thehatfox

At this point I’m quite heavily invested in smart home tech, but smart locks are one of the few things I haven’t touched.

Any exploit found in these devices could be packaged into a smartphone app and easily accessed by anyone. Someone hacking the lock that way would look no different to a legitimate user. Firmware updates for these devices seem sporadic at best.

It’s a security concern I don’t want to have to worry about, even if there are convenience benefits.

If you have nay knowledge of networking (or want to learn), start setting up restricted VLANs to isolate your smart devices. Only allow them access to specific services/devices like your media server.

For dedicated hardware, there are plenarily of options. A Raspberry Pi will work to start with, there are Linux images with Kodi such as LibreELEC and osmc (I have used both in the past and they worked fine), and Android TV images also that can run apps. I suppose you could also set up a generic Linux install and run the Jellyfin client or similar - not sure if there any turnkey options for that.

We have a couple of Apple TV boxes and they perform well, the Jellyfin apps for them have really improved in the last year or so too.

It’s worked well for me so far. I chose Homarr because it has a GUI for dashboard creation, I wanted the whole family to be able to use it and they aren’t all up to editing YAML etc.

I use Homarr and initially created a really complex dash, but I’ve since whittled it down to just the bare essentials as a homepage.

Links to my most used web pages and self hosted services, and a couple of vital metrics that I would need to act upon quickly.

For everything else I have Grafana dashboards I can dip into as I need to.