Home Assistant: Hands-on Adding a Matter Smart Plug (Eve Energy)
Matter, the promised home automation wiz kid, is here and some devices are now shipping with native Matter support. But what if you want Home Assistant and Apple Homekit to control the same matter device? What if you don't have a Thread radio on your Home Assistant server? No problem! This post will show you exactly how to provision the Eve Energy (smart plug) to Apple Homekit, then pair it to Home Assistant. The Apple hubs (Apple TV 4K) will provide...
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Ubuntu Kernel Upgrades: The Easy Button
Sometimes when running Ubuntu you need to use a different kernel than comes with the default installation. Only upgrade the kernel if you have a specific reason, such as needing a new driver or CPU support. But if you are an advanced user and know exactly what kernel you need, the following procedure makes it easy. 1. SSH into the Ubuntu server that you want to upgrade the kernel. Run the following commands to download a script and change the...
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Home Assistant: Setting up the Aqara FP2 Presence Sensor
Brand new to the market is the Aqara FP2 WiFi human presence sensor. It is one of the most exciting smart home products to hit the market in quite a while. It is the successor to the Aqara FP1 which was only officially available in China. This post guides you through setting up the Aqara FP2 from scratch with an iPhone and Home Assistant. If you aren't using Home Assistant and just use Apple Home, a lot of this guide would...
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Hands On: Beelink Mini-PCs for Proxmox, Home Assistant and Plex
If you are in the market for new mini-PC to run some services in your home such as Home Assistant, Plex Media Server, Grafana, InfluxDB, Docker containers, or more, this post is for you. I will cover three Beelink mini-PCs that all support Proxmox and can run a variety of workloads without breaking a sweat. All three are highly power efficient, using less than 8w with active workloads...including Home Assistant. Beelink is more affordable than Intel NUCs, and offers a mixtures...
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How To: Setup Synology NFS for Proxmox Backup Server Datastore
This post covers deploying a Proxmox Backup Server (PBS) and using a Synology NAS NFS mount as a datastore for backups. And optionally you can run the PBS server as a VM on your Synology NAS as well. Why would you want to use Proxmox Backup Server? Here are a few reasons:Built-in data deduplication. I'm getting nearly 20:1Verification jobs to ensure the backup is not corruptedAbility to protect a specific backup for a VM/LXC to retain for long term storageEasier...
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Migration Guide: Plex on Synology to Proxmox LXC
This post covers how to migrate a Plex Media Server (PMS) running on Synology DSM 7 to a Proxmox Plex Server LXC. This Plex LXC will then NFS mount your media library from the Synology, so your large media library remains on Synology. Why would you want to do this? Well some Synology NAS models don't have built-in GPUs so if you want to hardware transcode video you are out of luck. Or maybe you want lessen the CPU load on...
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Proxmox: Install Plex LXC with HW Transcoding/HDR Tone Mapping
In this post I cover how to setup a Plex Media Server (PMS) LXC on Proxmox with hardware transcoding and HDR tone mapping. Contrary to popular belief, the Plex LXC does not need to be configured with PCIe passthrough for the GPU. So NO Proxmox IOMMU host configuration is needed to allow the Plex LXC to do hardware transcoding and HDR tone mapping. This procedure uses the awesome tteck Promox Plex LXC script to mostly automate the setup of a...
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Proxmox Let’s Encrypt SSL: The Easy Button
If you are running Proxmox on your network and wish to increase its security by using a FREE trusted SSL certificate from Let's Encrypt, then you are in luck! This post will walk you through the entire process. The process is quick and easy, assuming you already have a public domain via a registrar and a supported DNS server. If you are accessing Home Assistant via HTTPS and want to surface Proxmox as an iFrame in your Home Assistant console...
Read moreInfluxDB + Chronograf: Configuring Let’s Encrypt SSL
If you value security and want to use InfluxDB 1.x and Chronograf with trusted SSL certificates from LetsEncrypt, this post is for you! This tutorial assumes you are running InfluxDB 1.x and Chronograf either in a LXC container or a traditional VM. If you are using Docker, the procedure would be fairly different and out of scope for this post. This post covers:Installing certbot for Cloudflare DNSObtaining a trusted LetsEncrypt wildcard certificate for InfluxDB 1.x and ChronografModifying your Home Assistant and...
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Getting your Cloudflare DNS Zone API Key and Account ID
If you are using Cloudflare DNS and need to get a DNS Zone API key and Account ID, this post is for you. Why would you need this information? There are two primary reasons that come to mind: You are using Dynamic DNS (DDNS) and want to update an A record in your domain to be your public home IP address. You are using Letsencrypt, snap, certbot or ACME to issue trusted SSL certificates for your domain and you want...
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