Avoid Tuya wifi devices. They’re nothing but trouble, requiring all kinds of hacks to get working locally, and even then can still be a headache.

If you really want the lock, try to see if you can run the Tuya cloud cutter on it, so it’ll be a truly local device. Then control it via HA, using a VPN or HA Cloud if you need remote access.

In my previous job and my job at the bike shop, yes. But I don’t really care, its issues aren’t my problem.

Interesting. After I got the new Debian running, I just updated the source for Jellyfin (and a few other packages) to Trixie, and it updated just fine.

Well I finally upgraded to 13, a few months later. The only issue was the blob file in glances, which I was ready to deal with. Oh and I had to install php-mysql.

I don’t like that you can’t start the Debian upgrade and just walk away. It stops and asks you about configuration files, so you have to babysit it. Other than that, it works well.

I have two Sengled zigbee bulbs (they also sell wifi bulbs, so choose carefully), and they’ve been great. They’re in my outdoor fixtures, so they deal with both freezing and very hot temperatures. They didn’t even have an issue when I changed my zigbee network channel. I’ve had them several years now without any issues at all.

They’re probably the same bulbs as yours, but I just wanted to give people another option.

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For some reason, if I were doing the physical media route, I’d want to ship the drives via FedEx or something similar. Presumably this isn’t the only copy of the data. Even if you still need to go, just dragging these drives around seems risky.

You can turn the encryption off if you are comfortable with the network you’re storing your backups on. The encryption is a good idea for people using cloud backups, but I’m not sure it’s necessary for backups on, say, my internal server.

Yeah this was a feature they enabled by default for everyone a while back. When people complained, the True Believers told everyone they should have read the release notes. I think the developers undid the encryption by default option, but there are a lot of people out there with encrypted backups as a result of the change, and some of them have no idea.

Yeah, almost two years ago, I bought a 10 tb drive to back up my 15 tb array that I’d built with 3 tb drives in ~2018. That new drive was under $200 then.

I think electing him twice should count for something.

I have to admit, I forgot about the Zigbee part when I replied.

The S31 Lite, which uses Zigbee, is supported by Tasmota. However they have a max current draw of 5 amps and don’t do power monitoring like the regular Wifi S31. I haven’t used the S31 Lite, so I can’t speak to how the pairing works or other details.

I have a bunch of S31 plugs from Sonoff, flashed with Tasmota.

In Tasmota, you can set it to default to on and ignore the button. In fact I’m not sure if I can even turn it off via the HA interface without changing an option in Tasmota.

I have this set for several plugs - fridge, freezer, pellet stove, sump pump, etc. No issues with any of them, and some are a few years old. I think I even have the switch on the washer’s plug disabled, too.

I gave up pretty quickly on trying to name things. Early on I was having a lot of issues with zigbee, and I frequently had to reconnect things, and renaming them into my scheme got to be another step I just didn’t want to bother with. It felt like a waste of time.

A better use of time was fixing the zigbee issues (wifi interference - fixed that, and now the network is solid). But now I don’t really ever need to worry about the device names, so, eh.

I use a helper for some entities. For example, the temperature sensors that come in via rtl_433 that rename every time I put new batteries in, or my phone or my wife’s phone. That way I only have to change the helper, in one place, versus having to change it in countless scripts, scenes, buttons, etc.

Finally updated my setup to 10.11 today. I did the recommended backups, but I didn’t have any issues! How long before it’s safe to delete them?

I used VirtualBox on Linux to host my Home Assistant server for a while. I kept having odd issues with usb devices. I’d have to disconnect and reconnect them to get them working again.

Many people in the HA help groups say not to use VirtualBox, and at first I thought they were basing that on old info. But then I started having issues, too. On the other hand, kvm has been rock solid for a long time.

So I’m glad to see they continue to develop it, but I wouldn’t recommend it for heavy duty use. It’s useful to dipping toes into virtualization, or maybe for running systems for the short term (a few hours here and there, or something), but for long term use, I’d go another route. It’s certainly easier to set up the network in VirtualBox, I’ll grant that - it took me a while to get it right for HA on kvm. (Of course, that’s a one-time setup thing, too - I shouldn’t have to touch it again. And don’t ask me what I did, because I don’t remember!)

Yeah I used to compile my own kernels, selecting only the drivers I needed.

I’m sure I wasted far more time doing all that than I saved with a (theoretically) faster day to day system. Now I use stock kernels, and they work great!

Thanks. I knew there was something. The HomeKit setup actually sounds better, maybe I should switch.

I like our ecobee overall, especially for being able to specify which thermometers to focus on for a given setting.

But there are some things that I wish were easier. For example, my work days vary, so it’d be nice if it was easier to specify a work day versus a home day in advance, without having to change the schedule.

Eyeing up those Z-wave thermostats though…

I have an ecobee too (and have for about 8 years), but I thought I heard that new ecobee users couldn’t get the access that HA uses.