Well indeed, that’s why I want to move the VM off the NAS and onto something with some hardware acceleration. Are there any remote frontend options for KVM?

Thanks, I’m going to have to put some research into this!

I’ve heard Shelly bandied about quite a lot in the HA circle but this is the first thing that’s made me sit up and take notice. You’re saying they’re far more customisable than, say, your standard ZigBee light switch?

Yes of course! I enabled experimental features to use a template add-on, but I later removed it and turned the option off.

Either they A/B tested this or they accidentally released some of it early because I got all of that new UI stuff a few months ago, complete with addons appearing in the HA updates section. A few days later, just as I’d got used the change, it disappeared!

At least I now know I wasn’t going mad.

To be fair the Synology lineup is confusing, but if you get the right model - one with a Ryzen processor and support for 32GB memory (officially; they can take more) - then you’ve got yourself a proper little workhorse with low power consumption, a stable, reliable OS, and super easy expansion thanks to the hot-swap drive bays and their Hybrid RAID option. My 8 bay model is running a couple of full-blown VMs and what must be two dozen or so docker containers while barely breaking a sweat. The DS723+ is the equivalent 2 bay model.

For things that need some acceleration like Plex and Immich I’ve added a little N100 box (a Beelink S12 Pro) with Ubuntu Server and another Docker instance, and mounted the NAS storage via SMB. This also sips power even when transcoding 4x Plex streams at once.

All of which is to say you don’t need to do a complex, potentially power hungry and difficult to expand self build to do what you want.

Ohhhhh I see. The wording on that page could be so much better!

I don’t get it. What’s it supposed to be doing?

This is excellent but alas I can’t get it to work in nginx-proxy-manager. Keen to see if anyone else can figure it out.

Make an offer of $0.01. Assuming the responses aren’t automated, every time they reject it, raise the offer by 1c. Keep doing it till you hit the $15 mark and then just stop. It could waste literal years of their time.

I’ll have to have a look when I’m next in the vacinity but I’m pretty sure I have an APC Easy UPS on mine and it works out of the box.

Let me get back to you…

Update: It’s an APC Back-UPS 850. No doubt the instructions banged on about requiring Powerchute but I just plugged it into the Syno and it worked fine. You do need to enable UPS support on the NAS itself of course, from Control Panel/Hardware & Power/UPS, and set it to USB UPS.

I have my dock plugged into a smart plug and the laptop set in the BIOS to turn on when it receives power. I have an NFC tag on my coffee machine that I bloop while I’m making my morning brew, and that turns the dock on so that everything’s ready when I move into the office.

For turning things off I have HASS.Agent installed and sending state updates (locked, unlocked, etc, which is useful for other automations) and when that sensor goes unavailable for 15 minutes it turns the plug off. I find that’s long enough to allow it to reboot for updates and what not.

The sensor does report shutdown, reboot, and sleep states but I found that it often happens too quickly to get the change sent, so the unavailable state is more reliable.

Unless you’re hosting VHDs and need maximum throughput (in which case use NFS), SMB is going to be the easiest to setup and maintain across those 4 platforms.

The Linux SMB implementation is decent and supports the latest version of the protocol (or close to, at least) whereas NFS in Windows ain’t so great and is a bit of a pig to get working in my experience.

Thirded. It’s helped me a lot with picking up the compose syntax, to the point that I’m now comfortable combining disparate services into their own stacks. And I can spin something up from an example compose in less than a minute.

Thanks, I’ll muse over this when I next get the chance!

Was looking into Docker volume backups just yesterday so this is perfect timing!

Thanks for the re-upvote. My guess is it was someone who sets timers on their phone. 😂

Dammit, now you’ve got my head swimming with ways to improve the washing machine stuff. I bet a vibration sensor on top could be combined with the smart plug power monitoring to detect when it’s being emptied.

How did you do the Google-turning-on-the-smartplug thing? I feel like I’m missing a lot of tricks by not having HA integrated into those. I just use them for audible notifications currently.

Yes please, I might revisit it with a fresh pair of eyes.

Thanks for the suggestion. I spent a good hour or two trying to make Wireguard work for me last night but failed. If I set it to only apply to Immich, nothing else would have Internet access at all. Likewise if I set the peer IP range to just my LAN subnet.

After pulling my hair out for a while I gave up and uninstalled.

The whole point of home automation is that it’s automated. Setting a timer on your phone is for chumps.

I have a similar thing to notify us when the washing machine is done, only without the cool presence stuff - I’ll have to look into your setup for that!

I also use a smart plug to monitor our toaster. Not for notifications but because it uses a mechanical timer that if it fails, will also fail to turn the element off, so it comes with dire warnings about always unplugging it after use. Instead I just have HA setup to turn off the plug if it ever draws power for more than 4 minutes.