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...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
If you want visually appealing dashboards for your long term Home Assistant data stored in InfluxDB, look no further than Grafana. Grafana allows you to query, visualize, alert on and understand metrics captured by Home Assistant (and MANY other platforms). You can create some really stunning dashboards. Sample Grafana Dashboard...
If you are a Home Assistant enthusiast and are interested in long term storage of sensor and other data, you will be using InfluxDB. InfluxDB is a time-series database, different from SQLite and MariaDB. Over time your InfluxDB database can grow and grow...becoming unwieldy and possibly slow. Fortunately there are...
