tburkhol

I really like the idea of an in-wall home control panel - the guy who converted his whole house to illustrations & animations was awesome - but when I try to imagine situations where I’d really use it, I struggle. Definitely not going to get up from the couch and walk over to a control panel when I can just use the phone app, so it’s got to be circumstances where I want to control something, while I’m in a specific place or can’t easily use the phone. Maybe walking out the door, just to see if lights or whatnot are on (if I didn’t have an automation linked to presence). Maybe in the kitchen, to fix music when my hands are too dirty for the phone, but voice control seems like a better solution there.

World is full of gadgets that seem cool, but then you get them home and it’s just easier to do things the old way, and the gadget ends up being a techy Hummel figurine.

I got an N100 motherboard with 4x GB ports and installed ubuntu. Configured 1 port for the ISP, 1 port for a guest network, and bridged the last two with a WIFI PCIe card for the trusted network. hostapd to manage the wifi, and it took a couple tries before I found a card that really handled AP mode well. dhcpd, radvd. bind 9 for DNS, integrated with dhcpd so clients can declare their own hostname. There’s a separate pihole in front of that. Took a while to discover that I had to specifically configure dhclient to the ISP to request IPv6 prefix delegation. The guest network port goes to a ddwrt router.

It also runs a mythtv backend, a couple web sites; immich, jellyfin, and paperless ngx containers. In my head, it’s more of a server with router functions glued on, where […]sense is more of a router with server functions glued on.

I was comfortable with cli administration, and the router side sort of grew organically, with a little victory each time I could unplug another appliance - first a WAP, then a switch. opn/pf-sense is probably an easier way to get into the DIY space, especially if you want to replace your whole infrastructure at one time.

All these people saying 500, 600, 700+ watts - it’s almost hard to believe. My “gaming” computer, with two monitors, peaks around 400W on graphics-heavy games, and the monitors are like 120 of that. I suppose, though, if you’re running a server-class CPU, a half dozen HDDs, and a GPU for continuous transcoding or mining, the it wouldn’t be too hard to get there.

I run a dozen containers on an N100 with a couple of HDDs, VOIP device, router & cable modem on 63W, and I’ve considered that a pretty fair deal for a home lab. Of course, that only serves the household - nothing really offered to the public.

I mean, you can, but this is a variation on the trope of 'FOSS is ugly" that has prevented popular acceptance for decades. The developers absolutely have the right to make their product look however they want, and the furry-lol aesthetic clearly appeals to some people. OP is pointing out that this aesthetic makes it a hard pass in other communities and there’s a market for anubis simply reskinned with a ‘.com’ domain and geometric icon.

If anubis used a swastika instead of a catgirl, would you be so accepting?

I’m happy with 90 day certs for homelab stuff: I’m not worried about anyone MITMing my network. I figure the short lived certs are more important for people who provide services with a significant external user-base, or who process sensitive transactions.

I have my certbot set to check every 12 hours and renew at 60 days. Renewing every 3 days would be 20x more load on Let’s Encrypt systems, and that feels like abuse of a free service for my use case.

Tandoor definitely has a self-hosted path, including SSO integrations. It has a fair API that I’ve used to link it to nutrition data at USDA and my grocery store for prices. I suspect I could use the API to transfer a shopping list to the grocery store’s ordering system, but I don’t like the pickup or delivery systems. I’ve been pretty happy with tandoor’s import-from-web results, although the ingredient amounts often need some editing.

Also love the pi-0-2w, but I’ve started to use ESP32 for those edge sensors. You can get those for like $1-2 each on aliexpress, where real world prices on Pi zero is upwards of $20 now. Truly embedded systems like arduino were always intimidating to me, but esphome reduces ‘programming’ to a YAML for any of the many supported devices. The Pis that are working now aren’t likely to change any time soon, but I bought a handful of ESP32s for $10, and I’ll probably buy another handful before I buy another zero. Maybe convert a zero to ESP32 if I really need a whole OS for something new.

I feel like (mostly because of my own path) Pi is a great platform to get started with self hosting because of projects like pihole, homeassistant, and osmc. Projects where someone has put together simple, all-in-one solutions where you can just download an image and go. That same approach, and the Pi’s hardware limitations, make it harder to co-host multiple services, while the price point of Pi’s, at least pre-2023, made it reasonable just to run a handful of them. Only once you start wanting larger or more compute intensive stacks does the pressure to use containers/VMs on ‘real’ hardware appear. If you’ve already got pihole and ha running on Pis, there’s no pressure to move them to the big server.

If it’s the path I followed, it must be the path everyone follows :)

Calibre-web and calibre can share a library directory. You can edit the .kobo/kobo/Kobo ereader.conf file to wirelessly sync to calibre-web instead of kobo.com (while still using kobo.com to buy new ebooks)

The 1U system I had, the heatsinks have been fanless and not the extruded aluminum block one usually thinks of, but an assembled stack of much thinner, more rigid fins. It relied on airflow from fans mounted in the middle of the case, between the mobo and disks, shrouded to focus that airflow. I want to say 2x40mm fans per processor.

You should expect a 1U system to run hotter than a desktop, and definitely hotter than cooler advertisers want. CPUs are designed to operate up to 100°C or so, and the constraints that lead people to use 1U form factors generally include replacing those systems regularly, basically because of burnout.

Not nextcloud, but I have several containers set up to use ‘third party’ database - ie, not running inside the container or compose group, sometimes on a second machine. It definitely complicates the setup. I haven’t noticed any performance issues, but my services are low load.

I would think that the db running on the Pi with storage on the Pi could be faster than the db running on the laptop with storage on the Pi. The Pi db would presumably have higher bandwidth to the Pi storage and only have to transfer the selected data over network, where the laptop db has to do all the db sorting, filter, and processing over the network, although I suppose the db would try to keep all the data in RAM. I know there’s limitations to Pi’s internal bus bandwidth, Maybe you can compare the hdparm performance of the NAS RAID vs the NFS mount.

Growing up in the US midwest, ‘bastardized version of actual food’ describes a lot of what I grew up with. Common substitutes: cream of mushroom soup for bechamel; mayonnaise for creme fraiche; hot dogs for literally any sausage or charcuterie; thyme for any herb.