I think you should have a thin sheet of steel kept in your car or somewhere safe, so you can just use that like a locksmith.

Plex was easy enough to set up. I use plexamp on my phone but can access the Plex server via a browser, which includes my music

Douch or turd sandwich?

I had a friend bring up this very topic this weekend and I replied “What would be more creepy and more likely is that the ad giants have algorithms for working out what you’ll buy that are that good that they know what you want before you do and you’re just noticing how good it is”

Yeah I mean I get it because I was also thinking about self hosting for a long time and had a bunch of questions myself.

The problem is that a lot of the questions were not needed, and a bunch of the other questions I answered myself by just tooling around with the stuff.

Great comment btw, it’s a good idea to have a list of the services you’d like to run, in order of importance z then work through it.

I did that then found ways to combine a bunch of services, to the point where I had multiple stand alone VMs that are now just one for Home Assistant and second for Plex and Docker

I see a lot of posts like this and it’s always people overthinking something they haven’t tried to do yet.

So my advice is to just do it.

You may lose everything at some point in the future, Satan knows I have a few times, but because you’ve actually done it, you can do it again.

Now, because you’re just thinking about doing it, it seems like a massive deal because you’ve not gone out and done it yet.

As for recommendations, I use a Proxmox VM with Debian and Docker. My Proxmox does backups, but my Docker compose is also a text document on my PC so I can recreate it all from scratch from that. I also have an idea what I did when I was learning how to do it, and have retained a good bit of that info so I could probably do it without either the backups or the Docker Compose, it would just take longer.

Just do it

Commenting just to add “nofail” to the fstab.

I didn’t do this in Proxmox and then the drive stopped working and so did Proxmox. As a noob I ended up starting fresh and losing lots.

After adding nofail the services start up, just without the NAS attached. Without nofail it just doesn’t boot.

Nofail for the win

I’m running Proxmox on a mini PC. I have a Debian VM for streaming and a Home Assistant VM.

Runs like a dream

Just Google “Booting a pi from an SSD” and follow the steps

I can’t remember the steps (they were simple though) but when my Home Assistant raspi SD card died, I bought a 128gb SSD from AliExpress and a usb-sata cable.

I then did something to the pi that meant it can boot from the SSD, and flashed the SSD using Balenetcher or RUFUS or whatever (same program I was using to flash my SD cards basically).

Then it was just a case of plugging in and turning it on.

Runs exactly the same as with an SD card with less dying because SD cards aren’t meant for a lot of read/write but SSDs do.

In a community without a lot of content, complaining about added content is a bit rich, but some people are just dicks, it’s a fact of life.

Scroll on with your day

It does. I use Mosquito but I believe HA has a built in one too. Mosquito was easy enough to set up though.

Honestly MQTT is like the nervous system of my HA setup. I started using it with Tasmota when I Tasmotised all my cheap WiFi bulbs, then opted for Zigbee2mqtt for my ZigBee setup.

But I also have things like my bedside clock (an old phone running WallPanel), my doorway tablet (a Nexus 7 running Fully Kiosk Browser), my PC and even my alarm clock app on my phone, all running through MQTT.

I even had Tasker on my phone communicating with HA via MQTT before I gave up on that. It’s really useful

Just set up MQTT in home Assistant, why not?

You can also use the GPS tracking in the companion app. If you’re on android (I’ve had issues on IOS) and have your home zone set up rightz it’s pretty damn solid.

I use it and have my outside lights integrated, and they’re always on when I get home at night

Go to your phone WiFi settings and turn off the random Mac address security feature on your wifi, then set up your router in HA as an integration. This will make device trackers for each mac address on your lan.

Then you can set that device tracker in your person.entity to track yourself.

That way, when you get home and on your WiFi, your router will mark you home

Me too, except it’s Adguard for me.

Came in handy yesterday actually. I have a friend who works for a University which was recycling some Chromebooks.

He managed to grab 3 for me, one for myself and one for my kids.

Problem is that one of my kids is being supervised through Google Family Link which means for some reason the Play Store won’t work.

So he is now unsupervised in Family Link just to get the Chromebook working.

So I’ve just given both my kids static IPs and pointed their Chromebooks at Adguard, then turned on Safe Search and adult content blocking.

Now I’m fairly confident they’re protected from a lot of the bad shit on the internet.

When I die my friends will miss me like usual. Then the Plex server will go down and they’ll miss me all over again.

I’ve passed my display through to a VM in Proxmox for transcoding and now I can’t get the GUI for that VM.

Is this something that would allow me to connect to that VM on another PC and use a virtual desktop?

If so, I may have to have a play with it. I mean I’m happy away using SSH but why not have UI if I can?

Good to know, I’ll turn it off when I get home from work, thanks