Home Automation, Networking & Self-Hosting

This article shows how to get detailed information about your Mitsubishi heat pump’s status and operations into Home Assistant. Prerequisites You’ll need a Mitsubishi Modbus interface, either the older A1M (serial Modbus/RTU via RS-485 only) or the newer A1M+ (Modbus/TCP via Ethernet in addition to Modbux/RTU). I’m using the Ethernet variant.

This article describes how to perform a factory reset on the Zehnder ComfoClime 24/36 Arduino board. I find it necessary to document the steps as the description in the installation manual is incorrect.

This guide shows how to get started with Home Assistant integration development. The article covers how to set up a development environment with WSL, VS Code, and devcontainers. An integration template is used to get you up and running quickly.

This article explains how to set up a Samba file server as an Active Directory domain member in a Docker container. This newer configuration differs from my earlier setup in one essential point: it uses POSIX instead of Windows ACLs, simplifying the administration and making it possible to modify files via other protocols than SMB. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article explains how to set up Filestash in a Docker container as a web interface for browser-based access to a Samba or SMB file server. This newer configuration improves on my earlier Filebrowser setup in one essential point: the SMB storage is accessed as the authenticating user, i.e., the user authentication is passed through to the backend storage. This means that each user sees exactly the directories and files they have access to. When a new file is created through Filestash, it’s stored with the proper permissions as if it had been created it via SMB.

KNX is a core Home Assistant integration that only recently reached the silver quality rating. This means that it is well-maintained and stable. Just what you’re looking for when you’re thinking about extending your home’s functionality.

A long time ago, when I was working as an IT consultant, a younger colleague asked me if I knew of a book that described how to set up an Active Directory domain so that it’d be ready for production and the setup incorporate all the best practices. I didn’t have an answer for him then. Looking back at what I’ve done in the past 30+ months I realized that I’ve compiled what he asked for - just not on the topic of Active Directory but on building a self-hosted home server that provides all services locally without any reliance on cloud services.

LED lights that still glow faintly when switched off seem to be a fairly common problem. This article describes possible solutions including the unlikely fix I found for our Vibia Duo ceiling lights.

This is an attempt to bring some clarity into the various APIs, apps, interfaces, and Home Assistant integration options that are available for the Zehnder ComfoAir Q ventilation and ComfoClime cooling units.

This is a getting started guide with information I wish I’d had when I made my first forays into creating custom dashboards for Home Assistant. Preparation SMB Access to Home Assistant Configuration Set up SMB access to the Home Assistant file system by navigating to Add-on Store and installing the Samba share add-on (docs). Configure it as follows:

This article shows how to synchronize your Frigate NVR recordings to offsite cloud storage for backup and safekeeping in case your onsite NVR is stolen by a burglar. Toolkit: Backblaze + rclone + Systemd Service Script I’m using Backblaze as cloud storage because it’s fast and inexpensive. It also offers temporary immutability, preventing burglars who gained access to the source machine from deleting uploaded recordings for a configurable length of time. The backup job is left to rclone, a modern file copy and sync tool for a multitude a cloud storage providers. A custom systemd service controls the backup process via a little script. To ensure low upload latency, it monitors Frigate’s recordings directory for changes and invokes rclone immediately when a new file has been created.

This article explains how to install and configure the Frigate NVR software on a Raspberry Pi 5 with a Coral Edge TPU. Overview What is Frigate? Frigate is a free network video recorder (NVR) software. It collects your surveillance camera video streams (typically via RTSP), performs object detection and stores the resulting clips.

Elasticsearch comes with multiple query languages, only one of which makes sense to use for time-series data as ours: ES|QL. It’s obviously modeled after Splunk’s SPL, is easy to read, understand, and write - helped by fantastic autocomplete in the web UI. This article explains some important ES|QL concepts by showing you how to create a chart that visualizes your home’s energy consumption.

This article describes how to send Home Assistant metrics to Elasticsearch for long-term storage and visualization. It focuses on the integration between the two products and on how to configure Elasticsearch. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server & network with dockerized or virtualized services.

This is a deliberately simplistic dockerized Elasticsearch & Kibana setup focused on long-term stability and minimal maintenance requirements. To forego the need to deal with a private CA and certificates, Elasticsearch TLS is not used. Instead, authenticated HTTPS access is provided via Caddy.

This is my documentation of how I set up and configured my Hikvision surveillance network camera. I bought a Hikvision camera because apparently their quality and reliability are good, which seems to be true. Their software, however, is rather gruesome.

This article explains how to set up VictoriaMetrics in a Docker container with automatic HTTPS via Caddy. It also shows how to forward Home Assistant data to VictoriaMetrics for long-term storage and how to query the data from Grafana. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server & network with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article explains how to set up Emby in a Docker container with automatic HTTPS via Caddy. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server & network with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article explains how to set up Syncthing in a Docker container and configure synchronization with peers on Windows PCs. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article explains how to set up Budibase in a Docker container with automatic HTTPS via Caddy. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server & network with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article presents a simple, balanced OPNsense firewall configuration for a secure smart home. The config provides good security while still allowing the freedom that is required by a family that is comprised mostly of people who wouldn’t call themselves IT geeks. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server & network with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article explains how to set up Home Assistant in a virtual machine on Proxmox with automatic HTTPS via dockerized Caddy. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server & network with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article explains how to configure OPNsense as your (only) internet router in a fiber to the home (FTTH) setup. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server & network with dockerized or virtualized services.

This article explains how to set up Filebrowser in a Docker container as a web interface for browser-based access to a Samba file server. Please note that in my own use this configuration has been superseded by a Filestash setup which has the advantage of accessing the storage as the authenticating user. Filebrowser and other tools like it have the disadvantage of accessing the file system through one “service” user account. This means that what the browser shows is not what the actual user is allowed to access but instead what the service account has permission to read. Also, when files are created, the owning user is the service account. This post is part of my series on home automation, networking & self-hosting that shows how to install, configure, and run a home server with dockerized or virtualized services. This article is part of a mini-series about running Samba Active Directory and a file server service in a Docker container on a home server: