At home vs. for work are very different. At home, I self host as much as I can. At work, I use as many managed services as I can. Especially databases.

I have really been wanting to try it out. Is there any good off the shelf hardware that you can use as “smart speakers” for it yet?

The idea of shipping something like that just makes me not want to do anything at all lol. It’s like a chicken and egg problem. Maybe if I could find someone local to buy it, then I would do the new build. But then I’d have no nas for that in between time. Hmmmm.

I’m in the process of divorcing my one giant server into separate nas and compute-only machines, I was going to leave the big one as the nas and maybe swap out its guts for something more power efficient than the dual socket beast since it will only need to handle storage now, but it might be easier to sell as a whole and do an all new itx build 🤔

My wallet is gonna hate me.

I really like that little case. I have a fractal xl r2 right now and it’s a monster.

I’ve been considering moving to this build in particular for lower power usage and heat output, but they have some other dual socket builds if you want more cpu power.

Some good ideas on this site if you are interested in building your own https://forums.serverbuilds.net/t/guide-nas-killer-6-0-ddr4-is-finally-cheap/13956

Deluge or qbittorrent. If you use a vpn, binhex images are good.

You’re likely not going to find a premade dashboard that does exactly what you want, but grafana is extremely powerful if you’re willing to put in the time to learn it. There are ways to visualize things across hosts without having to configure things separately for every host. If you’re using the same mechanism to scrape metrics from each (sounds like you’re using prometheus + node exporter?), this could be as simple as adding a by (node) (or whatever the label name is if it’s not node) grouping to the query on each panel.

Makes sense, thanks. Yeah idk about usb serial over Ethernet, it’s an interesting idea but I wouldn’t want to introduce more moving parts (and/or latency) to the network.

Proxmox is going to be a lot easier to pick up if you’re coming from vmware. Kubernetes is a beast with a considerable learning curve so if you’re not familiar with it already then I wouldn’t recommend it for a lab environment (unless the goal is specifically to learn it).

I’ve migrated most of my lab from a mess of proxmox lxcs over to k3s (I use k8s at work), except for home assistant. I’ve been back and forth on that one. I really like being able to back up the entire vm before running updates or whatever. Could you use a node selector to force zwave or zigbee or whatever to run on the node that has the usb device? Or is it still a pain in the ass that way cause you have to know the path on the specific host… I haven’t tried that yet.

My only contribution is to stay away from ultraloq. I have their zwave deadbolt and it’s terrible. I will probably replace it with something schlage.

Any recommendations for tranquilizer sentries that work with HA?

If you have your compose files in git, you might be able to use renovate to send you pull requests with image updates. I’ve done something similar with kubernetes but I think it supports docker compose too. You might need some kind of automation on your hosts to keep things in sync.

I’m not actually familiar with truenas or its ui, but if you have kubectl access you should be able to poke around in the logs and see what’s going on. I’m not sure if these logs are shown in the ui anywhere. With helm, there are so many different things it could be that there’s no use in speculating without some logs.

All that message means is “the thing didn’t start” and isn’t gonna tell you anything about why. You’d need to dig into pod logs or something to see if you can find the actual error that is preventing startup.

Rack mounting non-rack-mount gear always seemed like an interesting application to me. Raspberry pis, tiny lenovos, network gear, etc.

e.g. https://www.thingiverse.com/thing:4769452

Cloudflare cause they already had my DNS and google domains was on its way to the google graveyard. Not sure how privacy respecting they are but they do offer some kind of partial whois redaction. Surely better than google though?

TIL about the auto entities card. I’ll have to try that out. Since I don’t actually know anything about that card, I don’t have anything useful to offer specific to that plugin. But coming from a different angle, I wonder if using a template sensor to invert the “default” state and hiding the original entity (+ some clever naming) would help to make it behave how you want?