Regarding DNS servers, what router do you have? Some routers have simple enough DNS capabilities — I have a MikroTik, and have it set up with DNS entries for internal services (including wildcard). Publicly accessible services just use my registrar’s DNS (namecheap — no complaints).
Oracle Free tier, amd64. Only use it because it’s free—limited bandwidth, but given I have slow upload at home it’s never really been a bottleneck. Hate to admit it given it’s Oracle, but I’ve been completely happy with it.
If I switch to a paid VPS I will probably go with racknerd (suggestions welcome though if you have thoughts).
Especially after adding in all the power draw of the automation requires…
What exactly is the incremental power draw for automation? My network gear and server (a little nuc) are sunk power costs as I self host other services.
Idling, my home uses around 100W with the fridge off. One 10W light is an additional 10% of my power budget, and I have a lot more than one light in my house. I also pay about $0.40/kWh.
I can be a bit neurotic about turning off lights when I leave a room, so Home Assistant was a nice way to free up brain space for me. A few motion sensors here and there + some simple automations, and the lights mostly handle themselves. Zigbee sensors and Zigbee or Matter-over-WiFi bulbs, so everything is local. A free VPS+WireGuard setup means I can access them remotely should I need to, with TailScale as a backup.
Cloud failures mean I can’t access remotely, but local control is unaffected—if my smart devices stop working it’s almost certainly my fault :)
Matter is also local—provisioning can be a PITA but once done I’ve been pretty happy with even the cheap Matter WiFi smart bulbs. Home Assistant supports them very well.
Cheap bulbs can be a little buggy, which usually means I need to power cycle some of them now and then.
My lights and motion sensors were obviously unaffected (HomeAssistant). My Emporia Vue2 power monitor would possibly have stopped working, except I flashed it with ESPHome firmware, so it’s local only, and of course it was fine. My security cameras (Frigate) were also fine.
If my smart home devices are going to stop working, it will almost certainly be my fault, thank you very much!
On low end CPUs you can max out the CPU before maxing out network—if you want to get fancy, you can use rsync over an unencrypted remote shell like rsh, but I would only do this if the computers were directly connected to each other by one Ethernet cable.
If you’re running it via docker compose it’s trivial to upgrade, and there are no breaking changes. Pull, down, up, you’re done.
Frigate is pretty good, too. I’ve only been running it for a few months but I’m very happy with it.
Though, technically that leaves you more at risk of ransomeware or something that overwrites your data.
I rsync as well, but use snapshotting on the remote drives. So, a bad rsync would suck but shouldn’t really result in data loss. Ransomware on my local+remote server would of course be very bad…
I do something similar — I have a raspberry pi and a HD, with daily rsync and snapshots (monthly retained indefinitely, weekly retained for a month, daily retained for a week). It’s at family’s house, connected to my home via WireGuard via a VPS. Tailscale (or anything really) would also work here.
It’s a great setup! Just have some watchdog reboot if it can’t talk to home (a simple cronjob with ping -c1 home.lan || reboot or similar).
Even our “slow” 35Mbps upload speed is way more than enough for incremental rsyncs of my Immich library. The initial sync was done in person, though.
I got one from goHardDrive on eBay (link). It was cheap enough, looks flawless, and knock on wood has been working fine.
Googling around, the brand gets…mixed reviews. My use case is such that of this drive fails it’s not a big deal.
I’ve honestly never understood people who feel the need to “replace” Spotify. … Spotify has never made sense for my use-case.
I don’t know how to say this, but…you have extremely uncommon use-cases:
…during those times, my phone is either fully turned off (so I’ll use an MP3 player), or it’s in Airplane Mode.
Many people listen to music on stereos and don’t necessarily want a device plugged in, so
I just download the music I like to my device and listen to it via VLC.
either doesn’t work or is substantially less convenient than e.g. casting from a phone.
Not hating on your setup at all, but it’s very niche, in my experience.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/ACID
Atomicity (something happens in its entirety or not at all), consistency (database is always in a valid state — if the database has constraints, they will always be honored), isolation (transactions don’t step on each other), durability (complete transaction is complete even if there’s a power failure).
Not a database expert, my parenthetical explanations may need work.
It’s interesting that, with Python, the reference implementation is the implementation — yeah there’s Jython but really, Python means both the language and a particular interpreter.
Many compiled languages aren’t this way at all — C compilers come from Intel, Microsoft, GNU, LLVM, among others. And even some scripting languages have this diversity — there are multiple JavaScript implementations, for example, and JS is…weird, yes, but afaik can be faster than Python in many cases.
I don’t know what my point is exactly, but Python a) is sloooow, and b) doesn’t really have competition of interpreters. Which is interesting, at least, to me.
Did the developer use any version control though? SCCS has been around since the early 70s, RCS and CVS since the 80s. The tools definitely existed.
Also, it was a single dev, which makes SCM significantly simpler!
ZigBee router thing:
I’ve been happy with the SMLIGHT SLZB-06M. You can easily flash firmware, and it has PoE which was important for me. I believe it also supports Thread, but I haven’t tried this yet (and I’m not sure if it supports it at the same time as Zigbee).
Zigbee smart plugs from Third Reality have been pretty solid in my experience, and they report power usage.
For circuit breaker level monitoring, I have an Emporia Vue2. I have it running esphome, completely local — unfortunately this requires some simple soldering and flashing, so it’s not turnkey. But it’s been rock solid ever since flashing it. (Process is well documented online.)
I’ve had decent luck with cheap wifi Matter bulbs, but provisioning them is finicky, and sometimes they just crap out and need to be power cycled; Zigbee bulbs (e.g., Ikea) have generally been reliable, though sometimes I’ve had difficulty pairing them initially. After power cycling a Matter WiFi bulb, it takes a while for it to respond to Home Assistant; Zigbee bulbs generally respond as soon as you power them on.
I have a wired smart light switch from TP-Link/Kasa (KS205), and it’s been completely hassle free (and totally local — Matter over wifi). The Kasa smart switch dongles I have work flawlessly but need proprietary pairing, and I’m afraid to update firmware in case they lose local support.
Good luck! Fun adventure :)
I think a lot of companies view their free plan as recruiting/advertising — if you use TailScale personally and have a great experience then you’ll bring in business by advocating for it at work.
Of course it could go either way, and I don’t rely on TailScale (it’s my “backup” VPN to my home network)… we’ll see, I guess.
…are Turing Complete, so what you can do with them is exactly equal.
But they’re only equal in the Turing complete sense, which (iirc) says nothing about performance or timing.
xscreensaver of course! Note that this is not an option on Windows—jwz hates Microsoft, and any xscreensaver port to Windows is against his wishes.
I use yabai and sketchybar for a tiling WM feel. It’s nowhere as nice as my preferred i3, but it’s ok. Unfortunately it often breaks with major OS updates, so I’m sure to hold back updating my system until yabai is working.
IIRC
sshfswill work on macOS but it’s more work to install. Worth it if allowed by your IT policies and your work can benefit from it.Vim, tmux, and the usual *NIX stuff you might want.
The coreutils are not the GNU coreutils you typically find on a Linux system, so you may find a few differences. I believe
sedis slightly different, and the flags forlsmust be before the filename arguments, but I’ve found it’s mostly silly stuff like that (I used zsh before using macOS, so no problem there).