanning to maintain across devices (ie. Keeping a backup of the keys or having the key store setup) but that's reasonable. The spaces feature needs a bit of UI polish but otherwise provides a similar hierarchical channel grouping system as Discord and Slack.
I can't really think of any other particular criticisms I have of it except that to administrate a server we still seem to have to lean on a third party application, synapse-admin (or hand write curl requests), it would be nice for it to just be incorporated into the client or into the server. I haven't had to use it much due to not having many users, but I imagine it's pretty relevant for servers with more users.
I've tried running Synapse (and was partially successful) a little while ago but didn't try to federate as I never took the basic hosting of it anywhere.
I will try again when I have my new home infra set up.
[0]: https://photoprism.app/
I've used keepass for close to a decade, and synched via dropbox originally but utlimately switched to nextcloud for the synching...but, curious how and why you are sharing via *Caldav*? Care to share the "how" and the "why"?
Xen-Orchestra, OPNsense, nginx, wireguard: This is the foundation and plumbing to run all my other applications.
Nextcloud: I'd be very unhappy if this broke. It syncs my files, calendars, contacts and also has the rss feeds I'm subscribed to.
Jellyfin: movies, shows and music
Kavita: a more recent (and still wip) addition, books and manga reading
WikiJS: my current wiki. I'm moving to grav for a full CMS though
Plex and Jellyfin (yes, both)
Calibre-web
Vaultwarden
TrueNAS
PiHole
Paperless-ngx
Edit to add: Syncthing
While they're cheap, should I really self-host on shared CPUs because that's all I can afford right now.
My basic system would be Pi-Hole, Miniflux, Linkding. Maybe Bitwarden.
What would be a good way to get started? Any suggestions are welcome.
It's what I did. It costs me less in electricity than a VPS but it's way more powerful.
The only thing I eventually bought was an UPS, because for some reason I regularly have micro power cuts at home.
I have it connected to a small UPS due to the occasional random brown-out in my neighborhood. The server only runs on the UPS for about 15 minutes, but during the rare substantial power outage, that's enough for me to power it down gently.
I also have a little desktop Lenovo PC I found cheap (used) at microcenter that I use as my primary zwave hub with a custom MQTT/JS based home automation script. This replaced a Raspberry Pi, which I loved, but after losing the storage a couple times, I no longer rely upon as a primary server
Bonus, those MicroServers are supported by ESXi, IIRC
It is a (fairly small) desktop tower, so it takes up quite a bit more space than a couple of Pis, though, again, it also encloses some internal hard drives, which is nice. I'm not sure about power use but I'd just gut-instinct guess it's equivalent to four or five Raspberries Pi, even if you take out the power to run the hard drives, so it is (probably) worse on that front.
Rent a Linux server, deploy the Tailscale client, run apps on it.
> should I really self-host on shared CPUs
That shouldn't generally be a problem unless you're a very high value target (or really unlucky), but if you're that worried, rent a bare metal server.
Pi-Hole and bitwarden are simple enough applications that you can host both of them on a pi. Plus there are plenty of guides available online to guide you thru the process if you do get stuck.
I got started with self-hosting pi-hole on a raspberry pi myself.
And it's nearly impossible to get any of them. I've been trying to buy another 4 with 8 GB for over a year now, but am not willing to go beyond 80 € for just the board.
Also, there is a LOT of resource congestion for the arm systems. Be prepared to try every day to fire up new instances for a couple of weeks until you can find free capacity.
You can get them on eBay for <$100, they will typically have a fair amount of RAM and a quad-core AMD CPU (enough to outperform a raspberry pi pretty easily), and they will typically be on the order of <20W of power usage, meaning that even running 4-5 of them with k8s/Docker-Swarm won't murder your power bill.
Just an example: https://www.ebay.com/itm/154783701325?hash=item2409d3d94d:g:...
You can pretty easily install Ubuntu or something on there and treat it like a normal computer.
You would be better off with a like-new Dell Wyse 5070 off ebay for ~100 (and occasionally less if you're patient). Supports up to 32GB ram and an M.2 SATA slot.
You'll have much better IO, stability, and capacity compared to RPI4 for not much more cost. Power envelope of the system is pretty similar, the 5070 idles around 5W and loaded down it goes up to ~15W and is fanless which is in the neighborhood of the pi.
1. MediaWiki (internal wiki)
2. Bugzilla (issue tracker, used internally and externally)
3. SugarCRM CE (internal CRM)
* Miniflux as an RSS reader
* Home Assistant for home automation stuff with various door/window/movement sensors, Hue management, workflows like bedtime and welcome home
* AdGuard for DNS adblocking
* An OpenVPN VPN for me to get into my home network, and another to a VPS in another country that my network gets routed over when connecting to geoblocked content ( ip sets are awesome)
* Not really self-hosted per se ( just local) and as a replacement for what some here self-host, Obsidian for note taking and wiki.
Anyone have a simple, straightforward and secure process for remote access to a home server?
However to get it actually simple, Tailscale. It’s truely ludicrous. I had it running inside 10 mins, but only because I wasted 5 minutes trying to work out what to do next, when it was already running.